Trauma Farm (31 page)
THE REAL NIGHTMARE OF
any farm is rats—not so much the local, native rats but the ubiquitous Norway rat. A pair can produce fifteen thousand descendants in a year. Rats are attracted to farms because there’s so much feed and shelter. They love grain and compost and fallen fruit and almost everything else. Our island can be particularly rat infested at times, but you won’t find that in the tourist brochures. We have an equally noxious feral cat population caused by eco-urbanites who consider it “natural” to release a house cat into the wild when they grow bored with it or move away. The feral cats are hell on the songbird population but oddly, not on the mice or rats.
I often eliminate our rats for several months. Then suddenly there’s one, and then there’s dozens, and the war begins again. Outside of Antarctica, a few uninfected islands, and Alberta, which insists rats don’t exist (I’m deeply suspicious) within its boundaries, Norway rats are everywhere. No doubt they and their sometime companions, the cockroaches, will outlast the human race. While we rapidly push the planet toward mass extinctions, they’re waiting for the leftovers.
TRAUMA FARM HAS THE
standard assortment of dogs and barn cats assigned to patrol for rats and field mice (another professional pest). We use metal containers for feed and follow the best procedures, but still they burrow up through the ground or chew holes in the walls. The rats and mice worked us over pretty good during our early years here—a few even got into the attic above our bedroom. I resorted to poison pellets. Once! Little blue pellets. I put them in the sealed attic where our cats couldn’t enter. Despite my precautions, I soon found poison pellets stashed at the back of our medication drawer in the bathroom. Rodents are smart! Not only that, but they obviously weren’t just in the attic. We got more cats and set up more traps and finally drove them out of the house.
Rats and farmers can beget far-fetched stories. A tenderhearted artist long ago witnessed a brutal farmer kicking his sheepdog. After that, for years, this gentle artist, with impish glee, would release his live-trapped rats at night in the farmer’s barn.
In her young years Sam moved so fast she could snatch a leaping rat out of the air and break its back. I’m relentless when it comes to rats and mice, especially after someone I knew died from hantavirus—probably contracted from mouse droppings.
Traditionally, farmers deal with mice by filling a wooden-handled bucket half full of water. Then you tie a strip of bacon around the loose handle. The mouse will run up the metal handle and touch the wooden grip, which rotates, tossing the mouse into the water, where it drowns. I tried a variant for rats with a garbage can in the feed shed, filling the bottom third with water and floating a tiny dish of feed in it. The method worked too horrifyingly well. I found whole families of drowned rats. One would fall in, and the others would bravely, suicidally leap to its rescue. This was too cruel for me. But then I’d also seen rats that had mutilated themselves when caught in traps. The whole business turns my stomach, yet to surrender would have worse consequences.
ALTHOUGH I’M NOT A
Christian, the traditional Christmas with its carolling, gaudy tree, goodwill, rum-and-eggnogs— all of it—is nearly enough to convert me every year. Despite the ugly shopping orgy it’s also become, Christmas remains a warm tradition we celebrate with gusto. Every year on Christmas Day we declare a truce at Trauma Farm, disarm the traps, and throw feed and grain to every animal and predator in sight, pests included. The next day the wars begin again.
One year I couldn’t kick myself into the mood. Sharon wanted me to find our Christmas tree, and our gift making and purchasing had fallen behind. I was too busy and too broke to worry about Christmas trees. Then we had an early morning power failure. Without the refrigerator running, we heard a squeaking. We searched everywhere but couldn’t discover its source. After the power returned and I was cooking breakfast I heard it again and realized it was behind the stove. Crawling around on the floor, I noticed a little tail sticking up behind an electrical box attached to the adobe wall. A mouse! His tail wagged ferociously before he jumped out from behind the box and rubbed his face with his paws. He repeated these actions several times.
“He’s hurt,” I said to Sharon. “There’s something wrong with him. Pass me the goldfish net from beside the pond.” Sharon fetched the long-handled little net and handed it to me where I lay semi-trapped between the stove and the counter. I floundered after the mouse, while Sharon supervised over my shoulder, releasing the occasional squeal of support or fright—I couldn’t tell which.
The mouse continued this obsessive behaviour while I struggled to reach him. Suddenly, an enormous furry, red-bellied wolf spider, at least half the size of the mouse, darted from behind the outlet, straight for my head. Both Sharon and I shouted as I whipped the net around and whacked the spider with the handle. Gimped up, it kept crawling aggressively toward me, so I beat it to death. It was him or me. I’ve encountered some large spiders in my life, including a tarantula on a Texas gravestone, but this was the biggest, scariest, most aggressive spider I’ve ever met in a house, let alone while wedged alongside a stove. It died three inches from my face. The attack was so scary I almost felt like moving back to the city.
The mouse stood beside the outlet, stunned. That’s when I understood we’d been overhearing an epic battle between the mouse and the spider, and I’d just flattened the mouse’s breakfast into hairy juice on the floor. Worse, the disappointed, spider-bit mouse wasn’t going anywhere, so I said to Sharon, “Hand me a rubber glove, and I’ll grab him.”
Gloved, I dug in again behind the counter, stretching toward the mouse, then he lunged for me. This was one Schwarzenegger of a mouse! I scooted backwards, banging my head. Sharon was now standing on a chair, shrieking.
“He got away!” I exclaimed. “He made a run for it.”
“He didn’t get away!” Sharon screamed. “He ran up your sleeve.”
“Oh posh! He didn’t run up my sleeve.” That’s when I felt something wriggling around in my armpit between my shirt and the light flannel shirt-jacket I wear in cool weather. It was the first time in my life a mouse made me scream. “Arggh!” I ripped my flannel overshirt off faster than you could say “cheese.”
I managed to trap him in the sleeve and ran for the door with the bundle. Sharon flung it open, and I bolted down the walkway to the road. The mouse was still squirming as I went out the gate. By now I was full of admiration for this valiant mouse. I didn’t have the heart to kill him, so I decided to release him in the feed shed. If he was as smart as he was intrepid, he could survive the cats and me and never have to worry about dinner again. I shook out my overshirt.
No mouse. Nowhere. I was so terrified I started checking my pockets and my crotch. I didn’t say anything to Sharon after I got back, but I left the shirt outside. Later, four of Sharon’s girlfriends arrived for lunch. While the women wined and cheesed away I decide to haul in the week’s firewood. Entering with the second wheelbarrow load I was greeted by five screaming women, and a dog circling the chesterfield. The mouse from hell had returned. Needless to say, after much sofa lifting and furniture rearranging, there was no mouse. The women went back to their wine. I continued with my firewood. When I arrived with the next load all the women were screaming again, and both dogs were barking. Only this time one of the women had snatched the fishnet and in a remarkable feat of dexterity whanged it down on the mouse as he raced across the floor.
I lunged for the mouse as he attempted to squirm out from beneath the net. I caught it all up, net and mouse, and ran for the door, remarking to Sharon on my way past that maybe she’d have to drive me to Timbuktu this time, to make sure he didn’t come back. Instead, I walked him into the bush so far I practically got lost, and then I held out the net. The mouse clambered up the netting and perched on the rim, staring at me with absolute aplomb. He noticed a stump nearby, and made a graceful leap to a pile of leaves beside the stump, where he busied himself digging and searching, occasionally glancing back.
Everyone knows that feeling you get when you think you’re being watched. Well, I got it. I slowly lifted my head. Only no one was there—except the forest. I was ringed with trees. Christmas trees! They were perfect!
They were all around the stump, and while the indomitable mouse gazed up at me with curiosity, munching on a seed, I was finally infused with the spirit of the season.
T
HE FIRST TIME
I showed the grandchildren how to bake our bread for dinner the kitchen looked like it had gone through a snowstorm, but it was a fine loaf that came out on the baking stone. I love kneading bread, because it is so much like kneading clay for pottery. I can knead the dough in the two common patterns that potters use, the more complex Japanese chrysanthemum and the simpler calf-face. The kids love it when I knead the dough into the calf-face because it looks just like a calf ’s face. Then, two years later, we were given a bread-making machine. It makes lousy bread; however, using it to knead the dough works remarkably well, so we use it just for that and then move on to normal baking on a stone, braiding loaves, and so on. It’s a hell of a lot less messy. Sharon gratefully assumed I’d hurricaned my last kitchen with my flour-tossing talents. Bread making almost grew boring, so we began making homemade noodles, which really thrilled the grandkids, and I became a happy frog in the flour bag again. If there’s a way to make a mess, I will find it.
Later, I initiated them into the mysteries of honey. They were soon spinning the stainless steel gears of the extractor, the honey oozing out of the combs. This made them feel important, and after we had cleaned our sticky hands and the machinery I treated them to honey toast and they each got a little chunk of honeycomb to chew, and we were soon all sticky-handed again, blessed with the magic of honey.
Traditions survive only if they are taught to children, and we’ve done our best with our two sons, who both ended up being landscape gardeners; so now we have the thrilling grandchildren to corrupt with my anti-authoritarian, see-for-yourself attitude, despite the rolling eyes of their parents. We thought we’d start them in the kitchen and move on to the gardening and firewood later. That’s also why Sharon taught them the gentle arts of the cookie and the pie before I was allowed to lead them into my messier world of bread.
