Things that go growl in the night

Here's a tale of two hopefully not unrelated episodes--

The first is that every once in a while, usually in the evening, I have been hearing scurrying behind our kitchen cabinets. I know I'm not imagining it, because the cats also seem to respond to the noise, looking around curiously like they know something is there, but they're not quite sure exactly where or how to get at it.

The sounds was coming from this set of cabinets:

This is an exterior wall, so when I couldn't find any kind of mouse/rat/bird/bat/crazy big insect activity coming from inside the cabinets, we checked the gutters on the other side of the brick, but also saw nothing. We did a quick inspection for any holes nearby, but besides the microwave vent, which is tiny and louvered, nothing is an obvious entrance. We never did figure out what's going on behind there...

But then a couple of nights ago, we woke up to the sound of one of our cats yowling and growling (yes, growling--it was a spooky sound coming out of a cat). He would come in and growl at me in the bedroom and then when I tried to see what was the matter, he would run to the stairs. I wanted to ignore him, since it was 5am, but the sound actually made me scared we had some emergency health issue. D finally went to investigate and let the cat lead him downstairs. Then I heard him shout, so of course by then my adrenaline was racing and I went down too.

A mouse, very dead and partially devoured, was stuck in kitty's teeth. As we ran for paper towels, gloves, etc, I obviously was too busy to get a picture. But let's pretend it was something like this:

Because seriously the real picture would be much much more disturbing.

D pulled it out of the cat's mouth finally (after a brief moment where it looked like the cat was going to try to swallow it whole and had just its behind and tail hanging out and I had visions of how we might have to do the kitty Heimlich) and threw it outside in the garbage.

Since then, I haven't heard any noises. Now I'm not saying the two incidents are related, but it sure would be nice to have that loose end tied up.

(Even if the sound I was hearing was that mouse and it is now in mousy heaven, that still doesn't really solve the question of how it got in to begin with. But I'm trying not to think of that right now.)