How do they run so fast on such short legs? Actually, 'run' is not the word. It's not a matter of all four legs pumping in rhythm. Mice, when the mood or the necessity rules, go from A to B with a sort of flicker so that you're not sure if you actually saw anything at all.
Such was the movement I caught out of the corner of my eye on the back verandah as I bent to collect some kindling for the early morning fire. Soon, a second sighting moved me to deploy a hefty chunk of bait.
Checking this strategy a couple of hours later and expecting to see evidence of nibbling, I was astonished to find that the entire lump had been removed without trace. Either this mouse was, as the footy coaches say, a big unit or, more likely, some kind of rodent cooperation had managed the removal. The same teamwork, I hoped, was being employed in devouring the deadly prize.
My rather obsessive interest in the affairs of mus musculus — the common house mouse — is prompted not only by its rustlings, dartings and nibblings around the house but also and more spectacularly by the worst mouse plague in 20 years in South Australia's west.
I remember some time in the late 1980s heading to Streaky Bay on a fishing trip along roads slippery with crushed mice.
The mudflaps on the old Nissan Patrol were caked thick with skin, innards and blood and our traditional camping sites around Sceale Bay were 'alive' with thousands of mice: they trapezed in the branches of trees, cartwheeled and scrambled on the ground, congregated on and under rocks. They would run across your boots and hold conventions in any container, such as a tackle box, carelessly left open and accessible. And food, of course, needed Armaguard-like protection.
If our flailing arms, sudden movements and profanity ever scared them, they showed no sign of it. Shooting them with an air rifle was fair ground fun for a while, but the game palled when the targets leapt up on the barrel of the rifle and did their Band-of-Brothers imitation in and around the box of pellets till it tipped over. We retreated in disorder to the mouse-free zone of the Streaky Bay pub.
The present plague massing in the west is worse than that. Mice in their millions cover the paddocks and ravage any attempt to begin seeding. Sheds and hay barns are crawling with them and the farmers remove ute-loads of carcasses daily but without any noticeable diminution of numbers. Stocks of zinc phosphide — the central ingredient of mouse baits — are under enormous pressure and for many farmers the cost is crippling.
In the biblical narrative, plagues and aberrant natural events — floods, drought, mice, rats, locusts, blights — occur as punishments. There is still the odd zealot who insists on seeing the hand of a vengeful God in the various natural catastrophes that seem to have become so common recently.
And when you consider that the present mice infestation has followed quickly upon wave after wave of locusts — many cars, including mine, still bear traces of their journey through a thick, battering fog of wings and bodies pulping on the windscreen — then you can be forgiven for feeling positively biblical.
That's because an occult explanation covers our actual inability to understand these phenomena. It's clear why mice plagues begin after a good season, but no one quite knows why they end so suddenly. It's called a 'crash' and the population pretty well disappears within days.
Likewise, the precise trigger that sets squadrons of locusts on the move is not fully understood. In less enlightened times this gap in our knowledge and understanding allowed outlandish explanations to enter the discussion like a virus and alter its direction and credibility.
In the 14th century, people did not make the connection between bubonic plague and the fleas on rats. As a result, the deadly and phenomenal spread of the disease was attributed to a wild array of divine, demonic and diabolical causes.
In our more civilised and rational age, we can accept plagues of mice and locusts as part of a natural world which we still don't fully understand but cannot deny. It's hard to deny the existence of an intervention which, before your very eyes, destroys your crops, buildings, and electric wiring and coats your car with smashed insect corpses.
Why the moods and variations of another potent part of the natural world — climate — should be different is difficult to fathom. But different it is: it seems many Australians, some of them in 'high places', need climate change to demonstrate its presence with the murderous, repeated efficiency of the mice and the locusts. That would certainly be proof positive. Vindication among the ruins.
Brian Matthews is the award winning author of A Fine and Private Place and The Temple Down the Road. He was awarded the 2010 National Biography Award for Manning Clark — A Life.