Where The Wild Things Are (Apparently Wherever We Live)
One of the few benefits of living in a condo on a busy street is the small yard. Our new home was chosen carefully to have a yard just big enough for three chihuahuas, but not so big that it could support, say, a herd of wild turkeys, a family of deer, and a really retarded rabbit.
I figured that at least here, we were urban enough to be free of the ticks and wildlife-induced diarrhea that plagued us in Wayland, but before a week had passed in the new house, we had spotted suspicious pellets on our deck.
The pellets looked a lot like the deer/rabbit poop we’d seen in our Wayland yard, and then when I saw flies congregating on it, I knew for sure that it was one of my worst fears: Poop of Indeterminate Origin.
The Poop of Indeterminate Origin soon became the Poop of Determinate Origin when Chris spotted the lone animal in our yard that didn’t require us to regularly feed it: a squirrel.
For reasons known only to himself, Christopher has christened this squirrel, “Fat Tony.”
Fat Tony nimbly jumps from one fence post to another, occasionally pausing to chitter mockingly at the dogs below. This never fails to infuriate Mina, who races along our chicken wire fence, barking madly and leaping in the air. Stanley is usually right behind her, although there was one time when he actually caught up with Fat Tony. I hadn’t seen this momentous event for myself, so Chris told me about it later.
“And then what happened?” I gasped, envisioning a situation similar to the Great Rabbit Massacre of 2007.
Chris shrugged. “Stanley didn’t know what to do with him once he’d caught him.” And so Fat Tony easily escaped, to return another day to taunt the dogs.
Paco has never had to depend on himself to find food, so although he allows himself to be peer-pressured into joining the barking, he soon stops and wanders aimlessly away. Paco knows only that these animals in our yard are apparently supposed to be fun to chase and/or eat, according to the other dogs, but he has never quite seen the point of all that running unless there was someone waiting at the end of it all to cook, slice, and serve the animal to him.
On days that Fat Tony doesn’t deign to show up himself, he will often leave his calling card on our deck. Instead of a large clump of tiny pellets of poo like the deer and rabbits left for us, Fat Tony appears to have a slower constitution. In other words, one or two pellets will appear at one side of the deck, and another pellet will show up ten feet away and around the corner at the other end of the deck. Cunningly, Fat Tony will secrete his poo pellet in the crack between two deck boards so that we humans cannot spot it, but Miss Mina Beana can.
It took me and Chris two weeks to start filling our refrigerator, but only a few days for Mina to find her own local, organic, sustainably farmed food source. We have Whole Foods; she has squirrel poop.
Posted by: ssjane | July 26, 2008 | 8:37 pm
Posted in: Dogs | This Life