Action! Adventure! Girly screaming!

That's right, folks. I had myself a full-on girlie panic attack here in the household today. It's Niles' fault.

I was on the phone with Julie. While I was on the phone, I noticed my sweet white kitten paying particular attention to the right side of the refrigerator. I even went to find a flashlight to see if I saw anything unusual. I don't. Niles is rapt.

A's still sleeping when I get off the phone. I am about to sit on the couch to fold the last of Master A's laundry when Niles skulks through with a mouse in his mouth. I shriek. I yell. I don't even know what I yelled because I left my brain for a minute to yell and yell. My throat is still sore from all the yelling. (A slept right through, btw.)

Niles runs to the stairs and drops the mouse. It runs away. He catches it and looks at me with the mouse in his mouth. The mouse is wriggling. Niles is running with the guilty "I've got something good" skulk that means he's trying to get somewhere inaccessible to me as quickly as possible.

Now, it has always been a topic of postulation around these parts since our cats are unusual and ill-bred for life alone in the cruel world (not that any cat should be, but our cats are particularly ill-equipped with the pretty but unsubstantial coats), what would happen if one of them got a mouse. When I grew up, we had cats who would bring home stunned mice to train their kittens to hunt. We would inevitably find half-chewed mice later. I don't think Niles' mother taught him to hunt. This is what Niles does with a mouse: bats at the mouse, picks it up with his mouth, then puts it down again so he can run after it again.

But, back to me and my screaming. I run and get a bowl because I figure I'm going to have to catch the mouse. A bowl seems like a fine idea to me since I can slam it over the mouse and then figure out what to do. Niles takes the mouse up the stairs. He drops it a couple steps from the top and the time it takes him to pick up the mouse again gives me enough time to overtake Niles.

Now we are in the hallway at the top of the stairs. Niles has the mouse in his mouth. I think, I wonder if the mouse is still alive and the mouse blinks at me. Blinks. (I was almost tempted to use bold there, but I didn't.) Then it wriggles around and nips Niles. Niles lets go of the mouse and it runs into the corner. I'm trying to figure out how to clamp the bowl on the mouse when the mouse makes a break for it and runs the other way. Niles picks the mouse up and runs into my office with it.

My office has the activity gym for the darling baby (still strapped into his bouncy chair and sound asleep). Niles comes within a foot of the activity gym and drops the mouse. The desire to protect A's plaything is greater than my desire to trap the mouse so I flip the gym up on the futon and lose sight of the mouse.

The mouse is gone, somewhere in my office. So now I panic for real. I can't find the mouse; the baby's downstairs and I don't know if I have to take the cat to the vet. I don't know if we all need vaccines for hantavirus. I am seriously freaking out.

I call my husband and have a dickens of a time trying to even communicate that I have actually seen a mouse at close quarters. I'm incoherent enough that he takes his lunch to come home and mouse hunt with me (and talk me down). I close the office door and stuff a towel under it.

Then I call Julie back to ask for a vet's name so I can take my poor Niles in for a checkup since he's been nipped. I look carefully at Niles at this point (who is skulking by the fridge hoping for another mouse to play with) and don't see any blood but I'm still pretty panicked. Then I call the vet, whose receptionist is sure I should take my pet to the emergency room until I tell her there's no blood. Well, no blood, probably fine, don't worry about it. I make an appointment for a checkup for both cats with the vet for next week to assauge my bad-pet-guardian guilt. I put a piece of cheese in the bowl and put it in the center of the room as mouse bait. I think about rigging a Survivorman-esque stick and rock mouse trap but I have no stick.

C comes in the door just as A is waking up. He goes looking for the mouse to no avail. Every closet and room in the house is between the mouse and freedom. So he looks for the mouse point of entry and discovers none where there were before, so the mouse must have come in the garage door. Niles eats the cheese in my mouse bowl/trap.

We're about to head out for real mousetraps, so I go upstairs to get my money and find Niles investigating the towel in the doorway. I look at the towel and there's Mr. Mouse. I start yelling for C. I sound like Basil Fawlty in the fire drill episode. (Mouse! Mouse there!) He looks at me and says, "Where should I put it?" I dump out a plastic lidded container on our bed and bring it to him. He dumps the towel in and slams the lid, trapping the mouse. My hero!

We take the mouse outside to the woods and set him free. C called me later to say that we'd done a proper Sopranos warning: had our cat rough up the mouse, then let him go so he could tell his friends not to mess with us.

Now I'm tired and plenty embarrassed about behaving like a girl. But we don't have a mouse in the house so it's okay.