Okay, I should've written this about a month ago, but life just wasn't going to let me. It's probably lost some of its punch, but it's still kinda funny.
Some folks may remember the Tale of the Rat, in which I awoke in the middle of the night to the screeching wail of a rat stuck to a glue trap, and hid beneath my covers like a terrified toddler while James dragged it outside and beat it to death with a two-by-four. <shudder> I think I'd rather wake up to the sound of a fire truck parked in my bedroom.
Well, as it turns out, that guy was not the last of the rat colony attempting to infiltrate our home. In fact, it was only the first shot fired in a protracted battle.
The next wave of rats was much more brazen. At first, they would ambush us in the middle of the night, like guerilla warriors.
They would climb up to the countertops and attack the bread, tearing the bags to shreds. They would get into things in the pantry and chew holes through containers. They left their droppings in the bottom of cereal boxes. For a while, they were like the ninja - unseen, but their presence was known and felt.
Eventually, they were even willing to enter the kitchen when the lights were on, and many times late at night I would go in to investigate the noise to find them crawling around on our open pantry shelves, only to have them high-tail it out of there before I could do anything about it.
And so, a seige situation evolved. We were becoming very uncomfortable with going into the kitchen at night. The cats actually stopped going into that end of the house at all. It took on the character of a suspense scene in a slasher flick.
They had an amazing ability to leap high distances in a way that would give you just a little sliver of terror that they just might be able to leap up and bite into your neck or face like the monstrous bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Something had to be done.
Of course we had out glue traps, but the little bastards were undetured. I saw one actually jump over a trap that should've been impossible to avoid. According to James, another one actually got snared in a trap, and then subsequently freed himself.
In hindsight, that might have been the rat we came to call Ratsputin.
This new wave of rats were hardened veterans of battle.
Finally, we had Orkin come back in and the guy left more glue traps, and we all agreed that it would be okay to put some poison bait down in the basement where the kids and [worthless] cats would not eat it. We also had them set a couple of snap traps in places where they couldn't remove any toddler fingers.
And so, some time passed, and we waited to see if our Weapons of Rat Destruction would succeed.
I assume some rats ate the poison, then went off to their nest to die. I can't remember if we found any bodies.
Then finally there was the one rat who, frankly, has my respect.
You could tell that he probably died from loss of blood, by the enormous bloodspray that soaked the wall in our laundry room up to about two feet high. I wish I could've seen it; it must have been something straight out of Fist of the North Star. Who knew that rat blood was kept under so much pressure?
But what's really interesting is that, aside from all the blood everywhere, this little guy didn't have any obvious physical wounds. In fact, he didn't even die in the trap! Sure, the trap had been sprung, and the bait was gone, but he lay down to pass quietly about a foot or two away from it. And we couldn't find a mark on him.
So we began to wonder, what were the circumstances under which this strange rodent lived the last moments of his life?
Was he working with an accomplice, who actually sprung the trap and then slunk away to die someplace else? Did he consume the bait without setting off the trap, only to have it snap on him as he made his escape? Perhaps it only caught his leg, and he decided to gnaw it off like something out of Mad Max.
And then we started to wonder if maybe - just maybe - after seeing how he'd survived all these hazards, he'd actually consumed the poision as well.
Ratsputin survived glue, poision, and a brutal trap designed to break every bone in his body (if not cleave him in half), only to pass away peacefully on the floor, leaving more questions than answers. And so, in death, he has become the stuff of legend.
After that, no other rats came to call. If I were a rat, I don't think after seeing that I would've either.
Sometimes I wonder if there only ever was just Ratsputin, single handedly waging war and striking terror into our hearts from the darkness. Not likely - but certainly funny to think about, in a dark way.