Last year, there was a groundhog in our backyard.
He dug a tunnel under our wooden toolshed and so I filled up the one exit with dirty cat litter (they hate that, says the Internet), soil and gravel and put a big rock over it all.
Problem solved.
Just now, as I was doing the dishes, there he was, bold as Donald Trump, wandering across the lawn, munching on grass. I grabbed a hoe from the garage and ran after him like a maniac, screaming and yelling. I often go screaming and yelling across my backyard but I usually do it in the middle of the night and I’m not carrying a hoe.
He took off and ran behind the shed. I followed him and lo and behold, he had dug out the hole I had so carefully filled in and he moved the rock aside in almost biblical fashion.
I stood there yelling at him, then stopped for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe it. He stuck his head out – three feet from me – to see what all the fuss was about.
I screeched, he disappeared. A minute or two later, out popped his head again.
Having grown up on a farm, I come from a long line of groundhog fighters. On slow days in summer, not much else going on, I was sent out to the fields to employ various ways to encourage the little critters to move on because farm machinery wheels could fall into their holes and cause a lot of damage.
So I wandered the land, seeking them out and giving them the bum’s rush. My methods will go unspecified.
This morning, those old instincts kicked in. I grabbed the garden hose, pulled it across the lawn and stuck the end of it down the hole. Ran back to the house and turned it on full blast. When I got back, the hole was full of water, which I thought was a good sign.
Then I climbed my wooden fence to see if he would scurry over to the neighbours. Sure enough, he came hustling out from a hole on the other side of the shed, wet from top to bottom. I couldn’t believe he stayed underground long enough to almost drown.
I screamed at him some more and he took off, under my fence to the neighbour’s backyard and then under his fence to another neighbour’s and the safety of another shed under which I have been told he is living.
If nothing else, he got a good bath this morning. Maybe a good scare. I hope so. We let our poodle out there several times a day and at night for his goodnight pee. He isn’t much bigger than the hog. And I recently heard of a small dog getting badly messed up (hundreds in vet bills) by a cornered groundhog.
It’s interesting to watch the creature as he roams my yard, even in winter, but doggie comes first so he has to go. I hope, in me, he’s met his match but these guys have been around only a few hundred million years so maybe they’ve seen my like before.
As I write, he’s probably sitting under the neighbour’s shed thinking, “OK, how can I get rid of that guy? He’s really starting to bug me!”
©2014 Jim Hagarty
