Mole Your Enemy

We recently had a mole in the house.  This is, quite honestly, a very strange and rare occurrence, because unlike a mouse, moles don't particularly like being inside of a house.  They eat grubs and earthworms, which they're simply not going to find indoors, even if it's a basement.  If you look up how to get ride of moles in the house, the most common answer you will find is "Open the door, they'll leave on their own."  Obviously, this isn't really an option in a basement.  I'm assuming that it came up through one of the floor drains.  I've noticed that there are quite a few mole mounds outside in the yard, so I know they've been active in the ground around our house.  One of them probably found the exit drain from the basement and followed it up.

Moles aren't destructive creatures, unless you don't like mounds of dirt in your yard.  They actually help to aerate the soil.  However, that doesn't mean I want one in my house.  And, as I've learned over the last few days, they are incredibly annoying creatures.  They're also very intelligent, as well.  Getting it out of the house proved to be a challenge, because there's really no bait that will work well in catching them, unlike with a mouse.  As I mentioned, moles eat grubs and earthworms.  Putting cheese or peanut butter on a trap isn't going to really get you anywhere, and no stores sell bait that attracts moles because moles aren't a common household pest problem.

I learned that we had this tiny visitor in the house one night when I was just starting to doze off in bed and heard a scream coming from the bathroom.  John was the first to see it, and after spending a few minutes trying to track it down we decided to get some traps.  This was Wednesday night.  We got three traps on Thursday evening, the humane, live-catch variety, and I set them out that night with some peanut butter on them.  I figured that was better than nothing.  We had no luck after a day, and we noticed that the mole seemed to really like taking one path along the wall past the couch.  So, we moved one of the traps against the wall in that path.  It was then, too, that we realized that it was somehow getting up into the ceiling.  I still don't know how it was doing that.  There must be a hole in the wall near the floor somewhere that I don't know about.

The really annoying part of this whole experience happened Friday and Saturday nights.  It crawled into the ceiling during the night, and it would run back and forth across the ceiling above the bed constantly, all the time, non-stop, without rest.  Back and forth.  Over and over.  In the dead of night, the noise was beyond grating.  I wanted to rip out the entire ceiling just to get it to stop.  I couldn't sleep, and I started hearing the noise even when it wasn't there.  I think that if ever I have been on the brink of insanity before, it was during this point in time.  I threw humane methods out of the window and purchased lethal traps, including old-fashioned spring traps and glue traps.  I also purchased some bait, which is designed for mice, but I figured it was worth a try.  I also purchased electric high frequency repellents that plug into the wall.

I put two glue traps in the ceiling and one in the path that it liked to take next to the couch.  This was Saturday night.  Sunday morning, I got up and the glue trap beside the couch was gone.  I looked around a bit, and found it near the door to the back room.  There was one of Buyo's toy mice stuck to it.  The -logical- explanation for this is that the mole got caught in the trap, but not entirely, dragged it with him a ways before getting itself unstuck, and the toy mouse just happened to be there in the way and got stuck as well as he was dragging it along.  It wasn't difficult to imagine, however, that the vengeful litter fucker mockingly stuck the mouse to the trap while thinking, "You'll never catch me, you fucking cunt."  I was furious.

I saw the thing not long after that, and proceeded to chase it through the house, attempting to beat it to death with my shoe.  In case you didn't know, moles are fucking fast.  I probably would have been successful if I had a lot of open space to work with.  But, obviously in the house there are couches and doors and chairs and everything else getting in my way.  I have very few opportunities to actually tray and smack the little fucker, and it was moving from cover to cover too quickly for that to be possible.  I chased after it about two or three times that day, and John chased it at least once, too.

At this point, we began to think about what else we could do.  Our next step was probably to bug bomb the back room when we were fairly certain it was back there.  It's a pretty small creature, so a bug bomb may have killed it even though those things are designed for insects.  Of course, then there would be a dead mole in the house somewhere.  Fortunately, we didn't need to worry about that, because soon after the thing ran into one of the live-catch traps.  John heard the door click shut, and we saw that the trap was wiggling.  I took it outside (after terrifying my mother with it), and let it loose far away from the house, in the middle of the golf course.  If you're waiting for some touchy story about how it looked up at me before happily going on its way, or some funny story about how it bit me in one last act of defiant cunt-fuckery before scurrying off, you're going to be disappointed.  I dumped it out of the trap, it looked around in confusion for a little while, and then burrowed into the pine needles.

The silence during the night was divine.