One of the benefits of being a teacher is summer travel. There’s often still much work to do, but most of it can follow you on the road. I love my summer reset.
I’ve been away almost a month now, and there’s not much waiting for me back home other than Great Plains heat, humidity and an overgrown yard thriving in the rainy weather that started after I left. Still, it’s home and I’m ready to be back.
My neighbor has knocked down the lawn, but I suspect the string trimmer and I have a busy week ahead of us.
Travel means seeing friends and places I can’t easily visit. Kalispell is a two-day drive, so I need a four-day weekend just for the traveling part. Flights are possible, but expensive, and since there will be at least one connection, a day will be shot, and often two, since delays and cancellations have become so common.
So, I drive. I want to bring the dog along anyway, and I picked up a stray kitten a few years back, and Laney is quite the traveler herself. She rides mostly in her kennel, which I unzip so she can climb out when she prefers.
The cat was raised by dogs and I’m quite certain it identifies as canine, so we’re meeting her where she is, or at least I am. My English setter Jade seems skeptical.
The cat came in handy in a recent adventure in Kalispell. I was packing up after a long visit with my daughter and left the passenger-side door open while loading. On one trip, hands full of cargo, I returned to find a mouse on the floor in front of the passenger seat. It seemed rather blasé about my presence, continuing to munch on a large crumb of bread left over from our trip to the Thompson River the evening before.
A loaf of something from Ceres, with cheese, has always been our shore lunch of choice in the Flathead, and Zoe and I saw no reason to break that tradition now.
The mouse continued munching its snack. Maybe I’ve lost my scary countenance, or more likely, the bread was too delicious for the mouse to care about anything else. It ignored me when I set about, trying to scare it out of my truck. I didn’t have a good plan, and my first effort only managed to get the critter’s attention. It scurried up under the dash.
I was driving to Billings and hoped to be there before dark. I wondered how long it would take to pull the dashboard, but that didn’t seem a viable option.
I thought maybe starting my truck would scare the mouse, but I underestimated the power of a crumb of semolina loaf. When I returned, the mouse was back on the floorboards, snacking. It ignored the open door I’d left for its escape to freedom.
I had a plan this time. I walked around to the driver’s seat and pool-cued the rodent out the open door with a fly rod tube, but the mouse wasn’t giving up so easily. Instead of freedom, the mouse chose violence. At the last moment, it rejected its fate in the great outdoors and hid under the passenger seat.
This is when I remembered I have a traveling cat, who is also a serviceable mouser. I got the cat, shut all the doors, and left the job to a professional.
A few minutes later, the mouse problem was resolved. Laney found it and, sadly, unalived the mouse. I preferred a non-lethal solution, but the idea of driving seven hours to Billings, weighed down by the fear the mouse could scurry up my pant leg and cause a pileup on I-90, limited my sympathy for the critter.
Traveling with a cat is more practical than I ever imagined.