Okay, that’s not strictly true. I come from a long line of Austro-Hungarian cattle rustlers and one furrier, my grandfather, who apparently became a furrier only because Minneapolis got too hot to hold him, apparently because the mob was pissed at him, apparently because he was an extraordinarily skilled pool shark.

While he waited for everything to cool down, he went around the Wisconsin woods buying raw pelts from trappers. The only story I know from this era is that he ate lots of different fur-bearing animals, and could attest to the aptness of the name ‘muskrat.’

When things calmed down, he returned to Minneapolis and became a retail furrier, but he got out of the business in 1948, just as people started to think twice about wearing wild furs. He then started a perfectly respectable laundry, about which I know many more stories, including a very good one about a laundry truck and a parade. If you run into my father, ask him about it.

Now that I think about it, that’s not much of a pedigree, but it gets me closer to having fur in my blood than Kevin will ever be – there may never have been an Irish furrier in the history of the world. (And, although Kevin doesn’t have forbearers who got in trouble with the Mafia, he does have a few who knew their way around explosives.)

Still, it was Kevin who tackled the rabbit hide.

When I skinned the rabbit, I had a hazy idea that we’d do something with the hide, but I also had a hazy idea that tanning a hide was a pretty serious enterprise, involving tedious scraping, dangerous chemicals, and climate control. All that for one little rabbit hide with two rather prominent holes through it seemed a bit disproportionate.

But then Kevin talked to his friend Dave. Dave grew up in Georgia, shooting and eating small animals. He was processing squirrel hides while he was still in short pants. Dave told Kevin he could simply salt the hide to cure it.

Almost cured?

What, just pour salt on it and wait?

Basically, yes. Pin it to a board, scrape off any flesh (no avoiding that step), and cover it generously with salt. Let it sit a few days, take the old salt off and add new salt. Let it sit a couple weeks.

It’s now been sitting for a couple of weeks. It’s got some bloodstains, but otherwise looks surprisingly like a hide well on its way to being cured. We’re going to give it a little more time, and put some extra salt on the raw-looking spots, and then we’ll probably put it in the freezer to kill any hangers-on of the insect variety. And then … well … is that really all there is to it?

If this works, it’s a powerful incentive. Bag a rabbit, and in one fell swoop you eliminate a thieving varmint, procure an excellent meal, and get yourself a nice soft fur.

I want a first-hand hat.

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Unfortunately, the only thing we managed to trap before raccoon season ended was one hapless opossum, which we let go. But Kevin’s been practicing with the air gun.

Last night, just at dusk, he went out to lock up the chickens and spotted a rabbit coming around the side of the garden. I happened to be watching out the kitchen window, and he pointed to the rabbit and motioned for me to get the gun. I brought it out.  The rabbits regularly maraud through our garden, and are single-pawedly responsible for the complete failure of our bean crop, so I’m in favor of reducing their population.

The rabbit went behind the barrel we use as a firebox for the smokehouse, and then peeked its head and forequarters out so Kevin had a clear shot, under ten yards.

He took it, and the rabbit went bounding away into the leaves. “I was pretty sure I hit it,” Kevin said, and we went off in search.

We looked under the rhododendrons, we looked in the turkey pen, we looked anywhere we thought it might be, but we couldn’t find it. We figured he missed it after all, which meant that the “thunk” he thought he heard was probably the pellet hitting our truck tire, which had been inches from the rabbit.

Great.

This morning, though, in the full light of day, Kevin found the rabbit. It was under the rhododendron where we’d looked, but a rabbit in leaves at dusk is easy to miss.

He pulled it out, handed it to me, and got in the car to go to his office. He couldn’t miss the market opening, so I was on my own with the rabbit. I wasn’t yet fully caffeinated, so I poured a second cup of coffee and sat down to watch a few YouTube videos on skinning and gutting a rabbit. It didn’t look that hard.

I finished my coffee, donned latex gloves (in case of tularemia), and got some twine, a scissor, and my trusty poultry shears. I hung the rabbit on a tree by tying twine to a hind foot, running the twine around the trunk, and tying it to the other foot. A convenient branch ensured that the rabbit wouldn’t slip down.

I used the poultry shears to lop off the head and front feet, and made a cut around each hind ankle to release the pelt. Then one cut, ankle to ankle, and the pelt came off like a glove. So far, so good.

I’d been wondering whether it was safe to eat an animal that sat out all night but, because the temperature was well below freezing, I figured it would be fine as long as the rabbit hadn’t been gut-shot. When I pulled off the fur, I saw that the pellet had gone right through the chest and vital organs – the intestines were intact. Seeing the wound, I was amazed the rabbit could have moved at all after the shot; it must have died very quickly.

In the video, the gutting looked pretty straightforward, An incision down the underside, and everything comes out easily. But I don’t think I paid enough attention, because I struggled with the pelvis. Birds have a different skeletal system, and when you open the hind end you can pull the innards straight through. But mammals have a pesky pelvic bone between the chest cavity and anus, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to get everything out in one piece. I botched it a bit.

This was the first mammal Kevin ever shot, and the first mammal I ever processed, but it didn’t feel momentous. Maybe it was because it was a rabbit. Had it been a grizzly bear, or even a deer, and had artillery heavier than an air rifle been involved, I think it would have felt like a bigger deal.

But I also think we’re getting used to the idea that meat necessarily comes from actual, genuine animals. In order to transform them from animals into meat, you have to kill them. There’s no way around it. The only thing at all remarkable here is that I have gotten to the point that, when Kevin hands me a dead rabbit and drives off to work, I tell him to have a nice day dear, and have it skinned and cleaned before breakfast.

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There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s German shepherd.

But what the hell is this?

As much as I'd like to have varmints who leave money, the bill is for scale.

It’s a series of tracks, in one line, evenly spaced a little less than a foot apart. Each print is a grouping of four holes, each of which seems like it’s made with a stick, rather than a paw pad.  My best guess is a small rabbit on stilts. You got a better idea?

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Okay, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, but I’m going to limit this discussion to one thing in particular, and it isn’t quantum mechanics. It’s why people seem to want to believe that some traits are hard-coded in our genes, while others aren’t.

Usually, it’s the crappy stuff that’s genetic. Science journalists are jumping through hoops to show that obesity is hard-wired. Ditto alcoholism. Criminality, even. But nobody seems to want to believe that your genes are your destiny when comes to the good stuff, like intelligence, musicality and athleticism.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book, Outliers, on the subject. I haven’t read the book (having given up on Malcolm Gladwell since the last chapter of Blink, in which he undermined the entire theory of the book), but Kevin has, and one of the advantages of being the proverbial One Flesh is that I get to talk about books he has read as though I read them myself. They hypothesis of this particular book is that success is, to a large degree, determined by A) luck and B) practicing for 10,000 hours, and not so much to innate gifts.

You’ll get no argument from me about luck, but I’ve got a problem with the 10,000 hours theory. It seems to me that people with no gift give up on whatever skill they’re trying to build at about Hour Seven. The degree to which one perseveres is likely to be directly proportional to the size of one’s gift. I’m something of an expert on this, having not persevered at many, many things. Clarinet. Photography. Fiction. Stonemasonry. Tennis. One cheek swab would tell you all you need to know about why I’ve given them all up: I suck at them.

Intelligence is a particularly sticky wicket. While everyone concedes that genes are involved, there’s a general unwillingness to believe that we none of us can get any smarter.

This is compounded by the difficulty in measuring an innate thinking ability. It’s hard to imagine a test that will yield identical scores from identical twins, one of whom went to Harvard and one of whom was raised by wolves. And so parenting web sites are crammed with advice on how to raise your child’s IQ – read the right books, go to the right school, take practice tests.

And you can raise your IQ score. You just can’t get any smarter. I’m absolutely convinced that we are born with every iota of intelligence we’re ever going to have. It’s just that we can’t prove it because we don’t have a good enough test.

Which brings me to my opossum.

Those of you who stop by often know that raccoons have been terrorizing our chickens, gnawing away at the coop in the middle of the night. You also know that we’ve decided to trap, kill, and eat the culprit(s).

We borrowed a trap from our friend Les, who happened to have a raccoon-sized Havahart in his shed.

If you’ve never had to trap a wild animal, you may be unfamiliar with the Havahart trap. It’s a cage with a door that closes when the animal steps on a plate in the cage. It’s called “Havahart” because the assumption is that you’re going to take the trapped animal to a safe haven and let it go. I’m sure the marketers who named the trap fully understood that some of their customers would shoot and eat the animals they trap, but “Havablast” didn’t go over well with focus groups.

We baited the trap with sardines and put it out next to our compost pile, the site of many a midnight raccoon rave. For the first couple of nights, we got nothing, and then we got a something. A furry something. But it wasn’t a raccoon. It was an opossum.

We had nothing against the opossum, whose worst offense was stealing some turkey feed, so Kevin opened the cage to let it go. After a few moments, it realized it was free, and lumbered off into the woods, dazed and confused but unharmed.

Kevin and I speculated that we caught an opossum instead of a raccoon because raccoons are smarter than opossums, and know better than to eat sardines put out in a metal box. But, when I tried to ascertain opossums’ general intelligence level, I found that they are supposed to be quite smart.

Go free!

According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, “Results from some learning and discrimination tests rank opossums above dogs and more or less on a par with pigs in intelligence.”

If we can’t even measure human intelligence, how on earth can we measure and compare such disparate animals? I know we can arrive at some rough generalizations – rats are smart, turkeys are dumb – but to conclude that an opossum is smarter than a dog and “more or less” as smart as a pig seems unrealistically granular.

It also sounds like the beginning of a joke. A pig, a dog, and an opossum walk into a bar. Bartender says, “If the train leaves Chicago at 9:00 AM traveling at 60 miles per hour …”

Maybe the people who determine the animal intelligence hierarchy take into account how long the species has survived. Opossums have been around some 70 million years, so they must be doing something right. But, by that logic, horseshoe crabs should rule the world.

Unfortunately, the experts at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t compare opossum and raccoon intelligence, so I can neither confirm nor disprove my theory that raccoons are way smarter. I mean, come on. They’re always the ones who figure out how to open the garbage cans. They’re the ones who come into your house to eat the cat food. They’re the ones who have a long-term plan to break into the chicken coop.

But maybe it’s because they have 10,000 hours of practice. I think we should bait the trap with Kevin’s copy of Outliers.

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We don’t have a trap, but our friend Les does. And the only reason it isn’t sitting outside our chicken coop, baited with raw meat, is that we’re not quite sure how to dispatch the raccoon once we get one.

Your days are numbered

My idea of a humane kill is one shot through the heart, but we can’t discharge firearms on our property. Taking a trapped raccoon somewhere else to kill it would just prolong the poor thing’s agony. Besides, I don’t think shooting an animal in a cage is particularly safe, or particularly easy.

There is drowning, which would be easy, but I suspect there’s a lot of suffering involved. At the moment, we’re leaning toward carbon monoxide – put the trap in a box and attach the tailpipe of our catalytic-converter-free Land Rover. In the movies, people who die this way just drift off to sleep.

Before we do anything, though, I’m soliciting input. Many of you have much more experience killing things than I do, and I’d like to hear your ideas.

Anyone?

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Until now, we’ve had a pretty good record protecting chickens from predators. This year, we lost our runt chick, Rocky, to a hawk, but that’s our only casualty. It’s possible that Baldie, a full-grown buff Orpington, died of post-traumatic stress disorder about six weeks after she had the feathers off her back ripped off by what might have been the same hawk, but we don’t count that as a predator death.

We’d like to keep our streak alive, so we kept an eye on the gnawed spot. It didn’t seem to be getting any bigger, so we didn’t worry much.

Then, last week, we walked around to the backside of the coop. There, one of the battens had been almost eaten through. A two-foot section had been scratched and bit to splinters, and the nails were sticking out.

This couldn’t be allowed to continue. I decided that whatever was trying to get at my chickens was going to be in for a rude shock. I took one of the super-duper fiery habaneros from our hydroponic system, and put it in the Vita-Mix with some water and cornstarch to make a slurry. Birds don’t taste capsaicin, so the peppers wouldn’t bother the chickens, but most mammals (I think) are pepper-sensitive, so I figured I’d be able to deter whatever it was that trying to get in.

I painted the exposed wood with my slurry, set up the VarmintCam, and waited.

The first couple of nights, I got nothing. And then, when I checked it this morning, the drama unfolded:

At 9:12 PM, a rat comes and cases the joint. He walks around, and maybe takes a tentative gnaw at the wood.

At 9:51, he gets a real taste of the habanero. Or at least that’s what I picture.  Doesn’t that look like a rat trying to get the taste of pepper out of his mouth?

At 6:26 AM, he’s back. Or maybe it’s his friend. Either way, he’s not what I’m looking for.  A reatively small rodent couldn’t eat away a 1×2 piece of wood three feet off the ground unless he invited seven of his friends and they stood on each other’s shoulders.  While I wouldn’t put this past a rat (I don’t put anything past rats), I didn’t see any evidence of it.  

The next morning, at 3:36 AM, I got a more probable culprit.

Two minutes later, he’s back with his friend. These could be the same two who were robbing our turkey feeder a few weeks back.

But then, two minutes after that! Could this be a picture of a raccoon in pain?

The only other raccoon appearance that night came at 4:51 AM, and if ever I’ve seen trepidation written across a a furry face, this is it.  He never came any closer.

I think maybe, just maybe, he’s reconsidering.  Or maybe not.  In any case, it’s reassuring that they seem to be after the chicken feed, which is directly inside the gnawed batten, and not the chickens themselves.

I know better than to chalk up a victory in the raccoon wars; the best I can say is that I didn’t suffer a shattering defeat. But they’ll be back. Raccoons always come back.

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To top it all off, they’re letting their geriatric cat live out her days alternating between sleeping on the bed and whining for the only kind of food she’s willing to eat – which isn’t chipmunk.

It makes for a chipmunk free-for-all, and we are positively overrun. Luckily, unlike some other varmints around here, they’re not a threat to the livestock, they don’t compromise the foundation of the house, and they’re not even very noisy, most of the time. The worst you can say about them is that they’re a nuisance.

At least, that’s what I thought until I did the math.

We have six turkeys. At this point in their lives, they’re probably eating between two and three pounds of food per week. Which means that a fifty pound bag of feed should last two and a half weeks, minimum. When the last bag was empty in seven days, I upgraded chipmunks from “nuisance” to “menace.” Stripey little bastards.

I marveled at how much food a band of tiny rodents could make off with. I’d seen them going back and forth to the feeder, but it never occurred to me that the amount of food they could take was significant. Is it a zillion little chipmunks, taking a few pellets at a time, or one Chipzilla, making off with a pound at a go?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to chipmunk-proof a turkey feeder. If the turkeys can get the feed, so can the chipmunks. I had no immediate idea how to solve the problem, but I thought I’d get a better handle on it by putting out the Varmintcam to see just what was going on.

This morning, I went through the photos.

Picture after picture of chipmunks cavorting in the turkey feeder. They go in the little tray, they go up over the top, they pick up what falls on the ground.

They’re not even bothered by the presence of a turkey. While I see the appeal of cross-species harmony, I want my chipmunks to be afraid of my turkeys. Very afraid.

Bold as brass, all day long, chipmunk after chipmunk. Or maybe it was the same two, over and over. Don’t know, don’t care. Stripey little bastards.

When night fell, there was a brief lull in the activity. I scrolled through a few photos with no chipmunks at all. And then, at 8:28 PM, I hit on the surprise.

A raccoon. How the hell a raccoon got in the turkey pen, I don’t know, but there he was. Or she. Don’t know, don’t care. Ring-tailed little bastards.

But wait, there’s more! Two minutes later, the raccoon brought a friend. Two raccoons!

I scrolled through pictures. If anyone needs a photograph of two raccoons eating from a turkey feeder, I have 479 of them. Literally. The two raccoons partied all night long at our turkey feeder.

Okay, maybe not quite all night long. At around 2:00 AM they took a break. To let the opossums have a turn.

I’m not quite sure how they’re getting in, but I have my suspicions. There’s a spot where they can go over the fence but under the netting, and that may be what they’re doing. We’ll close that off, but we’ll take the added precaution of taking the feed out at night and putting it back in the morning.

Fortunately, the turkeys are too big, and roost too high up, for a raccoon to tackle, but I don’t want varmints to get in the habit of breaking and entering. Next year, we’ll have poults in there again, and it’ll be important to keep predators out.

Paula, at Weeding for Godot, bears a very particular and vehement antipathy for raccoons, and I’m beginning to come around to her point of view. They make the chipmunks look positively harmless. Thieving little bastards.

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Surprising, eh?

We planted a lot of winter squash. We picked two varieties: Delicata, and a giant kind I don’t know the name of but what we call Sasquash. We chose Delicata because it is supposed to taste very good. We chose Sasquash because it is supposed to be absolutely enormous.

Too bad you can't eat the leaves

Our friend Christl gave us the Sasquash seeds from the ones she grew last year. Christl is not one to be seduced by the novelty of a thirty-pound squash; she thought last year’s were watery and bland, and opted not to replant this year.

We tasted her squash last year, and it was watery and bland. But a thirty-pound squash? You gotta have one. We planted four plants. Or maybe five. I left plenty of room between them, and planned to corral them toward the back of the garden, where there was lots of space, as they grew.

Words like “plenty” and “lots” are tellingly unspecific. What looked like oceans of space when the plants were three inches tall proved woefully insufficient for the real estate needs of the Sasquash. When I marveled at the sheer biomass of the plants, Kevin pointed out to me that, If you’re going to turn sunlight into thirty pounds of bland, watery squash, you need serious solar panels. Each squash plant put out tentacles as long as twenty feet, the length of which are studded with leaves that can measure two feet across. Serious, indeed.

The row of pepper plants at the front of the garden was the first casualty, as the tentacle I ran in front of them swallowed them up. Then came the collard greens next door (although one behemoth is holding its own in the large-leaf department). The eggplants are still holding their heads above water, but it’s touch and go.

A few weeks back, looking at my overgrown squash patch, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea.

Amazing, isn’t it, how every idea seems brilliant when you have it. It occurs to you, and you are blinded by the brightness that the light bulb over your head is putting out. You’re a genius! Only when you follow the idea down the garden path do you find its flaws, which, if your ideas are anything like mine, are many and varied.

Here was my idea: pole beans.

Pole beans! If I planted pole beans in the squash patch, the plants would quickly grow over the level of the squash leaves. The squash, meanwhile, would act as a mulch and prevent weeds from growing up around the beans.

No sooner said than done. Kevin set up two little teepees of eight-food poles, and I planted beans at the base. It was the beginning of August, a little late for beans, but I wanted to give it a try.

Note sprout in foreground (ignore camera data, which is wrong)

It was only a few days later that I had sprouts. Beautiful, sturdy little bean sprouts, growing right in the teepee. Everything was going according to plan.

A few days after that, I had little stumps of sprouts, with all the leaves bitten off.

I had my suspicions, but I broke out the Varmintcam to catch the culprit red-pawed.

Note absence of sprout in foreground

Over the course of our procure-your-own project, we have considered raising rabbits for meat. They’re easy to raise, I’ve been told, and they’re one of the most inexpensive and least labor-intensive ways to grow your own protein. I understand all the ideas in favor, but there’s something about the idea of killing cute furry bunnies on a regular basis that doesn’t appeal to me. But it’s looking a lot better since one of those self-same cute furry bunnies got into my garden and ate my pole bean sprouts. That kind of thing has a way of hardening you to the species.

It didn’t help that the same rabbit, or one of his close relations, got into the hoophouse and ate my beet sprouts.

Cute furry bunnies, my ass. Mangy, lop-eared varmints.

It was only after my neighbor Mike mentioned that beans and squash were two of the traditional Three Sisters (corn being the third) did I realize I wasn’t the first to have the idea of pairing them. Planting the vertical with the horizontal is an idea that goes back to the dawn of agriculture. Beans and squash are a time-honored partnership.

And they both go very well with rabbit.

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It’s not like it was a tiger or anything – it was just a raccoon – but still.

As I stumbled out of the bathroom, half asleep, I saw a small furry thing make a dash for the porch. My first thought, if you can call it that, was ‘cat.’ But it was the wrong shape, kind of hunched up in the middle. Raccoon.

A raccoon in the living room has a way of waking you up. “Hey!” I yelled at it. “It’s a CAT door!”

The raccoon made for it, and squeezed through.

By then, Kevin was out of bed. “What was it?” he asked.

I told him, and we went out on the porch. We saw the raccoon rejoin his two friends, and amble off into the woods. He didn’t even have the decency to run; that’s how unperturbed he was at being caught in our house.

We figured he was after the corn we keep on the porch for the chickens, which we’d left uncovered. We remedied that situation, and went back to bed.

It was only in the morning that I discovered that the kitchen floor was covered with paw prints and the cat food was gone.

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Well, it’s your lucky day.  

Caught in the act!

The possum came back, and brought a friend.

A rabbit, out way past its bedtime

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