Our Kitchen Thief in the Night--Part Two

In my previous post, I described our week-long war of nerves with the mysterious creature who visits  our kitchen table every night, picking out its favorites of the treats we leave, making them vanish, leaving anything he doesn't like, (popcorn and even a piece of cheese!) and then disappearing without leaving crumbs or droppings.

As I said in the last post, on Sunday night we left two "humane traps" which the animal had managed to burgle the night before, without triggering the open doors at each end of the plastic boxes to crash down and trap him inside.  We also left a bit of cookie on the floor near the back door.

On Monday morning,--yesterday--I came downstairs to discover that the animal had again snagged the cookie pieces in one trap without setting off the closing doors, but in the second one, he was caught!  And struggling to get out. He seemed to weigh nothing as the Big Eleni carried the trap to the farthest border of our property, near our neighbor's house.  I had my camera ready to catch his image, solving our kitchen mystery once and for all.

The moment Big Eleni set the trap on the ground, the creature exploded out of it, shooting into the underbrush so fast that we didn't know what we had just seen.  I insisted it was a small chipmunk, and Eleni insisted it was a mouse.  It's so frustrating that our thief got away without us getting a decent mug shot!

Dejectedly, I left in my car to drive to New York, where I am now.  Big Eleni threw away the trap the thing had been caught in but, I learned later,  just to see what would happen, she put the other small trap on the table with cookie pieces inside.  And this morning, she found that the cookies had vanished, without the trap being set off!  Had our thief found his way back into the kitchen from our neighbor's yard, or are we dealing with a whole gang of very clever rodents?