Varmints

A  completely true story. Most of it.  Some of it.  .

                             Varmints                                                         

                                          by Dick Morgan

          The first time I saw the little grey critters in the house was not long after we moved in.  The house was already old, a rickety lath and plaster bungalow owned for sixty years by the man who built it.  Those last few years, in his nineties, Old Man Prosser couldn't quite keep up with the maintenance, and the restoration work his estate people hired, well, their goal was to sell the place, not actually fix it up much.  Consequently, when our family sank my modest retirement savings into our first actual house, we inherited one with new paint and new storm windows, but also with a well established mouse freeway within its crumbling walls.

          When you buy a bicycle, you get a receipt and fifty pages of instructions.  But when you buy a house, you get fifty pages of receipt and no instructions at all.  How was I supposed to know that oil furnaces need to have their oil filters changed just like a car, or that you don't just paint over peeling paint, that you have to chip it away first?  No one told me anything about rodents, or I might not have moved into this neighborhood with its tree-lined streets and porch-post houses.  Our street may look like a Norman Rockwell painting, but even such charming scenes hold tremendous disaster potential for practicality-challenged people such as myself.

          I'm a writer, not a mechanic or a carpenter.  I've mostly learned how to do practical things by failing at them, hiring experts, and watching over their shoulders.  But now that I have retired from my modestly paying teaching position at the city college, I can no longer afford to hire experts of any kind. I'm having to learn solo this high art of home ownership.

          My wife, a blonde-haired Yoga teacher with a penchant for collecting small and impractical knick-knacks, is even less mechanically inclined than I am.  Consequently, the home chores have become a paradigm of gender profiling.  Any chores that involve lifting heavy things, the disposal of stinky compounds, gluing, pounding, or screwing-- we're talking about the use of screwdrivers here-- that became my job by default.

          Our daughter the princess, at the age of ten when we moved in, appointed herself in charge of discovering things that were not right.  As in, "The color of my room is not right; the make of car our family drives is not right.  The places we go on vacation were not right.  She was rapidly approaching the age when a parent's only function was to make life more convenient for offspring; she was a teenager in training.  God only knew what would happen if she were responsible for regularly completing an actual chore.  There were three of us living in the house, but in many respects, I was alone.  Especially when it came to the mice.

          At night, my wife, the half of our relationship in charge of hearing tiny sounds, would jostle me in our bed and tell me there were noises coming from the walls.  I never heard anything, and neither of us saw anything either, so I dismissed it as an old house settling in, getting used to its new owners.  But one night, my wife's shouting woke me up; if it hadn't, her striking me in the head surely would have.

          "Something just ran over my face," she said through gritted teeth, and then started a motion like a cat cleaning its whiskers, only a lot faster.  "I'm sure it was a mouse," she said, followed by the inevitable, "I told you so!"

          This presented several logistical problems.  Where was this face-trodding mouse, and where did he come from?  The bliss that followed moving into a new house had already worn off, thanks to the high mortgage payments for door handles that fell off, windows that refused to open, and a porch that had already rotted through in several spots.  This mouse problem was just one more headache that said welcome to the neighborhood, as though this area of the city were especially esteemed instead of infested with rodents.

          Of course I had to get out of bed and deal with it immediately, if I wanted to stay married.  There was a moment of consideration there, but then, sooner or later, married or not, that mouse would continue to roam free until it ran across my own face one night.  That became unacceptable.  But despite a thorough search of the entire house, I found nothing.  Mice are very small and fast as slot-cars; I'm sure that after the first light went on, he slid onto the mouse freeway and sped into the nether reaches of the walls.

          The next day, I bought mouse traps, the wood and steel type that snap down onto whatever mouse part presents itself with enough force to squish, break, sever, or decapitate.  My daughter gave them one look and said, "Eww, those are gross," and headed for the bathroom and slammed the door, certain that she would hurl.  After a second trip to the store, I returned with several of the kind of traps that are little queen-size mouse beds covered with glue. The mouse steps in and then can't step out, and puts his other little foot in for leverage.  Apparently, they work exactly like the Tar Baby in Br’er Rabbit.  The question was, where was I going to put these babies?  I inspected the entire living area for mouse holes, and came up with no leads as to how our mouse had gotten access.  I placed the traps all around the kitchen where mice would be drawn to food smells, and around my wife's half of the bedroom in the unlikely event that mice would be drawn back to her face.   There were no stuck mice the next morning, but my wife could still hear noises inside the old walls. 

          Two days later, I heard my daughter scream in the bathroom.  She had gone in to take her morning shower and found a mouse trying to get out of the bathtub.  She was suddenly all through wanting to take a shower.   This became a job for Dad, immediately adding to my list of official titles, which included Spider Killer, Dog Poop Removal Specialist, and Garbage Man.  This mouse-catcher job was more challenging, though.  Even though the mouse could not negotiate the porcelain walls of the bathtub caldera, It was still the fastest little slot car racer I'd ever dealt with.  I finally nailed him using a combination of quick scooping with a spaghetti sieve and pulling him onto a glue trap.  Once I had him hopelessly gummed up, I could lift him up out of the tub and take a close look.  There he lay, sideways in the trap, his little mouse chest heaving, and his eyes bugging way out.  It was hard not to feel sorry for the little critter, But in order to keep the peace, I had to dedicate myself to a mouse-free house.  I had to be firm; I had to be hardnosed.  I suppose I should have squished it, or shot it with a pellet gun, or maybe drowned it in the toilet, but, well, that was too much like murder for my citified sensibilities.  I couldn't bring myself to just off the little guy, so I threw him into the garbage can still alive-- probably a more cruel death than any of the others, but which happened out of sight at least.

          The next day, we bought a cat.  I voted for a lean, street wise, ex- humane society type of cat that jumped when you entered the room and growled instead of meowed.  You can get that kind of cat for free, if you have good thick gloves.  But the household is disproportionately female, and, well, we ended up with a long haired Persian with an official pedigree and no front claws who had never been outside in her whole life, and which cost us two hundred dollars.  All you had to do was look at her, and she'd fall over into a cat coma, purring, lying flat of her back with her paws sticking straight up in the air.  Still, there were no mouse sightings for several weeks.  The mice must have smelled a cat in the house, and thought twice about venturing out of the walls.

          But the mice were not stupid.  They could tell that Tiger was no mouser, and after a month, they ventured forth once more.  This time, they came frequently, partly to taunt the cat, and partly drawn to the cat food left out in a dish on the kitchen floor.  It was the cat who found a mouse the next time.

          I noticed Tiger crouching down near the bookcase in the living room, sniffing at something behind the bottom row of books.  I immediately knew there was another mouse loose in the house.  I stayed and watched.  Now, a cat which has never hunted for food doesn't really know how hunt at all.  Oh, they smell the mouse smell and it gets their juices flowing, but they don't understand that mice move around very fast.  I saw the mouse make a run for it under the sofa, and so I put glue traps at both ends.  Meanwhile, Tiger was still snuffling around the bookcase, having missed the mouse migration entirely.  She could still smell where the mouse had been; the poor, terrified little guy had probably crapped back there between Shakespeare and the Bible, neither of which had been moved for years.  Tiger could smell the tiny mouse shit, and was certain the critter was still there.  Meanwhile, I jostled the sofa, and the mouse panicked, streaked for cover, and ran smack into one of my glue traps.  After I got back from the garbage can, Tiger was still pawing around at the bookcase.

          I took a closer examination of the kitchen, where most of the tiny little mouse turds circled the cat dish.  Finally, I found their access point, a tiny hole under an overhang near the dishwasher, a spot one had to put one's head on the floor to see.  A few moments with a can of expanding foam, and our house became mouse free for months, although Tiger still hung out over by the book case, snuffling around as though certain the mouse was still there.

          Things calmed down at our household.  The seasons slowly rolled by, and the only home crises were painting over old paint, repairing the rotting porch boards, and buying exactly the correct school supplies so my daughter would not be completely ostracized in fifth grade.  We managed to get through an entire school year with no mouse sightings, and only a few home emergencies.  There was a leaky roof to fix, a tree in the front yard which fell on the car during a ice storm, crumbling front steps demanding cement work, and the ongoing problem of an eleven-year old that needed new shoes every three months.

          Late spring and summer brought new problems on the home ownership front.  Yardwork is not my favorite way to pass the time, but my wife tells me it's a necessary evil.  I'd just as soon let the grass grow as long as it wants, and whatever chooses to grow along its edges was fine with me.  Thistles have a lovely purple blossom, and dandelions form a beautiful translucent puffball that reminds me of fairy wands-- just before they metastasize into every corner of the yard.  Let them be, I would exclaim, but this is apparently not the way people tend their yards in our neighborhood, according to my wife.

          It became necessary to buy a lawnmower, hedge trimmers, and jagged- toothed shears of all kinds, not to mention a sturdy, man-sized shovel.  It was my wife's job to point and discuss, but when it came to actually cutting or digging, well, that became the man's job.  So instead of reading or writing, I spent many sunny afternoons wrenching my back transplanting rose bushes from here to there, uprooting plants that had gone out of favor, trimming branches off of various trees.

          It was during a transplanting chore that I first noticed the holes along the foundation.  They weren't obvious to the eye unless you were actually peering down behind the bushes next to the house.  But there they were, holes about the size of my fist, with fresh dirt in front of them.  There were also little pieces of apple stems and seeds.  Probably whatever had gone into those holes had a taste for the fallen apples from the tree in our back yard. 

          These holes were too big to be mouse holes.  I knew just by looking at them that they were probably rat holes, and that we probably had rats burrowing along the cement walls of the basement.  God help us if they found some small breach, some crevasse to squeeze through and thoroughly dominate the mouse freeway, like huge eighteen-wheelers among the tiny slot cars.  This had to be dealt with immediately.

          The job called for cement work, my specialty since repairing the front steps.  It wasn't that I was especially good at it, or even that I had the right tools.  It was just a guy thing, you know, getting dirty and sweaty doing heavy lifting, having an excuse to wear a big black weight belt which held my rounding stomach in, making me feel years younger during the work, and years older afterward.  I poured rat poison into all the holes I could find, mixed several bags of concrete in my old wheelbarrow, and shoveled the gooey mess all around the foundation.  I didn't find any more rat holes the rest of that summer.

          It seems that work around the yard never abates, as long as the weather holds.  The grass needs cutting apparently every week or so.  I depend on my wife to point out the exact frequency, a job she has never failed.  Trees and shrubs need constant trimming, fences need painting, and in the heat of late summer, one actually has to put water on things, or they die.  This is apparently unacceptable to some people.  My own thoughts on the matter were more logical; if you quit watering things, they won't grow, and then you don't have to trim them back.  But as I have said, my wife insists that things are not done this way in our neighborhood.  At least among the wives.  I wanted to take a poll among the husbands, but people kept moving away, supplanted by complete strangers, wives pointing and husbands watering and then cutting the lawns, as though suburban living came with a manual that only wives were allowed to read.  Too bad rats don't eat high grass; I could get to like them in that case, but my wife insists that rats have no redeeming features.  They eat fallen apples, I told her.  If we had a decent sized rat population, I wouldn't have to go out and pick up rotten apples at all.  The silent stare I received after that statement made me feel stupid and lazy instead of logical and benevolent toward nature.

          But my wife is far more the nature lover than I.  She is the one who puts out bird feeders and brings home birdbaths from garage sales.  Of course, she prefers the old cement kind that weigh nearly a hundred pounds, and require the man of the house to interrupt whatever unimportant thing he is doing and put on his weight belt again.

          After only a year in the house, the back yard was beginning to look like the garden section of a K-Mart, the corner that has the cement birdbaths and Mexican chimneys, birdfeeders and bamboo Tiki lamps.  That is, except for the back corner of the yard behind the big forsythia bush where I dumped all the trimmings.  I call it our compost pile, but its mostly just a place to throw downed limbs, rotten apples, and excess cement.

          Every window with a view of the yard had some kind of bird feeder in front of it.  There were hummingbird feeders, sparrow feeders, and a Swiss chalet treehouse feeder on a pole just outside the kitchen window that required constant filling, and which fed nearly every kind of bird in the neighborhood.  It was always entertaining to watch the flurry of wing-beating and savage pecking that went on outside the window, but the increased bird population was quite indiscriminant about where it shat, which evidence indicated was mostly on our car.

          By the time the interminable Northwest rain began, the birdfeeder out side the kitchen window was discovered by the squirrels.  Now, squirrels are beautiful and graceful creatures, most of the time.  I loved to watch them as they scurried along the electric wires high above the street.  They could move through the trees and along the wires faster than a man could walk, twenty feet in the air, along a squirrel freeway with an exit ramp onto every single roof on the street.  Our own squirrel freeway exit happened to be over the kitchen window, just above the bird feeder on its four-foot pole.

          Squirrels love birdseed.  They would lean down from the electric supply line and leap to the feeder, which sent birdseed flying in all directions, landing all around the base of the birdfeeder, providing all manner of other rodents a constant food supply-- a fine second course to supplement the fallen apples.  I would try to scare them away by opening the kitchen window and yelling at them, but the squirrels caught on to that fairly quickly, and began chattering back at me, scolding me for making them believe I could come through the window screen.  Soon we were having a loud conversation that went sort of like, "Hey you!"  Chatter- chatter,  "Get away from there!"  Chatter, chatter, munch, munch, munch.  I kept this up until I saw my neighbor snickering at me.  I took to hanging little bags of red pepper around the birdfeeders; it's supposed to irritate squirrel nostrils, but not bother the birds at all. Evidence indicates that it doesn't work that way, though.  The birds pecked the bags apart, and the squirrels seem to relish the now highly seasoned birdseed, as though we had accidentally created a gourmet meal just for them.

          I wanted to discourage the squirrels from coming around.  They were, after all, just rats that lived in trees.  But I didn't really want to shoot them or poison them.  Discharging firearms in a residential area is illegal, and trying to poison them might be indiscriminate.  I might poison the neighbor's dog, the big labrador that craps regularly on our lawn.  There was a moment of unethical dilemma there, but I came up with what I thought was a better plan.      I cooked up a double batch of my grandfather's best recipe: Grampa's Bourbon Balls- God Rest His Soul, the family used to call them.  He died of a liver ailment when I was very young-- probably too much sampling of the goods, I'm told.

          I bought a special squirrel feeder just for that occasion, nailed it to the Birch tree out front, and filled it with the little nut and dough balls. It took the squirrels less than an hour to find them.  The squirrels loved Grampa's Bourbon Balls even more than gourmet birdseed.  They came in pairs, in family groups, large and small. They would chatter and squabble for position, chasing and nipping at one another for first access.  Soon after dominance was established and the alpha squirrel had had his fill, I watched him try to negotiate the high wire freeway on his way to wherever he intended to sleep it off.  Halfway across the street, he slipped and fell 20 feet to the pavement, and was immediately run over by a UPS truck.

          I felt really bad.  The squirrels were experiencing horrible deaths, and also the speckled starlings had discovered Grampa's Bourbon Balls as well.  This not only affected how they flew, but how they shat as well.  Regular starling shit is bad enough, but drunken starling shit eats right through car wax and leaves a discoloration that cannot be rubbed out.  My garbage can was filling up with dead squirrels, and my tan colored car looked like a leopard.  My brilliant plan to thin the neighborhood rodent population had not been a total success.  I filled the squirrel feeder with peanuts; at least they preferred peanuts to birdseed.

          Life went on into the dead of winter; the resident rodent population thinned out.  There were no sightings around our own house, although rumor had it that the neighbor across the street insisted on storing her big dog food sack on the back porch, where the resident rat population celebrated her generosity.  I thought no more about it, as that was all the way across the street.  My own concerns were more local than that.

          My daughter, the princess, had discovered The Mall.  Her shoes had to come from Nordstrom's, her jeans had to come from Abercrombie & Fitch, and her shirts, well, American Eagle was the only store that really understood sixth grade girls at all.   And these were only the exterior, the superficial. There was a far more crucial consideration: hair.  My daughter has beautiful, thick, luxurious, honey-colored hair with a slight natural curl; I'm certain many women would sell their souls for such a blessing.  But for my daughter, this was somehow not right.  Her hair would have to be made lighter, or streaked, shorter, or longer, or more wavy, or straighter.  There was apparently an entire industry creating various bathroom tools that are absolutely necessary for girls to survive sixth grade.  The cost of this essential equipment exceeded my daughter's weekly allowance by approximately fifteen hundred percent.  I was a hopeless, middle aged cretin for even bringing up this alarming statistic.  The word budget might as well have had the same meaning as rastafarian in our household, for all the impact it had.

          I would mention the possibility of choosing one hair style and sticking with it, and be met with two pairs of rolling eyes; apparently, the women of the household shared some of the grooming appliances I didn't even understand.  They would sigh and shake their heads as though the term natural beauty was the cruelest of oxymorons, and I would have to leave the room in disgrace.  I would exit into the back yard and do breathing exercises on the brick patio.

          One day, after an intense discussion about whether food was more important than hair appliances (apparently this is controversial), I was in the back yard when I saw the largest rat I have ever seen waddle past the side of the house and disappear under the pile of debris behind the forsythia bush.  Apparently, the slabs of old cement and rotting boards concealed several cavities suitable for dwelling in by the mother of all giant rats.

          I had to get another look at this big sucker, so I placed a pie tin full of Skippy's Peanut Butter out under the forsythia.  I watched the pie tin for several hours.  Just after dusk, I saw movement in the shadows and shined a flashlight at the forsythia.  I had mixed emotions about what I saw; it wasn't a giant rat at all; it was a possum.

          Possums are not native to the Northwest , but were brought here as some kind of pet or zoo exhibit, escaped into the wild, and have been prolific about reproducing.  Here in the inner city, they have no worthy natural enemies, only the occasional Beagle or Irish Setter to deal with.  Consequently, there have been an increasing number of possum sightings lately, especially in our immediate neighborhood.  Most likely, they live behind my forsythia bush.

          In the Southeastern United States where possums are indigenous, there is a sizable population of lynx, a wild cat the size of a rottweiler.  I thought about trading Tiger in on a lynx, but the others in the household had fallen in love with our hunting impaired cat.  Another practical idea also helped to change my mind.  I could toss the dead squirrels onto the compost pile behind the forsythia, and overnight the carcasses disappeared.  This was also true with old chicken carcasses, meat loaf, and moldy bread.  My wife's eggplant lasagna was untouched, however, proving that possums are not without a gourmet bottom line.  But I was saving quite a bit of space in the garbage can for real garbage: styrofoam packing, old shoes, broken hair appliances.

          In the early spring, as the forsythia began its yellow bloom, I noticed there were now approximately ten possums living in the compost pile.  Simple math indicated that without any natural enemies to keep them in check, by next year there would be at least a hundred of them.  It was an unpleasant reality that I would have to become their designated natural enemy.

          I could have used rat poison.  Looking back on it, I probably should have, but I thought they might smell bad as  they decomposed.  Anyway, I thought I had come up with a better plan.  I gathered together all of my old and highly illegal fireworks, unraveled them, and poured their contents into a large pan.  I ended up with more than a quart of high-grade gunpowder, which I rolled tightly into a newspaper tube, then stuffed into a section of neoprene water pipe.  I drilled a hole through a cap, and sealed off both ends.  With jet-X fuse sticking out my drill hole, I had created the biggest pipe bomb I'd ever seen.  I buried it into the compost pile length-wise, tamping the dirt down all around it.

          I waited until after dark to light the fuse.  Ten seconds later, there was no possum problem.  There was no compost pile.  There was not much left of the forsythia bush either.  All the neighbors came rushing out of their houses, but no one could tell where the blast had come from.  Of course, some civic minded zealot had to go and call the police, who would not take I don't know for an answer.  The site of the blast was located in my back yard, and I had to fess up.  It cost my five hundred dollars in fines, and I became the least favorite neighbor on our block.  I was already known as the eccentric writer who got the squirrels drunk, and was now known as the Possum Bomber as well.  We lost our Block House sign because of that.  Our house was not a safe place for children to run to in an emergency situation.  It's because we had possums, I tell people who still ask.

          It was at least a year before the neighbors would talk civilly with any member of our family.  But our daughter enrolled in babysitting classes, and became an expert at things like baby-bottle warming, changing diapers, and infant CPR.  It was she that finally broke the ice by taking care of the neighbor's kids.  Apparently, families with tiny children get desperate enough for an outing that they'll hire the offspring of an old, retired, squirrel intoxicating, possum bombing eccentric.  Soon we were all talking to one another like old friends, or actual neighbors, and my daughter had enough money to buy computer games and CD's by the handful.  Apparently, practical things such as new shoes and hair appliances were still my responsibility.

          At a neighborhood block party, I learned that our next door neighbor was building a koi pond.  I was supportive and enthusiastic until I remembered that koi are just big fat slow goldfish.  I thought about warning him about attracting preditors, but I was already known as a man who had obsessions about local wildlife, so I just smiled and nodded.

          When the Koi pond was finished and stocked with Koi, the expensive little fish lasted exactly one night.  The next day, the only crime-scene evidence my neighbor found were little bits and pieces of Kale leaves around his pond.  Apparently, the wild Koi robbers had desired a salad to go with their fish dinner, and so had dug under our mutual fence and pillaged my wife's garden.  The fact that the kale leaves had been drug back to my neighbor's pond told me, the neighborhood wildlife expert, which species had done the dirty deed.  Only one animal likes to dip its food into water before eating it.  My neighbor had attracted a family of raccoons.  That would have been fine, had the varmints decided to live in his yard, but no.  They had scratched a hole through the cedar fence and taken up residence in my yard, back behind the Forcythia stump, where a new compost pile had begun.

          My neighbor, slow to accept the situation, kept stocking his pond with Koi.  My new tresspassors got cocksure, bold, and came out of hiding in broad daylight.  These were not the shy nocturnal creatures the possums had been.  When I saw them at the neighbor's pond, I called my neighbor; we both went into our back yards armed with weapons.  I had a shovel; my neighbor had a lawn rake.  It should be stated here that raccoons are not the least bit afraid of yard tools, and the word Shoo! does not translate well into Raccoon.  When I swung my shovel at him and said Shoo! the largest of the raccoons stood up on his hind legs, bared his teeth, and charged me.  I could see his little fangs grinding, and pieces of fish flying off them as he nipped at the end of my shovel.  I swung the shovel again, and he dodged it like a kung fu master, grabbing the base of the handle and snapping it off with one grinding bite.  I had had enough of raccoon fighting; they could have the compost pile.  The whole back yard too, if they wanted it. I ran back into the house and bolted the door.

          The next day, my neighbor brought home a big, mean looking German Shepard with a scar across his face.  We took out the section of fence the raccoons had ruined and gave Old Buck the run of both backyards.  In a couple of weeks, there were no raccoons anywhere to be seen, but Old Buck had taken a liking for cats.  After a few complaints from adjacent property owners, Old Buck went back to the Pound.

          With conscientious planning and logistical support from my next door neighbor who was now beginning to share my reputation as an eccentric, we had freed our household from mice, rats, squirrels, possums, and the occasional raccoon.  I thought I was home free.   My only problems were relating to the more human of household occupants.

          My wife had taken to hunting down garage sales, and the lawn was filling up with ceramic deer, elves, and plaster of Paris Buddhas.  K-mart would have fired her for bad taste in decoration.  She also had a penchant for glass vases, ceramic pots, and wicker baskets, which now lined the walls of most living spaces, including the already narrow hallways.  I complained that our house was beginning to develop pathways through her collections, but was always met with the unassailable retort, "But where else are we going to put them?"  Apparently, to stop buying these things was out of the question.  Our daughter had taken to dressing up like Christina Aguilera, only with several more pierced body parts.  Her hair looked as though the local school bully had dipped it in an inkwell filled with red ink.  She began walking home from eighth grade accompanied by boys wearing leather jackets with chains hanging down in big loops.  Our only conversations were usually about how urgently she needed an X-Box or a cell phone.  Apparently, all her friends already had these essential items, and I was the only cheapskate at her middle school.  The word Budget still meant Rastafarian in TeenSpeak.  I can barely relate to either of the women in the house, and spent more and more time in the back yard doing breathing exercises.

          I was out on the patio one warm spring day doing a Tai Chi form when I noticed movement behind the Forcythia, which had grown back with amazing resilience.  Even though I couldn't see what was moving very well because of all the bright yellow blossoms, I could see that whatever it was, it was very large.  I was curious, though.  When I couldn't see any more movement, I went in and raided the fridge, bringing with me a variety of leftovers to lure whatever it was out of hiding.  I placed my cache over in the shade of the forsythia, then sat as far across the yard as I could get from it.

          I waited more than an hour, but it was pleasant back there on the patio, smoking my pipe and dreaming of younger days.  I was having a blissful reverie about a girl I'd known back in my college days when a huge form came out from behind the forsythia bush.  It was black-haired, and had tan colored snout like a bear, large yellow fangs, and incredibly long, brown claws.  It made a snuffing and grunting sound like a bear, too, but was smaller than an actual bear.  It was astonishing that such a creature would be rutting around so deep inside the city, but there it was, like a miracle, an urban legend, guzzling up my wife's eggplant lasagna.  There was a possum tail stuck to its butt.  Just the tail, no possum attached.  I liked him much better when I saw that.  The creature sat on the possum tail, exhaled noisily, and belched; I could smell old lasagna clear across the yard.  

          I had no idea what it was.  Maybe it was some huge cousin to the marmot or badger, or even a wolverine, although these were quite rare in East Portland.  It could have been an exotic foreign refugee escaped from the zoo, or some wandering garbage pit scavenger, or a lost wilderness beast, but now he was undoubtedly just a scared and exhausted fugitive, starving for a little understanding and a bite to eat.  With water from my neighbor's Koi pond, an occasional possum, and a few leftovers, he had found sanctuary at last.  We all search for a sanctuary of some kind; I could relate to his desperation.  And my varmint problem, at least with smaller versions, would be over as long as this great beast remained.  Damned if he didn't seem to like eggplant lasagna, too.  We could get along, this lone creature and I.

           I'll call him Wally, and see if I can teach him to eat out of my hand.  I'll feed him all the things I now stuff into the wet garbage bin.  I'll teach him to lay low when the neighbors inspect their mysteriously disappearing Koi.  We can have lovely, quiet conversations in the back yard, under the shade of the apple tree.  We'll smoke my pipe and discuss the women in my life, about whom I understand nothing.  And if anyone should ask, Do you have a garbage disposal?  I'll answer, Why yes... 

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