I Hate You One And All, Damn Your Eyes!

Squirrels that is, not y'all. Damn furry treerats. Near as I can tell, the best thing about them is when they're fried or fixed with dumplings. I was put to work at an early age keeping them out of the bird feeders and the garden with my BB gun. Bastards would keep just out of range and sit and taunt me, we've been at odds ever since. As I got older my weaponry improved but the only thing that really changed was the range.

Moving to the city brought a lot of changes to our dispute but if anything it has intensified. The amount of firepower I was able to bring to bear was severely curtailed and the S.O.B.s seemed to know it. University of Louisville's campus was overrun with the varmints, there were even several albinos. Eventually I'd had enough of their bullshit (and bourbon) that I managed to catch one and take it back to my dorm but my girlfriend at the time made me set it loose.

Later on I got an apartment in Old Louisville, which is almost entirely old Victorian homes. Shortly after I moved in the landlord put a new roof on the place and it stopped leaking when it rained but a new sort of leak took started. It started with scratching sounds coming from the furnace (which was in my bedroom closet). My landlord looked at me like I was crazy when I told him I thought there was a squirrel in the furnace but come wintertime the thing wouldn't work right.

The landlord sent an HVAC guy out to investigate and he'd only been poking around for a minute or two before I head "Well, here's your squirrel" (he also found a couple mice and a furnace filter, that blower had quite the appetite). By this time the scratching sounds had spread to the ceiling (the apartment had drop ceilings) and it wasn't long before I started noticing holes gnawed in stuff and food going missing, mostly Reese's cups. Before long I caught the culprit in the act and sure enough it was a damned treerat. It seemed to think I meant it harm and quickly fled and I gave chase to make sure it was certain of that.

The bugger got away but I discovered the hole in the ceiling that it was using to get into the apartment. Figuring there's more than one way to skin a cat was probably applicable to treerats as well, I got some wire and rigged a snare over the hole. The next day I came home from work to find my kitchen covered in fragments of drop ceiling tile, the wire chewed in two, and the hole greatly enlarged.

As you can imagine, things only escalated from there. Eventually it got to where the refrigerator was the only place in the apartment I could keep food. I did everything I could think of to discourage their depredations but even BB guns, police batons, and throwing knives did little to deter them. I eventually got one with a stiletto (knife, not the shoe) but even that brought only a brief respite.

I've since moved out of that apartment and our feud has diminished somewhat to more of a 'cold' war but I don't think my animosity towards the hyperactive varmints will ever go away. Song below is Johnny Cash's version of 'Sam Hall' which is the tune that the title comes from.