Wild kingdom

A packrat was living in our woodpile until we flushed him out, and he moved into our garage. Which is attached to our house. Which made me nervous.
Don’t get me wrong. I love seeing and interacting with wild animals on the trail, or at the park, or even in my yard. But when they could possibly be setting up residence in a downstairs closet, everything changes.
During the 20 years we’ve lived in the mountains, we’ve had many animal encounters. Fox, deer and elk are regular visitors to our backyard. Flickers show up at the bird feeder, and flammulated owls call to each other from the dense ponderosa pines that surround our neighborhood. Black bears check out untended garbage cans in our neighborhood, and mountain lions make rare appearances and leave not-so-rare footprints on park trails. We’ve encountered rattlesnakes, badgers, porcupines, moose and coyotes on our hikes throughout the Rocky Mountains.
And each time we see a new creature, we consider ourselves lucky. Until the packrat.
Here’s the problem: packrats are, well, rats; creatures we associate with filth. But here’s what Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t tell you - packrats are fuzzy, cute, cuddly looking, almost chinchilla-like. Think giant hamsters with long hairless tails. Our outrage over a rat in our garage was diminished by this guy’s soft black eyes and twitching whiskers. Even though he had crafted a nest of dryer lint, pinecone needles and M&Ms with peanuts in the air filter compartment of one of our cars, he had still won our hearts.
We made a half-hearted attempt at flushing him out of the garage with brooms, but this packrat was fast and crafty.
We started to lose patience and we armed ourselves with shovels. We would have to eliminate this pest. But we couldn’t… not with shovels, certainly. And also not with rat poison or any other of the methods proven to work. I searched the Internet for remedies, and found tips on scented dryer sheets (rats aren't supposed to like the smell) and dry wool (to plug holes they might have made).
So we blanketed the perimeter with dozens of sheets of Downy. We haven’t seen the rat since, and our garage smells April fresh.