And the nominees for Mouser of the Year.... ...don't include Trilby.

→[More:]One night a few weeks ago I was in my bedroom watching a DVD when I heard a little noise from the doorway. I turned to look, expecting to see Trilby. But no. It was a mouse, and it was peering around the doorframe. The mouse saw me looking at it and scurried back around the corner and under the linen closet door.

I paused the DVD and went to get Trilby, who was sound asleep in his pet bed down in the kitchen. I hauled him upstairs, opened the door to the linen closet, and set him on the floor in front of it. Trilby looked into the closet and then at me with a bemused, “is THIS what you woke me up for, bee-aitch?” expression on his face. So I started hauling stuff out of the closet in an effort to flush out the mouse for him. When I saw the mouse at one end of the closet, I put Trilby into the closet near the mouse. He saw it and took a couple of swats at it. But then the mouse ran out of the closet and into my room and Trilby never noticed. I could not figure out where in my room the mouse had gone. All I knew was that it was somewhere in my room and it was my bedtime. Meanwhile Trilby kept nosing around in the closet for a good 15 minutes before giving up. Then he prowled around my room in an unsettled way for some time after I’d turned out the lights and settled down to go to sleep. I hoped he’d at least keep the mouse from running over me while I slept.

It seems Trilby is only good at eating mice, not at catching them. He’s not in the running for Mouser of the Year anyway. He prefers to fight pitched battles with a bag of yarn or a box of tissues, with intervals of deadly calm while he sits and watches his opponent intently, daring it to make its next move. Also he has learned to untie the string I’ve used to secure the doors of the cupboard under the sink so he can get into the garbage can I keep there and fish out any food wrappers it may contain.