Invasion of the Shrew

To preface this story, you need a setting. My wife and I were living in the lower level apartment of a house in Milwaukee that had been split into a duplex. Built in a917, the house was not well-insulated. In fact, like other houses at the time it wasn't insulated at all, and we were in the basement, which for the most part kept the temperature a constant. This was a plus when we toured the place in late Fall, when it was a pleasant 68 degrees in there, and it was pretty good in summer when we were able to get by with fans while our upstairs neighbor sweltered. But it sucked in winter when the temperature outside was below zero and there was two feet of snow on the ground. Then, without central heat, we were able to only keep the average temperature in there at about 55.

The other disadvantage was plumbing. Our tub would frequently gurgle, as would the toilet, and sometimes there would be clogs, or it would drain very slowly, and plunging and use of drain cleaners, peroxide, and the old vinegar and baking soda combination became part of our routine. This was a particular problem if the washing machine was being run at the same time as someone was taking a shower, either us or our neighbor. Clearly the pipes could only get out so much water so fast.

This led to our first disaster.

Poop in the tub

Our neighbor was out for the week and my wife and I had been out doing things all day. It was a lovely Spring day, and in the afternoon it started to rain. When we came home, there was a smell. A bad smell. A poop smell. I went to find the source and found our tub half full of yellow-brown water, and chunks of sewage. When there had been bits backed up in our tub before it seemed to be hair in various stages of decay. But there was no mistaking or denying that what we had here was poop in our tub. And neither of us had pooped recently. We hadn't been home all day. So it was someone else's poop. In our tub.

I started plunging while my wife ran away in horror. It took three hours to plunge that thing out. Three hours of feeling like a pioneer working a butter churn except I wasn't turning fresh cream into fresh butter, I was getting foreign waste out of the only place I had to take a shower when I was done. But I did get done, and I cleaned that thing. I had to, because it looked like this...

The next day while I was at work, our landlord sent the specialty plumber to take care of the drain problem. He called in back-up, and soon there was a team of guys in my apartment with multiple drain snakes trying to clear whatever the clog was. I came home early from work to witness the carnage and open windows for ventilation because the smell they released was even worse than what we came home to the night before. You see, they couldn't get in through the ancient tub, so they had to go through the main pipe access, which turned out to be beneath a removable tile in the floor of our living room. So we had to move our furniture out of the way while four guys sent a spinning cable into the pipe to destroy the mystery clog and release the backlog of sewer water and shit that was apparently sitting under our floor. Even after we cleaned the room from top to bottom with all manner of disinfecting and deodorizing solutions, my wife refused to go in that half of the room again, knowing the nightmare pipe was there.

They did find the clog, which was all the way out in the street. At first they suspected tampons, the usual go-to for persistent clogs, but what they found was flushable wipes. The crew's boss said even though each of those products is supposedly flushable, they're both murder on plumbing. Well, we knew not to flush tampons, and we don't use flushable wipes. Neither does the upstairs neighbor. That left the former downstairs tenant as the suspect, and she was dead, leaving a legacy of her apparently many ass-wipings as a legacy for others to clean up.

With that part of the day over, we cleaned up, each enjoying a shower without water backing up around our feet, and treated ourselves to take-out gyros for dinner. We lit a nice scented candle, had some wine, and sat down to relax with a movie. It started to rain again, but nothing gurgled, nothing backed up, life was good. Then it began. A tapping. A rattling. A scraping by the front door.

Intruder

As I noted at the beginning, our apartment was in the basement, Months earlier, we had put weather sealant tape around the frame of the front door and the front closet because the place was so drafty, wind actually came in around the door, and also the front windows. I never took the tape off because we could use the back door, the place was considerably more comfortable, and that tape was catching a disturbing number of bugs that had apparently been crawling under the door. Because of the tape, I couldn't just throw open the door to see who was there.

I listened at the door. Yep, there was the sound of the scratching. We lived in the city and our lights were out. We immediately thought it was a homeless person or worse, a potential robber trying our locks.

"Grab the bat!" my wife said, "I'll call 911!"

Calling 911 was a bluff. She grabbed her phone and was ready to call, but hadn't yet. The bat was not a bluff. I have a heavy wooden softball bat, the kind commonly found back in the 80s when I bought it, but that is hard to find now. I've kept it by the front door of every place I've lived since I first moved out on my own.

I picked up the bat and thumped it against the door.

"Hey! Whoever you are, get the hell out of here!"

The rattling stopped. We sat back down.

The rattling started again.

I grabbed the bat and my battery-powered lantern, got my shoes, and went outside. It was a nice night. The rain had stopped. It was warm for Spring. No one was in the backyard. No one was in the alley behind the house. I made my way to the front of the house. No one was in front, no one was anywhere on the street. I was alone.

Our front door outside actually opened to a 5 x 4-foot entryway with three giant steps down to our apartment level. It was unlit, thus the lantern. Once getting down the steps you'd reach the door to our living room.

At this point I expected whatever was at the other side of our door was an animal. Maybe a raccoon, but probably a rat. I knew from previous research that rats can go almost anywhere and chew through almost anything, including concrete. The rat probably chewed its way into the entryway to get warm, and now was chewing through the door.

I threw open the door and shined the lantern inside.

No rat. No homeless guy. No rabid racoon or squirrel. But something small was skittering on the floor near the door. A mouse?

No, it had a pointed nose like a needle and a short tail. That was a shrew. I surprised myself by remembering what one was. Then I remembered shrews are poisonous.

I closed the door and went back in the house through the back door. I kept the lantern and traded the bat for a dustpan. I had thought about just taking out the shrew with the bat or a quick stomp, but I knew my wife would object. We had been married long enough for me to know she would hear me from the living room and feel bad for our intruder, regardless of its venomous nature. She would research shrews and tell me how cute they were. It would never end. Plus I didn't want to clean mashed shrew paste off of my bat or the floor.

I went back outside and threw open the front door again. The shrew was still there, running circles from the door to stair to wall. I started going down the steps, slowly.

"Hello shrew," I said. "Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to get you outside."

I balanced the lantern on one of the steps and stepped onto the floor. The shrew retreated to a corner. I scooped down with the dustpan and it darted away. I scooped faster, lunging with the dustpan. The shrew dodged faster, running in figure eights. A few times I got it and the shrew simply ran up and over the side of the dustpan. It started to get tired.

At some point I must have nicked the shrew while trying to scoop it up. There was a streak of blood in the dustpan and little drips on the floor. I began to fear for the shrew. I respected it as an opponent. It was putting up a valiant fight against an opponent hundreds of times its size. I knew I had to get this done soon or the shrew was going to die. It would either bleed to death or run itself to death.

I leaned forward and focused at a spot toward the middle of the bottom step and waited for the shrew to get there. I would dart for where the shrew would be, not where it was.

The shrew made another circuit around the floor coming around on my right and going left. I shot the dustpan forward and scooped the shrew up into it, then lifted the pan immediately to flip the shrew outside, but the shrew also tried a new tactic. Rather than running up the side of the dustpan and out again, it ran up the middle and used the back of the dustpan as a ramp to leap at me.

The shrew was attempting a full frontal assault!

I would like to take this time again to assert that this story is 100% true.

The shrew launched off the back off the pan, emitting a long squeak that could only be a very tiny battle cry. Remembering the venomous fangs, I shouted, "Whoah!" and stepped sideways, swinging my arms out and getting my body clear. I took a step back, making sure the shrew didn't land on my foot or leg.

The shrew hit the floor, stunned for a half second by the impact, then started to run the circle again, much slower. It was tired and groggy. It had had a rough night. I liked this little bastard. It was the bravest animal I had ever seen. But it had to go.

In one swoop I scooped forward with the dustpan, caught the shrew, and continued brining my arm up to shoulder height, where with a flick of my wrist I flung the shrew up out of the entryway and out the door. I watched as it spun in space, caught in the moonlight, pinwheeling in the air, all four legs and stubby tail stretched out. It hung in the air a moment , then landed across the back walkway on one of the giant leaves of my neighbor's ground plants. It was a soft landing, straight out of a cartoon or children's book. The big leaf dipped and the shrew slid down like a venomous Stuart Little, running off of the tip of the leaf as it just touched the moist Spring dirt. Then it was gone.

The shrew never came in again. No other shrews or mice or rodents of any kind came in. Maybe the shrew warned its friends and family that a mammoth psycho would come get them if they dared go in there. Maybe I was the boogeyman. Fee fie foe fum.

I did worry about the blood. I didn't tell my wife I nicked him but she asked if he was okay when I told her the tale of our battle. She knew it was intense. She heard me jump, heard me shout, "Whoah!" I got lucky for that part.

I was worried though. I wanted to know if the shrew survived. The next morning and for a week's worth of mornings and afternoons I checked the front and back walk and the flower beds for a tiny, familiar, fallen warrior. But there was none to be found. Either it was alive or it got away and died somewhere else. I liked the idea that somewhere it was sitting with a bandage on its wounded leg, telling its even tinier children about the adventure it had had, and how it was a hero.