We live in a housing area which is rather nice – it has a kindergarten nearby, several playgrounds for kids small and big, and lots of green areas, with bushes and trees. In between, there are some pathways for us humans to walk (and some like to cycle there, too, or ride their – now electric – scooters, or even drive in with cars).
I got up early this morning, before dawn, and let the cat out soon after sunrise. She disappeared on one of those pathways which we can see from our dining area window – and like last time, she was back after less than two minutes, carrying a mouse. I let her in, expecting to find a dead mouse which I could take away from her – but this time, the poor thing was still alive, so there was an inhouse chasing and hunting time for the cat, which she surely enjoyed.
I tried to catch the mouse as well to set it out again, but it ran under my computer desk to hide from that deadly predator. I was thinking about how to save the poor thing – doing nothing meant that it would starve if not moving, or being killed if it dared to come out again. Locking away the cat in another room and then moving my computer desk would mean that I would have to chase it through all of the flat. I also didn’t know how bad it was hurt already, so I thought about the mouse’s status as maybe in-between, like Schrödinger’s cat, of which you couldn’t really tell if it’s dead or alive, so in my thoughts I named that mouse “Schrödinger” already.
As it turned out, my wife was far more clever than me – when she returned home from work, she brought a shoe carton in which we could trap the mouse (after locking away the cat), so I could bring it out again and release it beside some big rock and bush. The mouse looked up at me, and I left it there…
It was the second time that our cat came back from that pathway carrying a mouse in under two minutes, so by now we know where the mice live – but so does the cat…
