"That helmet makes me look like Ralph, you know, the motorcycle mouse." - Erik Estrada, Sealab 2021

The Vole in The Mist - I could so be the Dian Fossey of voles. Except I'm not a girl. And no one can poach something that anyone could go out and kill a billion of legally, and there would still be billions left.

Once upon a midnight midafternoon dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten Internet lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping rustling of wrapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my messing with a cereal box near my chamber fridge door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my messing with a cereal box near my chamber fridge door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Then this ebony bird little friggin’ rodent beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven mole.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven vole wandering from the nightly shore into my peanut-butter flavored Cookie Crisp -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven vole, `Nevermore.' “Are you going to kill me?”
-with apologies to Eddy Poe

So, yeah, I found a critter in my Cookie Crisp. Actually it wasn’t my Cookie Crisp; it belongs to The Boy. Like I’d eat Cookie Crisp. Oh, sure my diet would probably kill a monkey or one of those cute albino rabbits that they test my shampoo on (do rabbits eat steak?), but I draw the line at Cookie Crisp. A man has to have some standards.

Step one was to get the critter from the cereal box into a suitable container. The Mrs. was sleeping, so a series of bad ideas went through my head before I recalled we had a nearly empty container of peanuts. I marched out to the pantry to retrieve the peanuts, holding a jumping box of Cookie Crisp in one hand.

I emptied the peanuts into a cup for later consumption. I took a handy drill and put enough holes in the top of the peanut container so that I wouldn’t suffocate the critter. I upended the box and the very surprised critter and the few remaining cookie-shaped pieces of cereal ended up in the container.

The Boy was on this like stink on The New Boy’s butt. “We need a mouse cage. A little mouse cage. He can live in my room.”

“No,” I responded with parental finality. “No.”

“Why not?” His question was reasonable.

I pondered that for a second or two. Why had I gone to the trouble of putting air holes into a container for the four-footed cereal pilferer?

I resorted to that final parental bastion of logic. “Because I said so.” If my brain had been running faster at that point in the day, well, I would have also have come to the conclusion that The Mrs. would skin me, The Boy, and the critter if we tried to keep it. I didn’t let this one to go further. The Mrs. loves me, and puts up with a lot, but a small rodent living in our house on purpose is not on her agenda.

Not that she’s scared of mice. I’m not sure that she’s scared of anything, really, since when we were dating she saw some sort of spider the size of a 1969 Camaro RS (the one with the headlight covers – the car had headlight covers, not the spider) and said, “Oh, spider.” Then she killed it with a claw hammer. Took her ten minutes, but she got it done.

My first thought was that this might have been a mouse. I looked at the critter a bit closer, and found that indeed it wasn’t. I used the handy dandy purveyor of all information, the Internet, and found that indeed this was not a mouse. It was a vole. Specifically, a Northern Red-Backed Vole (Clethrionomys rutilus).


Not listed in the "official" description of the Northern Red-Backed Vole (Clethrionomys rutilus) is that they can move with the speed of a cobra. And that they have four inch long fangs. And that they're venemous. These facts are probably not listed because I just made them up. But if you leave a Northern Red-Backed Vole (Clethrionomys rutilus) in a peanut canister long enough, they will jump up repeatedly into the lid. Which is kind of funny to watch.

From the description (stolen from here):
Red-backed voles usually have a broad reddish stripe down their back and buffy-red sides. These small to medium-sized voles have small eyes, and small ears reaching just above their fur. Their average total length is 5 ½ inches including their 1-½ inch tail. They can be distinguished from meadow mice by their conspicuous reddish back.

This species is omnivorous but eats mainly greens, berries, seeds, Cookie Crisp, lichens, fungi and insects. Red-backed voles are found in cool, damp locations and are partial to forests and kitchens; however, they are sometimes found on the tundra and near General Electric appliances. Northern red-backed voles are active year-round and do not hibernate, especially if they have a large supply of cereal.

Also, I found on the site that they aren’t endangered, and that there is no limit on trapping as many as I’d like to trap. I can envision setting up like a million little two-inch steel jaw traps around the house. It would certainly keep our dogs on their toes. Maybe it would keep them off of their toes . . . but that would be a lot of work.


The Alaska Trappers Association would so laugh me out of the place if I showed up with a bunch of vole pelts. I suppose you could make wooly tea-cozies out of them . . .

When The Mrs. woke up and began scrounging around the kitchen for coffee, I pointed out the Northern Red-Backed Vole (Clethrionomys rutilus). She looked at it. It looked at her. She looked for her claw hammer.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked, after being unable to locate her hammer.

This could have been a loaded question, delivered neutrally. As it was, the implied, “it isn’t living here” was coming through loud and clear.

As we drove to town, we stopped and The Mrs. upended the container, leaving our friend the Northern Red-Backed Vole (Clethrionomys rutilus) in the forest. We continued to go shopping. To buy new Cookie Crisp. And mouse vole traps. The next one won’t be so lucky.