Maximus and the mouse

This is the story of Maximus and and mouse.

Tonight we found a mouse in the bathroom. Despite our efforts to put a towel in the crack under the door as a means of trapping it in the bathroom, it squeezed it's way under the door anyhow and scampered into to the dining room. We thought we had lost it. Not so.

I have to add that Maximus could sense something was going on in the bathroom and was waiting right outside the door with his little tail wagging out of control.The moment that mouse came out from under the door Max flew after it. Although the mouse tried to escape through the dining room, it didn't get far. Max made a game out of cornering it, and for all the freedom that little mouse had, Max might as well have been sitting on it. My husband grabbed it with a towel and ran with it outside. Just as my husband reached the back door, the mouse wiggled free and ran for his tiny life away into the darkness of our backyard. At this point we gave up all hope of getting rid of it and just figured we lost this one, and the excitement was over. Not so.

I have never seen my puppy so in his element. He went through this really funny process of sniffing the entire trail where the mouse had been vigorously (he was pushing his nose down into he carpet and making this really loud sound with his nose ( it sounded like a cross between really obnoxious snorting, flapping and sniffing at an alarming rate.) It was hilarious. If you have seen the Disney movie "Tangled" that just came out, he acts exactly like the horse (coincidentally also named Maximus), while he was tracking Flynn Rider. After he sniffed around for a good three minutes or so, he darted outside into our backyard, which was now totally pitch black.

Now this mouse could have easily been three houses away already with the time it had to escape, and although we knew Max's breed (English Pointer) is a hunting breed, we had already thrown in the towel and gone back inside. I glanced out the back window to see him doing the same thing he was doing inside, walking really fast doing the flapping-snort-sniff around the yard in a figure eight. I couldn't help but giggle and just couldn't bare to make him come in yet; he was about as excited as a kid at Disneyland for the very first time. We turned off the lights, and just then Max came back inside. As I sat in bed waiting for my husband, this is what I heard:

(my husband talking to Max)
"Come on inside Max...good boy...wait...WHAT?"

Max had caught the mouse in the backyard, killed it, brought it back inside, and dropped it at my husband's feet.



I thought you had to train domesticated dogs to hunt like that. Not so.