One of my friends, who also happens to be my roommate, shares a birthday month with me. As a present to both of us, a good friend of ours decided to give us a pet mouse, which we named Nugget. Having never cared for another living creature besides myself (besides a fish, which, let's be honest, are not much work), I was a little apprehensive. But still, it was easy to fall in love with Nugget and the little squint she would make whenever she looked up, or the way she nibbled peanut butter off my finger.

Within a week, she was gone.

We suspect that she most likely slipped through the (very wide) bars of her cage and disappeared somewhere into the apartment. Apparently, mice can squeeze through holes the size of a dime. So after a few days of trying to lie out her favorite food or leave her cage open for her, I had honestly lost hope that we would see Nugget again.

That is, until one day over a week later when my friend texted me frantically that she had seen Nugget crawling around behind our keyboard.

Thus, the search recommenced. We spotted Nugget a few more times around the mouse after that, but she was always too fast for us to grab. Whenever any of us would get within a foot of her, she would see us and run away, most likely assuming that we were large predators. Whether it's a pet or a wild mouse, they're pretty hard to get ahold of. It didn't help that Nugget isn't really domesticated that well, since we haven't had her that long.

I figured if there was no way we were going to outrun her, we would have to outsmart her.

Since most of the mousetraps my friend and I tried to find at Walmart had the words "kills instantly" printed on them in bold lettering, or pictures of dead mice, and the glue traps my parents typically use to catch mice getting into their patio didn't appeal to me, I decided to order a humane mouse trap online. The concept was simple; the mouse steps inside the little trap, which is shaped like a tunnel. Inside the trap there is a trigger plate, which the mouse steps on, inciting the door behind it to snap shut and essentially trapping it inside.

A quick internet search showed that the way Nugget most likely survived running around the apartment without being properly fed or given water was by getting water from a source near the fridge. Mice are pretty hardy creatures and can also go for a time without food. So not only had Nugget run away, she was mooching off our fridge, which was something I couldn't have.

I baited the trap with plenty of peanut butter and cheese, which I knew she loved, and placed it near the fridge with the front of it facing the crack between the fridge and the wall. Upon checking the trap a while later, I discovered that Nugget had somehow managed to grab the food without triggering the plate. She's a pretty small mouse, so this makes sense. After a small fit of rage, I placed a quarter on the trigger plate for it to have a little bit more weight on it, and then baited the trap again.

Lo and behold, a few minutes later I heard the snap of the trap door closing and rushed into the kitchen to check. She was there, a little dirty but still no worse for her. She didn't seem too distressed about being caught on the trap, wandering around and sniffing curiously around her.

Since then, her new home has been the (more secure) cage my roommate and I have brought for her, with added tunnels and a nice hamster wheel for her to run on when she wants to do her marathon training.

If there is anything from this ordeal that I've learned, it's two things. One, that I probably shouldn't be a parent to an actual human child for a while, and two, that mice really love peanut butter and cheese.