Apocalypse Mound

About six months ago we moved back to the family farm. This was the result of a seller's market, skyrocketing bills, and the desire to be closer to our friends with children. So, here we are, about 3 miles from the house I grew up in - in a place I said I'd never live again.

See, O'Brien isn't a particularly bad place - in fact, it is surrounded by famous springs that cave divers from around the world flock to in order to get fantastically stoned and huff nitrous and stuff. And dive some. It's quiet here and the meth labs are generally well-hidden. To top it off, every backyard is stocked with a veritable menagerie of local wildlife. We have fox squirrels, redheaded woodpeckers, skunks, bats, hawks, and my wife saw a bobcat out our kitchen window a couple of months ago. Hell, my friend's wife gets chased by large lizards due to their proximity to the river - this is funny to everybody but her. Not to mention more common and plentiful creatures - I was just giving you the high points. (I watched a lot of Marty Stouffer's Wild America when I was a kid - we only had three channels, y'know.) All of these beasts are fine with me. I've got no beef with them.

I have a real problem with pocket gophers.

Around here they call them salamanders, which always makes me think of lizards for some reason. Oh, right - because salamanders are fucking lizards, or amphibians or something. One of the many things that salamanders are not is a fuzzy rat-like behemoth with giant incisors, threatening claws, and great big pocket cheeks so they can carry all manner of shit for their pocket gopher wives. (That's a pretty rad description - makes it seem like they burrow up from the center of the earth to feed on Asians and test meddle with Godzilla.) For the record, I'm pretty sure that pocket gophers are called salamanders (even though they are obviously not amphibians) to eliminate confusion with the gopher tortoise, which apparently has a corner on the "gopher" tag and is a protected species. All this does for somebody who refuses to bow to rural parlance is create even more confusion - I swear one of my neighbors was about to call a game warden when I told her about my ongoing battle with gophers.

Anyway, we've moved back here and have been trying to put together a yard, since our property was previously a briar and cherry tree (not the good kind) buffer between my grandma's house and 80 acres of open field. I got on the tractor (not the one in my pic - a BIGGER one) and ran around the yard with a harrow and drag, reducing all vegetation to dust and then I proceeded to plant grass, which is much friendlier to small children. The pocket gophers did not like this one bit. Mounds began springing up all around the yard as they re-dug their old tunnels and, seeing that they were already going through soooo much trouble (and to stop the incessant nagging of their vermin wives), they actually expanded their territory.

I wasn't sure what to do. Everybody I spoke to about the problem suggested something different, from the common (traps and poison) to the slightly insane (Juicy Fruit bubble gum and a hose from the lawnmower exhaust stuffed into a tunnel.) I have a problem with anything that causes undue pain and anguish to animals. I mean, it's one thing to snap a chicken's neck, but it is an entirely different thing to feed said chicken chewing gum and watch it fill up with shit like a feathered colostomy bag until it falls dead.

Then came the breakthrough. One evening, my wife and I were enjoying a smoke out front and she spotted movement in the yard. A gopher was making a new mound just to thwart me. As it pushed dirt out of its tunnel, it poked its little head up out of the hole over and over - like the game at Chuck E. Cheese. Since I don't own a cartoonishly large mallet, I turned to the gift my dad gave me when I was 15 as a rite of passage into manhood: a 12-gauge shotgun. My shotgun hasn't gotten a lot of use through the years, but it has always been in the closet, ready to go. (Yes, concerned parents, it has a trigger lock.) I ran inside and loaded up with the closest available ammo - buckshot.

Holy shit, this gopher had no chance. There was enough carcass left to determine that it was, in fact, a mammal. Triumph and victory - horns sounded as I paraded my quarry around the borders of my kingdom. Then I got out of the road.

I have since repeated the feat three times. Sparing most gory details, I once launched the head and forelegs of a furry foe in a parabolic arc some 15 yards from the point of separation. And it pleased me. Those few battles won, the war is far from over. New mounds have sprung up on the north side of the homestead and I won't be satisfied until I hang the last gopher pelt to dry.

I will have a yard free of burrowing vermin if it takes all the buckshot in my closet.