Mouse Hunt 2007 Part III

Baxter appears!

Last night, I went out into the garage to get some boxes to put away a few Christmas lights. As I moved one aside, Baxter comes running out from under a nearby box and runs straight into my woodpile (yes, I have a woodpile in my garage, its landscape timbers waiting for Spring). I quickly glance around to find a nearby Christmas present, my new copperhead. A copperhead is a two pronged hoe. Copperhead pic for those not as well versed in hoes. I had worked with a copperhead quite a bit over the summer and knew how to wield maximum destruction with it. The cool wooden handle felt good in my hands, I was confident that I had chosen the right weapon and that this epic battle between man and mouse would end tonight.
Here is where I made a mistake. Instead of trapping him and sensely beating him to death, I decided to give him an option. I opened the garage door, humanely allowing him to chose life over death and imminant destruction. Then, I went to work on the wood pile, swiftly using my copperhead to move around landscape timbers as if they were toothpicks and then swinging at an empty roll of carpet as if it was possessed. All the while keeping a close lookout for Baxter. But he never appeared. My suspicion is that at some point he snuck out the garage door while I was working on finding him elsewhere. Once my wife came home, she donned a scary looking sock hat and my baseball bat and joined the hunt. At this point in the story I should interject that my garage door has now been open for about 45 minutes, clearly being used for purposes other than 'egressing' and 'ingressing' and in violation of my home owners assocation rules. I'm sure I'll have a letter in my mailbox about that today. As Jeni tip toes around on high alert holding her baseball bat close and ready to swing and I walk around swinging a copperhead at innocent landscape timbers, I'm beginning to see while possibly the HOA hates us; since those nazi's are so much more high and mighty than us common folk, who are forced to hunt for our mice on our own. So in the end, Baxter was able to allude us once again, although I did clean up the garage and got rid of anything that could be considered a food source. Plus, surely the image of me wielding that copperhead ready to strike is burned in his little memory and haunting his little mouse dreams.
Mouse 2, Phil T 0.