McCARTHY AND THE MOUSE
Sitting at the helm in a light breeze, my arms crusted with a fine rime of salt, my skin so dry I’d lost my fingerprints, I heard a clatter and a curse from below. There were only three of us a thousand miles from shore and only one on watch at a time. Usually the off watch lay asleep in their berth, exhausted, but McCarthy was awake and agitated.
“What the hell?” I yelled from the cockpit.
McCarthy had discovered the mouse several days after an unseasonable storm had driven us south from our northerly course into the stagnant air of the North Pacific High. Not the mouse, exactly, but evidence of the mouse. Small teeth had gnawed the corner of a box of macaroni and cheese. Then a bag of Chips Ahoy. Our stores were already thin. Mc-Carthy wasn’t about to surrender anything more.
He appeared in the companionway holding a frying pan.
“You going to beat it to death?”
“I’d strangle it if I could get my fingers around its tiny little neck.” He had tried to bake it, propping the oven door open and leaving a trail
