Murder presents

I have three cats, the youngest is Oreo. He is the goofball of the three, as you can see from his picture. He routinely sleeps on his back with all four paws in the air. He was stretching and yawning in this picture, I love the shot because I think it looks like he's singing opera.

Out of the three cats, Oreo is our cat most likely to hunt mice. He comes from a family of barn cats so I guess that's to be expected. What's less expected is that we'd get any mice here. We live in a high rise apartment building and not on the first floor. And we've lived here for 7 years without seeing any mice other than the ones attached to our computer... until this summer at least.

I was in the bathroom in August and Oreo was staring, rather intently, at the litter box. I figured there was a bug of some sort behind it. Probably a big one like a beetle, or even a spider. I moved the box so he could kill it and discovered there was a mouse crouched behind the box. Neither Oreo or I caught that mouse then as it quickly bolted under the bathroom vanity.

A day later I noticed my bedside mat had a lump underneath it. I figured it was a crumpled Kleenex (the garbage can was right near the lump). It was a very flat mouse. My guess was that Oreo crouched, waiting for the mouse to appear... on the mouse.

A week or so later I was woken up, on my day off, by Oreo and Blackie stalking around my bedroom. They were trying to paw behind my filing cabinet. After I went into the living room they moved to the front hall closet. Then Oreo walked toward me with a tail hanging out of his mouth. I took the tail and told him to "drop it". Thankfully he did. Even more thankfully, there was a mouse attached to the tail and said mouse was alive.

Son and I took the mouse to the greenspace across the road and released it. Said road is a minor highway... I don't think that particular mouse is coming back.

We didn't see signs of any more mice after that so I figured we were done with them. Then last night rolled around. I walked into my bedroom and found another very flat mouse on my floor. Very flat and very dead. It appears Oreo is giving me some special presents...

Picture is from here

Although to be honest, considering the flatness of the poor things, I'm not sure if Oreo's trying to kill them or he's just snuggling them to death.