Haha! I can empathize with the OP and his uncatchable mouse issue!
The ending to my saga was indeed anticlimactic, but there is a noteworthy update…
Over the last couple of summers, we only had a few and very isolated issues with rats in the garden; and I was able to quickly catch them using a long spring trap buried in a shallow hole under the tomato the rat was eating at night.
Also, my old bird dog died, and we adopted a cow dog mix from a Navajo reservation in NM. Turns out, the dog is a vermin catching machine! The dog prefers to sleep outside and would post up in the garden. A couple of times, the dog has caught a rat on his own, but any rat that ended up just caught by a leg in the long spring was quickly dispatched by our new dog.
Between the hard earned education I got dealing with my uncatchable rat, and our new dog, I almost wished I had another next level intelligent rat to try and kill.
However, my wife has essentially put a period at the end of our rat problem and my chances at matching wits with another challenging rat to catch. You see, one time last summer I was out of town and our dog brought a rat he had caught into the house. With me not being home, my wife had to get the dead rat away from our dog, but he was reluctant to give it up and a chase through the house and a game of tug of war with my wife trying to use oven mitts as gloves ensued.
Fast forward a few weeks and about $5k later… my wife had the old wood deck that any critters would live under torn out and replaced with a concrete patio. As a result, other than a rat coming in from a neighboring property, I really don’t think we’ll have any future rodent issues.
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