Usually I spend my days yelling at Pocono for various reasons. Getting on the counters... yet again. Grabbing something off my desk and bringing it upstairs. Knocking things over. Recently, he knocked over a very old, glass candy dish that was my grandmother's. He got scolded over and over again for that one, and it took me a few days to even be pleasant to him once again.
We haven't exactly been the best of friends.
If you remember, we got him after we witnessed our second mouse here in the Poconos. I thought to myself, "I cannot live with mice. I do not want to live with a cat, but I'd much rather live with a cat than with mice, given the choice."
We went for quite a while without any issues, which sometimes caused me to wonder if we had done the right thing in getting Pocono. After all, my life was so much simpler without this creature.
Then came last night.
Brian and I were upstairs in the living room; Caleb was already down for the night. I heard some squeaking going on by the sliding glass door, and I turned to Brian and asked him what he thought that was. Birds on the deck, I asked? Then Brian stood up and said, "I think Pocono's got something." That something turned out to be a baby mouse which he had brought up from the downstairs. We let him be for a little bit, thinking surely he'll kill the thing and end the whole dramatic scene, but being still a young cat, he wanted to play and have his fun. At one point, Brian and I each had a Swiffer in our hands as we were trying desperately to guide Pocono to the deck to bring his victim outside, but our sneaky cat didn't want to lose his prey so easily. He bounded downstairs, and later he come back up without the rodent. What happened? Brian went down to take a look, found nothing, and we were forced to go to bed with towels under our doors.
We woke up still not knowing what in the world happened or if we still had a mouse among us. We wore sneakers just in case. We went to Lowe's and bought more mouse traps. Every moment, I kept looking at the floor for scurrying. Finally.... finally, Brian went downstairs to do some unrelated clean up, and he found the dead mouse, stuck to a sticky trap we had set up months ago for spiders. It was also clear that our Pocono had mauled him. (Thank the Lord Brian came upon this scene, and not me.)
So we gave our Pocono a victory dinner... canned cat food for a change. We don't know what happened. No doubt, the mouse was trying to escape his clutches and came upon the sticky trap, and Pocono finished him off. I was annoyed at first that Pocono didn't kill him straight off, but I had to remind myself that this was his first prey, so he has some learning to do. (Hopefully not too much, if you know what I mean!)
In any case, I called our exterminators, because we are already in a contract agreement when we had ants this past spring, so we are already paying for pest control anyway. They'll be coming out this week to take a look around and decide on a game plan. Meanwhile, we'll still take pleasure in our little protector.
Here's Pocono eating his victory dinner:
