As I mentioned in a previous post or two, two months ago we managed to get a cat to "alleviate" the mice problem at school. Though I am not a cat fan, this cat (who we named Jah-lay, "little tiger" in Burmese) has won me, and the school committee members, over. This is mainly due to the fact that he really acts like a dog. So, as Jah-lay settled in to life at school (he spent the first week curled up in a box, scared to death), he has also spent many nights sleeping curled up on a corner of my blankets, outside my mosquito net.
On Christmas Eve, I came home to find the Jah-lay scratching underneath my blankets. I thought he was just playing with the mosquito net, which he seems to find endlessly entertaining. However, when I lifted up the blankets, I found he was actually playing with a dead mouse. He had apparently recently killed it and after I revealed it again to him, he grabbed it and continued to bat the mouse around my room, flipping it around and throwing it up in the air. I didn't want to leave him there with it, in case I came back to find remnants of the mouse strewn across my room. So, I stayed for about 10 minutes and watched him play with the carcass. After he was finished using it as a toy, he ate it whole, no mess. I beamed with pride at my little tiger.
My first morning in Nupho, I found that one of the mice that had taken up residence in the school had used my shirt and pants as a toilet. Then, even after the cat had taken to sleeping in my room, I found that another mouse (or mice) had decided to use my water bucket as a swimming pool and my cup as a toilet. So, I really wasn't sad to see that Jah-lay had taken revenge on at least one of them and hope that it will be a lesson to them - at least until I leave here in about a week.
Early this morning I was woken up by Jah-lay running around my room. I assumed he was just bored and playing with the mosquito net, which, as mentioned above, he loves to do. It went on for some time though and I decided to shine my light to see what he was doing, but didn't see him - or anything else. So, I tried to go back to sleep.
However, I still could hear him. So I sat up again and took out my ear plugs. I heard the noise coming from his usual sleeping spot and shined my light there. There he was chomping away at the head of a rat that he had apparently killed sometime earlier. By DC rat standards it was pretty small, but in comparison to the little mouse he had a few weeks ago, it was huge. It was therefore quite shocking to wake up to at about 5:30am and it took me a minute to figure out what the beast (that is what it seemed like at first) was exactly. I wasn't sure if I was more horrified at the sight of Jah-lay eating the head of the rat or the idea that the rat had been alive and running around my room just before its demise.
Moments later, Jah-lay heard cats fighting off in the distance and took off to investigate. I did a little investigating of my own, inspecting the carnage the cat had left behind. There was blood on my mosquito net and underneath some of my blankets. You might be horrified to know that after a few minutes of deliberation, I pulled the blankets away from the carcass and with it just a few feet from my head, went back to sleep.
Jah-lay returned a while later, inspected the rat carcass, and also went back to sleep. I got up again about 8am, left the carcass where it was, and went downstairs. At first, I breathed a sigh of relief as I discovered a trail of blood on the bamboo porch, down the stairs and onto the cement. I realized that the rat had not been in my room alive, but that Jah-lay had brought it upstairs after he had killed it.
I had been ill in bed the day before and had only eaten a bowl of milk and sticky rice, along with two small cups of tea in the last 24 hours. So, with the heat of the day first hitting me, the lack of food and water in my system, and the trail of blood I was inspecting, I began to feel a bit woozy. Luckily, one of the school committee members was willing to remove the carcass from my room and dispose of it so that I could get some breakfast.
Apparently, with my colleague and I both being ill in bed with giardia, and the school committee members in a dispute with the internet shop people, no one had fed Jah-lay yesterday. So, being a resourceful little one, Jah-lay had acted like a true little tiger and had gone hunting.
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