Greetings and salutations!
OmbudsBen asked me to post some stuff about the wildlife around here. (I haven’t really even met OmbudsBen. What’s up my dude?) Since I’ve been too lazy to post lately, and since I’ve had a floating intention to post about my wildlife adventures, I’ll indulge you all. In fact, there will be two posts. Aren’t you lucky.
When we first moved into the house, my dog Noggin got the idea that there was something living under the basement stairs. I didn’t really blame him for thinking that, because once I had seen something that might have been a mole in that general vicinity (the basement stairs are right next to the back door).
After a few months the thing under the stairs really started to mess with Noggin’s head. Sometimes he’d just stand there, wagging his tail, staring at the stairs. Sometimes I’d find him in the middle of the night scratching at the bottom step. Eventually he tore the bottom step right out of the stairwell. That made me mad, especially when I had to go down to the basement.
One night not to long ago Mr. Rizzuto and I were sitting on the couch, not doing anything in particular. I was talking to him, facing the kitchen, when all of a sudden a big, huge rat walked into the kitchen from the direction of the basement stairs. He kinda walked in, looked around, said “hey, how ya doin’?” and went back towards the basement. Mr. Rizzuto didn’t see, but I just sat there dumbstruck, pointing. When I finally managed to tell him what happened (and convinced him I wasn’t hallucinating) he put a mouse trap under the stairs where the bottom step used to be.
That night I slept with one eye open. Not for me so much, because I sleep on the top floor, but I worried about my kids. I didn’t exactly want them to wake up with a big ass rat chilling in the bed with them, right? Some time in the middle of the night we heard some kind of commotion. Mr. Rizzuto went down to check it out and found Noggin curled up in a ball in the bathroom, shaking like a leaf. Also? The mouse trap was gone.
The next morning I left early to take Dante to his drama group. When I got back Janey was bouncing up and down and couldn’t wait to tell me that Daddy had caught a rat. Mr. Rizzuto was holding a huge bucket and I could hear something crawling around inside of it.
Now, where I come from rats are filthy, dirty, disgusting creatures that live in subway tunnels and only come out when the sanitation workers are on strike. Needless to say, I hesitated when Mr. Rizzuto brought the bucket over. But I peeked inside and what I saw was…cute. I’ll be damned if the rat wasn’t cute as hell. He also walked kinda funny. Mr. Rizzuto said the trap broke it’s carriage. That made me feel bad.
In the end we decided to take it outside and let Noggin have his way with it. We figured that would be the most humane thing to do. We were right, it was all over in about two seconds.
That’s all I have to say about that. Next I’ll tell you about the deer that Mr. Rizzuto hit.
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