By the look on my partner’s face, I must have been quite a sight
as he drove in the driveway expecting to find me dressed for the
Hispanic Chamber of Commerce banquet.
By the look on my partner’s face, I must have been quite a sight as he drove in the driveway expecting to find me dressed for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce banquet. Instead, I’m up on the ridge in a housedress and mud boots with curlers in my hair, blasting away with a 12-gauge shotgun and cussing well above my breath.
My partner and I have had many long and sometimes argumentative conversations about the place of wildlife since we moved to the country. His first inclination is to make our 10 acres a people-first area at the expense any critters who happened to be here before us. Mine is to accommodate all of them.
Our skunk was really the first real test. After it started coming into the house through the cat door to enjoy some cat food, he wanted to trap it and shoot it or poison it. After a long discussion I got him to call the Nan Pipestem Wildlife Center and talk to Gregg about it. Gregg said what I had been saying: “Change the cat door so the skunk can’t get in the house and let it be. The skunk won’t hurt anything and its part of the community.
I’m not sure he listened to me, but he listened to Gregg. He built a catwalk under the garage window about six feet off the ground with a small step halfway up (skunks can’t jump like cats) and installed a cat door just above his work bench.
So we’re learning to make accommodations to those who were on this land before us, but when the local wildlife is just dropping by for a dinner of one of my chickens and a few cats, that’s where we both draw the line.
“You fired that gun?” he said breathlessly as he came running up the hill to where I was still looking for signs of the two bobcats where they’d gone into the brush.
“I was protecting the chickens,” I said defensively. “I wasn’t huntin’ bobcat. They got two chickens, but I shot and they dropped one, but now we have to round up her up before it gets dark.”
There we were, two urbanites – out rescuing one lucky but deliriously confused hen.
We were protecting our livestock. My man gets the Eddie Albert of the Year award. Pointing to the brush where I last seen the lucky hen, I said, “You might want to put your mud boots on. It gets kind of thick in there.”
Poor Gimpy wasn’t so lucky. She was just too stupid to stay from being underfoot, including Junior, a 1,200-pound horse – hence the nickname Gimpy. No doubt it was her bum foot that made her easy prey.
In the country you expect to hear your neighbor’s shotgun go off, but when someone from the city hears a gun go off they duck and cover. City dwellers, take warning when traveling through a rural community – not all folks carrying guns are lunatics. Could be they’re having a disagreement with neighboring wildlife about where’s a good place to eat.
“You won’t find anything to eat at Linda’s Last Chance Ranch but buckshot!” I hollered back where I had heard the sound of crunching bones and pumped another round into the brush. “We don’t allow fast food take-out!”
My significant other is an ex-Marine and was an expert rifleman for four years while in the Marine Corps. “Now I got 60-year-old eyes,” he said. Laughing, we agreed to step up the pee patrol and do more brush clearing.
You learn to live by the rules that go with the landscape. The game warden said you can’t hunt bobcats, but you can protect your livestock. Country folk will tell you, “Shoot, shovel and shut up.”
