I’m out walking in the neighborhood around midnight (like ya do), and I see this little flash of movement. A juvenile grey mouse runs down the sidewalk in front of me, hunkering down at the edge of the grass a few feet away to hide. I keep walking, and the little sod jumps up and runs further. “Why doesn’t it just dive into the grass to get away?”
Then I realize: the low-cut grass is an almost impenetrable barrier for this little mouse. When you’re that small, you get one chance to make that dive and make it count, hoping that the thing chasing you loses track. When the bugger finally does jump into the grass, I can still see it, and it’s basically wedged down in the lawn 4 inches off the sidewalk. Running now is futile, it knows its only hope is camouflage! Even in the light of a shining flashlight, poor thing just froze in place.
Lucky for that mouse, I’m neither cat nor fox, and not even interested in stressing it out further, so I just kept walking while trying to imagine what the whole world must be like from the mouse’s perspective.