I now know what cooked rat smells like.
Let me start at the beginning.
Wednesday night, I heard and saw a mouse in my room. It's body ws about 5" long and was just tooling about in my room, looking for anything to eat. I had some trash (that I collect and then pack out every week) sitting out, so I got rid of that the next morning. I told my host dad about the problem and suggested we get some poison or something along those lines. He said we'd take care of it on Saturday.
So at about 4:30 this morning, as the sun was rising, I heard it. And it was not trying to eat, but trying to find somewhere to hide during the day. I could tell it was trying to burrow into our cement wall, so I shined my flashlight on it from the comfort of my mosquito-net enclosed bed. I saw it run and hide, so I got up and started...
THE HUNT
I wrapped a towel around my waist to form a makeshift capulana, and looked for whomever was awake. Minutes later my host dad and mom came in and I explained the situation. I had seen it crawl in a hole halfway up the wall, so I pointed out the hole to my dad. He got a stick and a rock, thinking he could trap the rat with the rock. Unsuccessful in this endeavor, he started poking around the hole with the stick. I can only imagine what must have been going through the rat's head at this point. Whatever it was, it looked like sheer panic. I was standing about 5' back of the wall, shining my flashlight on the hole. Sr. Bernardo got the mouse out, and as it came out of the hole, he gave it a little flick...right for my face. I managed to swat the sucker away, but only after making eye contact with what must have been the most freaked-out mouse on the planet at that very moment.
We hunted it in my room for a little longer, managing to scare it into the common room. I closed my door, and we proceeded into...
STAGE TWO - The Common Room
Now, one of my brothers was in on the action, too. My dad armed himself with a wooden spoon, my mom with a fairly mean stick, my brother with a T-shirt, and I grabbed our mini-broom and was in a hockey stance. We all had a good laugh about the situation (in fact, we were laughing the entire time as different languages were fired about). The mouse kept running to different parts of the room, and as it found more hiding spots, we kept moving things outside or on top of the main table.
The mouse seemed to have found a good hiding spot at one point, behind a food cabinet. But we managed to urge it out.
Every time it started running, there was a chorus of yelps and screams followed by a fairly violent "whap-whap-whap" of brooms, sticks and T-shirts. Then laughing, and a regrouping at the assumed hiding spot. This went on for a good 15 minutes until the rat made a break for my room and burrowed under the door. Which leads us to....
SQUARE ONE
Now it was getting serious. I didn't want to kill it before, but it had the balls to go back into my room. So now my room got turned upside down, looking for the fearsome critter. We repeated the previous ritual several times, until it left my room for good and back into the common room. I put a towel in front of my door to make sure there was no repeating the disaster...
REVENGE
After only a minute, the rat came into the clear. My mom had a good read on its pattern, and started thwacking with all her might. She nailed it and it died pretty much instantaneously. Not a bad way to go, if you're a rat, considering what we do to them in labs...
Anyway, we celebrated and presented the corpse on the front step like raising a trophy. It was a great moment, I guess :)
A minute later, it was gone, and I asked what had happened with the body...
BREAKFAST...
Peace
John
