|
|
|
|
Who needs cats?! By John-Henry I like hunting dogs, and I've got a lot of them (If anyone is interested in some pretty fine hound pups out of lion/bear lines, please contact me, 'cause I've got a whole slug of them on the ground at the moment). In addition to a mob of hounds, I've got Airedale Terriers. Five of them at the moment, counting Miss Lori's old fat growly male. Now, many of you may not be real familiar with the Airedale, but an Airedale Terrier, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "Can do anything that any other dog can do, and then whip that dog if it has to." Once you encourage an Airedale to hunt, you find yourself feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, because you realize that you've created a monster; those dogs become so monomaniacal that you begin to fear that if you don't get them out after something you may wake to find their fangs in YOUR throat one night. Having had Micky and Max in CO all summer long, hunting every single day, did nothing to abate this tendency of theirs, either. Airedales, as Teddy observed, are generalists; they'll happily hunt anything that walks, crawls, or flies, and enjoy themselves immensely, whether it's a lion or a bear or a coyote or a quail or a rabbit or a rat. I mention all this so that you'll understand (unlike Miss Lori) that what happened last night was a pardonable mistake; an "unintended consequences" kind of a thing. For some reason S.E. AZ is suffering a plague of rodents this fall; every house is infested with mice. Mice in the cupboards, mice in the vanity, mice scurrying across the floor, mice in the bookshelves and bedclothes and even (Horrors!) in the boudoir. Now, I don't particularly care anything about that; I've speculated idly that I might wander down to Victor's house and make up some .38 special loads with wax bullets and piddle with my Model 19, but I've been busy, so the mice didn't become a priority until one ran across Miss Lori's arm. I was fooling with the computer while she sat in the armchair reading, and the first inkling that I had that something was wrong was a blood-curdling shriek as she erupted from that chair and fled across the room. When she fetched up against the opposite wall (with the whites showing all the way around her pupils, just like a maddened horse) she hopped up and down and yelled incoherently about the "goddamned mice; I HATE those goddamned mice!" I could kinda tell that she was serious; normally she doesn't curse at all, and that white-eyed thing had me troubled, so (without thinking too much) I snapped my fingers at Mickle the Pickle, who was laying on the couch grinning, and said, "Go get that mouse!" Now, my humble abode consists of a semi-large adobe room tied onto an old trailer, and the connecting door is normally shut to hold the heat from the wood stove in the adobe. There happened to be four Airedales laying around the place when they heard, "Go Git!" and things just kind of went south from there. The poor old mouse sought refuge behind a stack of bookcases to begin with, and that lasted for all of two seconds before the Gas Axe dog rammed his head between the back of the bookcase and the wall and tipped the whole thing over on it's face. Athena was dancing around the edges of the wreckage and almost ended the whole thing there, but she missed her snap and allowed the mouse to flee behind the desk, which afforded safe cover for all of a second before IT went over. From there it fled under the computer table, madly pursued by three Airedales (Maggie Mae is a brand-new rescue dog, and she was apparently raised somewhat differently, because she could only stare in horror as the Rat Pack went wild) who managed to de-construct in five seconds all twenty-three power cords, monitor cables, video patch cords, SCUSI feeds, and speaker co-axial cables that were hanging under there, in the process missing the mouse again, who nimbly ran up the curtains and perched on the rod, where he was just beginning to draw breath to say, "Nah, nah, nah..." when Micky went right up the wall after him, hooked the curtain rod with both forepaws, and tore it out by the roots. The curtains fell down, enveloped two Airedales AND the mouse, and a rapidly agitated mound of cloth careened across the floor, caromed off of the couch, and suddenly came to a stop in the middle of the room. When I pulled the curtains away, La Pic had a satisfied look on her face, and the Gas Axe looked disappointed; he likes any raw flesh, and Micky hadn't shared at all.
When I saw that it was all over, I turned around and looked at Miss Lori (who was standing on the bed) and explained to her, "See? When you have Airedales, you don't have to worry about mice, and YOU DON'T NEED CATS." John-Henry
|
||
| Hauptseite ♦ Mainpage | vor » | |
|
© by Martin Reinartz |
||
