COLLIGIATE MEMOIR

The Field Mouse Incident

An undergraduate experience that was a matter of life and death

Photo by Frenjamin Benklin on Unsplash

The Dalai Lama once said, “All creatures fear pain and desire life.”

When I was an undergraduate at State College, Pennsylvania, commonly called Happy Valley, I rented a room in the basement of a split-level house off campus. It was a furnished room with burlap wall covering, a hot plate, and a bathroom in the hallway that I shared with the landlord's pot-smoking, head-banging son. He lived in the room next to mine.

The teenager's name was Roy, and he played heavy metal music from the time he got home from school until 11 p.m. No matter how many times I told him to turn it down, his bass still rattled the floorboards.

I wasn't far removed from high school, so I understood Roy's need for loud music. He was an alienated youth in a small town with little to do. Over time, I built up a tolerance for his music. The rent was cheap, and I had no other options.

Roy's music was the least of my worries.

There was something far more annoying than Roy's music. The room overlooked a wooded area with a variety of wildlife. One of them paid me an unexpected visit while I was asleep.

About 2 a.m., I woke to the sound of something crawling up the burlap-covered walls directly above my head. I flicked on the light. There, in the middle of a burlap wall, a field mouse froze in its tracks.

I paused as well, unsure what to do. The mouse looked at me, and I looked back. Then the mouse scurried out of sight. The problem was that I had a full schedule of classes the next day and needed my sleep. I could not rest easy knowing a mouse was crawling along the wall just a few inches above my head.

My first thought was to kill the rodent. However, I was a pacifist and a vegetarian, and I believed that all life was sacred. If I killed it, I would have bad karma.

What were my choices? I can live with a mouse in my room. But I was afraid the mouse would sneak under my bedsheets and crawl along my leg. Mice carry diseases. It could crap in my bed, bite me, or transmit salmonella, and I'd end up as a sickly sophomore at Penn State. Therefore, I could not be passive. My GPA was already in awful shape.

Another option I tried was keeping the sliding door open, hoping he'd leave on his own. But after a few minutes, I worried that a larger animal like a skunk or a possum would make its way into my room. Then I would have to call Animal Control and never get to sleep.

I hoped to make friends with the rodent and lure him to the backyard. When he didn't respond to "Here's a carrot, mousy mouse," I took a more aggressive approach, moving the bed and other furniture, hoping he'd come into the light and out of hiding so I could trap him under a pot and then escort him outside.

But the mouse did not show its whiskered face. There was no squeak or squeal from it. I felt I was dealing with a smart mammal, smarter than most of my fellow coeds at PSU, and perhaps having more guile and common sense.

When moving the furniture failed, I put my bed, dresser, and desk back in their rightful places. As I stomped around the room in frustration, there was a knock at the door. It was Roy.

"Dude, it's 3 a.m. What are you doing in here?"

It was ironic. Now Roy was complaining about me making noise, after all the months he had played Judas Priest and Black Sabbath ad nauseam.

"Sorry. There's a mouse in my room. I'm trying to figure out how to get it out."

He shook his head. "Dude, ya gotta kill the sucker — smash the hell outta 'em."

"I can't, Roy. I'm against killing."

"Don't be a freak, dude. It's you or him."

"Roy, does your mom have a mousetrap?"

"No, man. You've gotta 86 the little fucker. One pops its head into my room, and I take my dad's mallet and knock 'em out."

That didn't sound like something I'd do. I already had enough bad karma.

"I'll think about it, Roy."

"Yeah, okay, but don't move shit around anymore. My mother might kick you out if you're too loud."

My view of Roy had changed. Roy was not just a stereotypical teenager. He had a lot of confidence, even if it was misguided. As for killing the mouse, the only living things I killed were a mosquito and a couple of termites.

I would let the mouse live.

Since the mouse was not a threat to my life, I would leave him be. My first class was at 10:30, so I had a couple more hours of sleep. Sleeping on the opposite side of the bed and wearing the headphones while I slept seemed to block out the mouse's pitter-patter on the burlap.

When I woke at 9 a.m., I had hoped the mouse had left the way he came.

At 9:30 a.m., someone knocked on my door.

"Is that you, Roy?"

"Yeah," he said. "I have some good news. Open up so I can show you."

He stood there with a proud grin, holding the lifeless mouse by the tail, which swung back and forth like a metronome.

"You've got no more mouse problem, bro. Now you don't have to move your shit around at night."

I didn't tell Roy he'd have bad karma for the rest of his life. Nor did I tell him about my plans to move to a place without stray rodents or homicidal teenagers.

© 2026 Mark Tulin

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