The Mouse Detective returned for a follow-up visit. Seriously, I get excited when the doorbell rings and the Rottler van is outside, because I know she'll know where the vermin are and what they had for dinner and what religion they practice.
I was ready for her. "Mouse poop. Fluff is moving. Steel wool is gone. And a dead smell was in the basement, but no traps sprung. Also, there might be a skunk, but it's mating season. The skunk smell goes through the whole house, though. Maybe it lives under the air-conditioner?"
(I was excited about my little contribution. Reddit said if the smell is in the whole house it might have come inside through the AC unit. I did look by the air-conditioner outside and saw no evidence of skunks, but still thought it was a good theory.)
“Let’s start with the mice,” she said.
In the basement, she showed me where a mouse had chewed a bit at the poison, and said that while usually poisoned mice just die quietly without making a stink, sometimes ... they do, if it’s a recent death.
She said, “It got past the steel wool. I’ll go out and replace it. I need to look for the skunk anyway.”
Minutes later she rang the doorbell. She looked both amazed and alarmed. “You’ve got a skunk!”
“Let me put on my shoes,” I said, and I followed her out to the air-conditioner, where she pointed to an OBVIOUS TRAIL in the grass leading from under the neighbor’s trash can, to right under the air-conditioner, then it followed the foundation until it went into a tiny tunnel under the fence and came up on the other side and vanished in the mint bed.
Also, she pointed at a dark mass and said, “Skunk poop.”
(I realize now I’d imagined this was a male skunk advertising his presence with his smell, like “Here I am, ladies, come lay with me in my mint bed,” but no. This excellent description of skunk boning makes it clear the smells are from an unhappy lady skunk who is tired, damnit, after a long day of masking her smell under a garbage can, and she just wants to get home to her mint bed, but then a male charges out of a tunnel and accosts her and bites her neck.)
“I could trap them,” she offered, “And release them in the woods?”
“Well then they’d come right back. Let them be. It’ll be over soon.”
And while I wouldn't mind sending all the DTF skunks on a free vacation, because the smell still wakes me up at three-thirty, it’s nicer to think of the smell as an effective squirt of skunk mace to fend off some neck-bitey asshole male.
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