Mighty mouses

Around the end of March, 2007, there was a lot of notice showing up about mice. One article turned in by the Associated Press for March 24th was just five paragraphs long, but its headline was a real attention-grabber..."Mouse Taunts man, makes off with his dentures" , about a husband and wife in Maine, reporting how the man caught a mouse three times, but that it escaped three times, and then stole his lower dentures right off his bedside table from whence, after their daughter's fiance helped crowbar apart a good section of the bedroom wall, the dentures were retrieved. They said that the mouse comes out and just looked at the man, wife stating "he's taunting him, I swear he's taunting him". (mouse taunts man! :)
This was a merry story about a mouse and humans actually entertaining each other in a snowed-in, otherwise dreary late winter.
And then along came our own teensy little charming mouse-entertainer. Early in the morning, while my husband/partner was giving the doves each a generous several handsful of seed mixed about 1/4 with breadcrumbs, Out from under the smallest doves' cage , and that perched high atop another much larger cage set on a slick round-legged stand, comes a tiny field mouse who must have been a new spring youngster, for its body spanned no more than half an inch long, not counting the fuzzy tail. My partner was thinking of cleaning out the seed from the catch-tray under that cage, but looking straight into the eyes of this tiny, tiny brave little mouse, he just didn't have the heart to take its found seed-food away from it, just then. (Said to me, later that it was just as though the mouse was asking almost aloud "Why can't I have this seed?, the bird didn't want it." So, he left it stay there. Changed and cleaned the tray out the next day, after, apparently, the little mouse had its little fill and went on its own little way.
What is there about these small, but spiritually indomitable creatures? Mice are vegetarians, given any choice. Not the occasional predators for meat that rats are. Among the most adaptable and resourceful creatures, there's just something appealing about them, especially their apparent bravery in coming out to face us, the way some of them do. First the little winter mouse in Maine, then the spring mouse near our own house. Yet even still they are eminently practical. After all why even try to get in to a house where there are 7 cats and 62 ferrets of whom both these species are hereditary predators of mice, even if the ferrets have long-ago forgotten how to kill (of American ferrets, specially bred by their distributing 'farms' for gentleness and docility, this is true), when the doves swish extra seed out of their bowls and seed-trays every day and this excess is then broom-swept into the yards' grounds.
We admire that bravery and resourcefulness, keeping in mind the tiny, mighty mouse when bigger, meaner entities (like the Internal Revenue Service for some folks) tend to try to loom over us. In the end, the little mighty mouse prevails. It survives. The meek little mouse "inherited" the Earth when the dinosaurs were nearly wiped out. I think they'll be around long after humans have done the same wiping-out of one another as they seem to be perpetually bent on doing.