2007-10-07
Killing In The Name Of
Borrowing the title of a a Rage Against the Machine track, I was killing in the name of my yard. Our front yard was recently infested by a mole. Friday, I did some research in to traps but all of the ones I found were spears. They were also inconclusive as to whether they worked, and possibly inhumane if you speared one and then it had to lay around and bleed out. At the end of Friday the traps still looked like the best method as poisons and folk remedies looked to be ineffective or dangerous.
While visiting my grandparents on Saturday I asked grandpa what to do. He told me to go through and crush the tunnels with my heel then watch for it with a shovel in hand. He specifically said 8:00 a.m. and noon. Yesterday evening I went through and collapsed the runs. They were everywhere! There were five entrance holes and somewhere around one hundred linear feet of tunnels. I was amazed at how much one mole could do!
We missed the 8:00 a.m. shift as we had been out to see the Rumblejetts, who were awesome ... and Jim didn't break a hip, there was a moment! After lunch we went out to check on the yard and every tunnel was back open. Jacey and I went through and stomped them all down again. We were watching the yard but the grass, weeds and fallen leaves made it hard to see very clearly so I mowed. I finished mowing the front yard and grabbed my pitch fork to turn the compost heap when I noticed the ground moving. In the span of five minutes this little creature had made about 10 feet of headway in to my yard following the same paths that he had previously created.
I grabbed my shovel and dug in about six inches behind the digging. I dug in and flipped the ground up in one quick movement. It immediately started digging a new hole. It's fat silver body twitching like crazy to get back in to the safety of the ground. I hesitated for a moment but I knew what had to be done. I placed the point of the shovel on its neck and delivered a quick and exact blow to his neck just below its skull. There was no suffer or struggle, just an immediately limp little body.
I'm thinking back and I am pretty sure that this is the first time in my life that I have intently taken another life. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that ...
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
