Chapter 7: The joy of mice

Here at Tom Cat Towers there is a whole world of wildlife outside, and inside too if you count the spiders and woodlice.

We have foxes, hedgehogs, Dumpty’s Royal collection of pet blackbirds (more about them later), and mice. The garden has zillions of mice. There is Bandit, the patio mouse who comes out to eat the bird seeds that drop from the seed containers on the bamboo poles where the beans grow.

Then there are mice in the hedgerow, we clearly have a better class of mice than most other gardens judging by the various other cats that come amble into our garden to look at our mice.

Then there are shed mice.  There is a whole rook of them living in a gap under the shed. Most mornings after filling my tummy with whatever my human gives me I waddle and crocodile my way down the garden falling over a few times before I reach the shed.

There I can spend many a happy hour with my nose to the ground looking under the shed at the mice. Totally fascinating! Wusstard has also taken up this past time recently, but he is too bulky to get down to the ground and peer at them so he has to content himself with just sniffing.

Heaven knows what the mice think at a huge ginger snout sucking all the air up from under the shed. He is too busy sniffing to see them leave the shed at the corner and wander round the lawn.

He reminisces about the time he was a kitten when he would bring mice back by the brace. If true, those days are long gone.

He did recently catch a mouse that was snoozing by the hedgerow; he must have caught it unawares. He trotted up the garden with the mouse in his mouth, looking so proud of himself, but he stumbled over his own shadow and accidentally let the mouse go. I bet that mouse couldn’t believe his luck as he dashed off across the grass, the human just laughed till she cried.

Today, after an exhausting morning sniffing under the shed he fell asleep on the lawn in the weak sunshine as a mouse marched right past him. He managed to raise an bleary eyelid, and the mouse just stopped and looked up at the enormous ginger cat then went on its way The human couldn’t believe her eyes. Clearly his mousing skills need sharpening up.

Willi’s version

Since I have my new charge, Dippi, I have lost all interest in terrorising the wildlife in the gardens of Tom Cat Towers.

I am too exhausted with all the following round and sniffing I have to do as I keep a constant eye on Dippi. Being a carer is an unbelievable full time commitment but in my heart I know that she is very grateful for my company.

When I was a tad younger I would clamber over a neighbour’s conservatory roof and bound down into their garden to raid the mice nests in their garden, then take them home as a love offering for my human. I would sometimes just sit on their conservatory roof surveying the landscape leading to complaints to my human about the resident humans having a clear view of my pink bottom on their glass roof every time they looked up!

I was rather annoyed when my human gave me a rather dirty look today when I graciously allowed a mouse to trot by. Does she not realise I am allowing stocks to build up for when I teach Dippi the noble art of mousing?