Lucky
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, (Mort: A Novel of Discworld, 2013)
There was only one field mouse involved, but I considered describing something more believable—like maybe a congregation of field mice singing hallelujah—which might have given this article a bit more, how shall I put it, more gravitas. It turns out you can’t have too much of that stuff if you want to be taken seriously. Ask any politician. They’re full of that stuff. I think gravitas actually means full of that stuff. Upon reflection, though, I chose to use only the facts as I remembered them.
Anyway, the mouse in question had no name, at least not to my knowledge, but he did have a date with destiny. Strictly speaking, he might have been a girl mouse. I am not expert in such things, though I did know a friend who could sex mosquito larvae under a microscope, but he was of little help in identifying the sex of the corpse.
My father was a great armchair hunter. He possessed many armaments, from handguns to rifles to shotguns to bows and arrows. He taught me to use them all, but the bow and arrow was his favorite. He used a fifty pounder. That wasn’t the weight of the bow, he explained to me. That was the strength it took to pull the bowstring back to shoot. The greater, the more lethal.
He spent countless hours on the beach taking target practice, using a few hay bales set against a nearby embankment, on which he had taped a paper target with a stenciled silhouette of a white-tailed deer. “You gotta aim for a spot right behind the upper part of the foreleg.” He told me. “That’s where the heart is.”
In spite of his many years of preparation, he had never killed anything... until that day in his bedroom, in which a surprise intruder had entered. My mother was the first to see him. “Eeeeeek!” was what she yelled, as she ran out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
My father immediately swung into action, grabbing his double-barreled shotgun and slowly opening the door to confront the intruder. Further information from my mother, other than her Eeeeeeek, revealed that the intruder was about an inch tall and had a long brown tail... the stuff of nightmares for my mother. My father immediately realized that the shotgun, while it might be effective in rodent control, was a bit of overkill in his newly-painted bedroom. He then grabbed a broom and attempted to give the mouse a lethal blow, eventually chasing the mouse behind their bureau, where he had escaped to presumed safety, running along the top of the baseboard and stopping somewhere behind their bureau.
Improbably, my father put down the broom and grabbed his fifty pounder and an arrow, tipped with a stainless-steel broadhead, the modern day equivalent of the flintstone arrow heads used by Indians before steel tips were commonplace, and which were found occasionally in rural areas. He had spent many hours honing the blades of his broadhead arrow heads to razor sharpness. “They gotta be sharp to be effective,” he often told me. Now, he was going hunting for the first time.
My father could not see the mouse behind the bureau, but occasionally, the mouse would let out a faint squeak to let him know he was not very happy. My father took his bow and arrow, placed them flat against the wall and took aim at where he thought the squeak was coming from. He pulled back the bowstring a few inches and let fly an arrow, tipped with a razor-sharp broadhead. One last squeak... and then silence.
After a few minutes, he pulled the bureau away from the baseboard and found that he had pinned the mouse to the top of the baseboard, right through a spot just behind the top of the mouse’s foreleg. All those hours of target practice on the beach had finally paid off in a most unlikely manner.
My mother, now feeling sorry for the deceased rodent, thought we should give him a proper burial at the edge of her garden. My father was in favor of using the toilet, but much to my father’s chagrin, she prevailed. My mother even had given the field mouse a name before interring him. She named him, Lucky.