‘Die, Country Mouse, Die!’
Rotting rodents, chainsaw envy, and 10 other discovered truths about rural life after six decades in the city
By Martin J. Smith
1. Porcupine quills are one of nature’s most devious creations, constructed in such a way that they penetrate deep into a curious city dog’s snout as if they’re buttered, but are difficult to remove because the surface of the business end is covered in microscopic, backward-facing scales. Pulling them out is like removing a barbed fishhook.
2. A curious city dog with a face full of quills will tolerate the forcible removal of about 15 from its snout before it gets gun-shy about anyone approaching with a set of pliers. Removing the remaining few will involve a local veterinarian, anesthesia, and at least $120.
3. Wild marmots are better organized than many large corporations and at least one major political party. During your regular dog walks along a river road, marmot sentries on unreachable high lookout posts will announce your approach with spirited chirps intended to alert the next marmot unit down the road. They’re watching you, and know exactly what you’re doing, all the time, like a version of the NSA staffed by impossibly cute beaver impersonators.
4. In vast areas of the country, men are judged not by the content of their character, but by the horsepower of their tools. You may feel pretty good about your mastery of the manly arts as you chainsaw a fallen tree into a pile of firewood, but that feeling stops when a passing rancher assesses the long electrical cord trailing from your saw and comments, “Yeah, that’s a ladies’ chainsaw.”
5. There’s vast entertainment value in watching two Canada geese raise their five goslings over the course of a summer. You’ll admire their vigilance as, day after day, night after night, they take turns guarding their tiny brood from foxes, coyotes, and other predators. You’ll marvel as the fledging birds practice clumsy takeoffs from the surface of the pond. You’ll thrill the first time you see them all airborne, and laugh as you watch them execute a water landing in which two of the little ones overshoot the designated landing area and tumble into the brush at pond’s edge, then stand up quickly as if to say, “Everything’s cool.” You’ll see them less and less as their migratory test flights take them higher and farther from the pond, until finally you hear their honking no more. This will make you both happy and sad.
6. The osprey is the insufferable braggart of the bird world. Having dive-bombed into the pond to snag a trout, it will rise back into the air and fly at least one unnecessary victory lap around the pond with the hapless fish in its claws, showing it off.
7. When the weather turns cold, critters that normally live outside will decide that it’s better to live inside.
8. Any qualms one might have about killing those invading critters will disappear the day you find tiny caches of stolen dog kibble piled neatly beneath the cushions of your couch.
9. It doesn’t take long to develop strong opinions about the relative effectiveness of mousetraps. My advice: Of the two basic Victor brand models, spend a little extra coin for the one with “precision strike technology” and an excellent “speed of kill rating.”
10. If something crawls into your car, eats through the foil packet of the food rations in your emergency road kit, then dies before leaving the premises, it will choose to die in an area of the car that is utterly inaccessible, probably behind the dashboard, rendering the vehicle temporarily unusable.
11. Your initial reaction to this situation (“It’ll be fine. How bad can one little dead mouse smell?”) will evolve from “We can just drive the other car for now” to “I don’t care if it rains, but I’m leaving it outside with all the windows and doors open” to “Are you sure there aren’t capybaras around here?”
12. There’s simply no way a little Febreze will fix this.
For more information about Martin J. Smith, his novels and nonfiction books, or to sign up for his newsletter, visit www.martinjsmith.com. Diversion Books will publish his latest suspense thriller, “Combustion,” on Sept, 27, 2016, and a documentary film adaptation of his 2012 nonfiction book “The Wild Duck Chase,” called “The Million Dollar Duck,” will premiere on Animal Planet on Sept. 14.
