RIP Arnold

Actually, Arnold was a rat – rats have hairless tails. It was the fact that his was brown not pink that confused me. A noble adversary…

It’s over. After two weeks, five mouse traps, one packet of rat poison, ten helpful suggestions and about a quarter of a jar of peanut butter, Arnold is dead.

And I feel awful about it.

As a vegetarian sailing a boat with a Buddhist name, we should have done better. But this is Colombia and, as I mentioned last time, the concept of a humane mousetrap simply does not translate into Latino Spanish.

Consequently, night after night, I would fall asleep listening to him behind the panelling, gnawing – and rose the next morning to find all the traps licked so clean they might have been through a dishwasher.

Admittedly, Arnold did nearly come to a sticky end (literally) after I took a taxi to HomeCenter – a superstore the size of one of South America’s smaller countries to buy a pair of sticky traps. The idea behind these is that the mouse puts his foot in the goo and can’t get it out. They hadn’t tried it on Arnold, though. He did put his foot in the goo – but then dragged the trap all over the fo’c’sle covering everything else in goo, before finally shaking it off in a Sainsbury’s bag-for-life (which now has a much shorter life). Anyway, he bolted.

Next, I mashed up a sort of Rouillard of rat poison and peanut butter, reasoning that he would be so busy licking it off and feeling smug that he would never realise he was eating the condemned mouse’s last meal.

I don’t know how he did it, but the entire dessert disappeared and Arnold did not. I can only think he spat out the blue bits and ate the brown. Anyway, as a savoury, he chewed the top off my clarinet reed. It was a Vandoren and I take it as a personal affront. Arnold was toying with me.

He made me feel like the put-upon Commandant in The Great Escape when Steve McQueen grins at him on the way to the cooler and says: “You’ll still be here when I get out?”

It’s my own fault. I underestimated him from the start. Because he joined in Aruba, I presumed he had jumped off one of the enormous cruise ships and would be easy prey. He had probably lived his life on smoked salmon and truffles.

Well, now the gloves were off. For one thing, I was being goaded by Niko Bolas, a regular on the blog who announced he was sending me two electronic devices. I looked them up. They made my hair stand on end. Any mouse putting a foot inside would get zapped with the full force of six AA batteries. But the Amazon delivery won’t get here until December 12^th.

It was time to man up. I spent a day in the Public Market – Santa Marta’s version of Camden with stalls selling everything including, tucked away behind the grilled sausages and the pineapples, mouse-sized mousetraps: Maybe Arnold wasn’t ready for the rat-sized one yet (although, the rate he was getting through peanut butter, it wouldn’t be long.).

I filed down the bars that spring the traps to make the mechanism more sensitive – a sort of hair-trigger, if you like. Now I felt like Edward Fox in The Day of The Jackal – a cold, calculating professional.

And, sure enough, on the second morning, there he was, hanging off the side of the navigator’s seat, his neck squished under the big trap’s mega-spring, his naughty little nose in a pool of blood. Of course, he’d polished off the other traps first.