Life in the Kitchen Part 2

I awoke another night last week around 1:30 to look up and see something flash quickly from left to right across my chest. Not wearing my glasses, I couldn’t focus clearly, but I thought I saw two little bulging eyes. I yelped, waking my wife. Both of us then heard the pitter-patter of rapidly moving feet. A rat! (here in Taiwan known as a money rat). It had just leaped off my chest.

We pulled out the luggage and boxes underneath the bed where the rat had ran, but found nothing. Then we saw a small crack we assumed he had slipped into. We went back to sleep.

A few minutes later we heard the pitter-patter again. We turned on the lights to see the rat looking down at us from atop a tall shelf. As we watched and tried to swat at it in vain, it was apparent it had absolutely no fear for us. It ran back into a crack we couldn’t reach.

Living in a remote location in the middle of the night, going for a rat trap was impossible. So I put out some peanut butter on a piece of paper and waited to smack it if/when it came out. However, I was unprepared for the rat’s sheer speed as it zoomed out, grabbed the peanut butter before my eyes, turned around and whisked back to shelter all in a split second. All before my hands could begin the downward motion with the weapon I was carrying.

We then prepared a trap using fly paper on a piece of cardboard and went back to bed. Within minutes the rat was caught in the fly paper, but before we could react it had ripped the sticky paper taped to the cardboard away, and taken it back with him on its run back to shelter. Just minutes after that, we looked up to see the rat staring down at us from atop the coffee maker.

Around 5 we gave up and I opened the door in the hope it would simply leave the room. It must have eventually, because we didn’t hear it again. The next day I rode into down and came back with some sticky traps. In five days it hasn’t come back to the room, although I did catch a glimpse of it in the shed outside.