Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  What if adults lived in a world of comparable imaginative richness? What if, instead of choosing desperately from among the half-dozen threadbare plots our popular culture sells, we asked a broader range of questions about our stories? “Do you know the one about the man who learned to love his wife?” “Will you tell about how the lady in the cubicle discovered that her work really mattered in the world?” “Do you remember the tale about the old man who played guitar for the very first time?” “Please spin the yarn of that father who, while splitting a bucked juniper stump just at dusk, suddenly remembered his daughters’ coyote story and so looked beyond himself and witnessed alpenglow igniting the snowy flanks of his home mountain.” Who knows what new questions we might ask, what new language we might ask them in, what new answers our stories might inspire? After all, no fine story unfolds without surprising plot twists, and no real story can know its own conclusion. Perhaps our lives may only be fully written once we relinquish narrative control, allowing the tale to tell the teller—once we renew our belief in a world in which a little girl reading the trail of a pronghorn can imagine the animal and, in that imagining, can summon a breathing ungulate on a dusty desert mountainside.

  Chapter 6

  6. The Wild within Our Walls

  “Honey, get the camera!” I’ve just peeled back the tarp covering a half-used pallet of quartzite flagstone to reveal the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. From between the slats of the empty part of the pallet pokes a furry little head with large, dark, shining eyes, a tiny, sniffing nose, and twitching whiskers. Its big, rounded ears are backlit in the early morning summer sun, and its bushy tail is partially visible through the slats just behind its body. Then a second curious little head appears, and a third, and a fourth! By now Eryn has arrived with Hannah and Caroline, and with each furry noggin that pops up the girls’ eyes open wider with surprise and joy.

  “They’re so cute!” Eryn exclaims, snapping away with her camera.

  “What are their names?” Hannah asks, as she holds the hand of little Caroline, who is squealing with delight.

  “Pack rats.” It is the gravelly voice of my mason and surly neighbor, Charlie, who is coming around the corner of the house, finishing his third beer and getting ready to lay stone. In building this passive solar house of our own design here at 6,000 feet in the remote high desert, we’ve employed mostly rural neighbors, and there have been some hardpan characters among them. Charlie the mason—whom Eryn refers to as Charlie Manson—is an irredeemable desert rat, and though he’s wild-eyed and sullen, I like him very much. He knows stone and he knows the desert, which is good enough for me.

  “Pack rats?” Eryn asks. “Is that really a kind of rat? It looks more like a baby squirrel.”

  “Pack rat,” Charlie repeats, scowling a little from behind his beer. “Wood rat. Trade rat. Pack rat. Rat. Deal with him.” He’s looking straight at me. My daughters are still smiling, but my wife is now frowning. I reach over and slowly slide the glass door closed in front of them. I can see the girls’ lips moving but can no longer hear their voices.

  I turn to Charlie. “What do you mean, ‘Deal with him’?”

  Charlie takes a big step closer to me, crushing and dropping his beer can as he does. “You don’t know him like I know him, Nature Boy.” I hated when he called me that, but I tried never to show it. “One day you’ll step out of your house to take a piss behind that woodpile, and when you come back inside you’ll find your bottle of single-barrel empty and that rat bastard sitting up in bed with your wife, smoking a Marlboro.” Charlie is as earnest as a shark hunter, and he’s in my face, reeking and squinting as he growls out his apocalyptic warning.

  “Come on, Charlie, it’s just a little squirrely thing.” I gesture toward the pallet, where one of the wee, timorous beasties is still peeping up at us, cute as can be.

  “Deal with him,” he says over his shoulder as he walks back to his pickup to fetch another beer.

  That night I heard no hooting from the resident great horned owls, no yelping from the upcanyon band of coyotes. Instead, strange scurrying sounds filled the darkness, unmistakably the acoustic trail of rodents, though the sounds were as loud as the jackrabbits out here are big. Scurrying on the deck, the walls, even the sill of the window just behind the headboard of our bed—the scratching and scrabbling sounds of claws, so loud that they kept me awake most of the night. In the morning I found small, sausage-shaped lumps of poop on the stoops of the house, with the greatest concentration on the doormats, as if the calling card had been left intentionally. Brownish-yellow streaks ran down our stucco walls, as if pints of porter had been spilled from the window ledges. The flowers in the pots on our porch had been clear-cut, leaving sheared stems where their colorful stalks had recently stood.

  By breakfast I was already hunched over my field guides, reciting preliminary findings to Eryn. “Got to be Neotoma cinerea, the bushy-tailed wood rat,” I concluded. “There are twenty-one species of wood rats, spread out across the United States and from Arctic Canada south to the jungles of Nicaragua, but this is the only one that fits: fairly boreal, widely distributed in the Great Basin, and has that big, fluffy tail. Nocturnal, good climber, likes to hole up in crevices in rock faces but also builds stick houses in juniper country like this. Will carry stuff off and pack it into its house. Generalist herbivore, but relishes succulent plants like, say, your snapdragons. Neotoma cinerea. That’s our boy.” Now I can answer Hannah’s question. “He’s named ‘bushy tail,’” I tell her. Caroline likes that.

  In the days that followed, the signs of a rodent invasion became increasingly evident. Each night brought the Mardi Gras of scurrying, and every morning, a new harvest of the signature butt pellets and the proliferation of nasty yellow streaks down the walls of the house. The potted plants were soon completely gone, and their stems invariably showed the distinctive angular cut of rodent teeth, which got the maligned desert cottontails off the hook. Bugs Bunny just chomps and gnaws, while rodents slash stems on a perfect angle, like a carrot julienned with the precision of a sous chef’s blade.

  One morning I went to fetch our hidden house key to loan it to Charlie, and it was unaccountably missing from its secret hiding place. Then in the afternoon I opened the hood of my truck to add windshield wiper fluid and discovered that over a single night the bushy tails had built a respectable nest atop my battery, one that was not only well wrought but also colorful. As I removed the nest I called out to Eryn: “Honey, I found your snapdragons.” Then the inevitable happened. Evolutionary programming told the pack rats that our stucco house was the sheer face of a rock cliff and the cement roof tiles were the innumerable doorways to a honeycomb of crevices and cavities. Once under the tiles, they had the run of the joint and could enter the soffits and at their leisure chew their way into the attic space, where they proceeded to gnaw insulation off pipes and coating off wiring. Now we had a critter issue that no amount of cute was going to fix. Despite the girls’ enthusiasm for these furry visitors, if something wasn’t done soon we’d be driven from our home by an army of furry little Neotoma. I had to “deal with him” and without delay.

  But in a matter of twenty-four hours, before I could even formulate a strategy, something happened that should happen only in tales born in the dark imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: scratching, scrabbling, clawing sounds came from within the interior walls of the house. Even Nature Boy was forced to admit that things were now out of hand. I winced, steeling myself for what I knew was necessary: a belly wriggle through the dark, claustrophobic crawl space beneath the house. If the rats were down there (at some point I had stopped calling them “bushy tails” and started calling them “rats”), then the levee was breached, and they would not only be under the roof and in the walls but would also have access to a labyrinth of ducts.

  I drained a glass of single-barrel sour mash before strapping on my headlamp and dropping through the trap hole in the floor as the girls held Eryn’s hands and watched me vanish int
o the darkness. It was immediately clear from the acrid smell that something was down there, and the stench wasn’t coming from the glossy, bulbous black widow spider whose orange hourglass tattoo was the first thing illuminated in the beam of my small headlamp. With less than two feet of clearance I commando crawled across the vapor barrier on the ground, where I soon discovered that the plastic sheeting was littered with turds and sticky with the same Grey Poupon that streaked the walls of the house. They were down here, all right, but I didn’t know where, or what I’d do if I found them. How many would there be? What diseases would they carry? Would they julienne my fingers with their razor-sharp choppers, leaving me with ten precisely angled stumps?

  As I pulled myself forward with my forearms, I began to identify trash that had been collected from around our property: bottle cap, tinfoil, coyote scat, wood screw, tuft of dog hair, flagging tape, masonry nail, owl pellet, snapdragon stalk, tabs from Charlie’s beer cans, even my spare house key. There were clipped juniper twigs lying all around, most of them still fresh and green. It was immediately clear that here, within the very foundation of our home, something quite wild had been going on. This was my house but their territory, and since they were accustomed to crawling around the dark in the choking ammonia stench of urine, they had an immediate advantage over me. Continuing my commando crawl, in the dusty beam of my headlamp, I noticed a pile of sticks a few yards ahead, tucked against a foundation wall and behind the elbow of a large duct. Nudging forward in the dark, I expected at any moment to feel a rat run across my back or tangle itself in my hair.

  At last I eased up close to the duct behind which the stick nest was concealed and then slowly craned my neck down and around the duct, turning my head to allow the beam of my headlamp to fall onto the bundle of sticks. There he was, a foot from my face and exactly at eye level, and he was all attitude, standing straight up on his hind legs and glaring at me as if ready to rumble. I had somehow assumed that if I found the little beast he would simply scurry away, but clearly this bruiser had no intention of stepping off. Which of us would blink first? In the next moment I reached the turning point in my increasingly troubled relationship with Neotoma cinerea. As I tilted my head a little, the lamp revealed the treasures he was defending in his nest. Nestled among juniper berries and beer can tabs rested Caroline’s pink pacifier. Now I could feel my jaws clench. “Listen here, you wife-stealing rat bastard,” I said aloud, “you are not going to drink my good bourbon.” He didn’t move a whisker, and he didn’t look at all scared.

  Since moving out to this remote hilltop in the western Great Basin I’ve dealt with plenty of critters. A great horned owl once swooped in front of us in an attempt to airlift our cat in its talons. On another occasion I intercepted a scorpion crawling along the baseboard beneath Caroline’s crib. Then there was the time the big bobcat walked coolly beneath the girls’ swing set on his way to raid our chicken coop. I’d even had my truck towed to the shop only to have the mechanic call to say he couldn’t work on it because there was a four-foot gopher snake snoozing on the engine block. But it was Caroline’s pilfered pacifier that finally pushed me over the edge. In a way that perhaps only a father can understand, that was going too far. Nature Boy was on the warpath.

  I started by doing a lot of research quickly. I reckoned that to defeat an enemy you must first understand his strengths and weaknesses and compare them to your own. What would make my adversary hungry, thirsty, tired, cold, worried, existentially despondent? What might a bad day for a pack rat look like? I read what I could find on wood rat social biology and then made a two-column list documenting a point-by-point comparison of the relative strengths of Rat Bastard and Nature Boy. I expected, given my status as a member of the species widely celebrated as the pinnacle of evolution (albeit only among ourselves), that I’d have impressive advantages over my foe. As the two-columned list shaped up, I soon discovered that the opposite was true. Rat Bastard was such a dietary generalist that I could never stop him by cutting off his food supply—he’d eat almost anything, from plants, berries, seeds, twigs, and bark to small invertebrates, fungi, and even his own feces. I couldn’t chase him down, as he could climb like lightning up vertical and even inverted faces, and I couldn’t shoot him because he was nocturnal and, besides, he was always crawling across my damned house. I couldn’t track him, as he could navigate by kinesthetic memory and scent markings—detailed maps I couldn’t even see to take away. Because he was hydrated by the plant matter he ate, he could go his whole life without taking a drink, while I, by contrast, couldn’t go a day without whiskey, let alone water. When I was roasting in summer he’d be chillin’ in a cool rock crevice, and when I was freezing in winter the master of thermoregulation would be toasty in the heart of his insulated den, curled into a ball and wrapped snugly in a long, furry tail designed especially for the purpose.

  As for breeding, it’s no wonder he’s a threat to people’s wives. Bushy tails produce one to three litters of two to six young each season, so they can feed plenty of owls and still fill your crawl space with the next generation. Their social structure is polygynous, which means that each male shacks up with a harem of several females. The females, for their part, are capable of running up vertical walls even with young dangling from their mammary glands, and they will often begin copulating within twelve hours of giving birth (two facts that, as it turns out, one should not bring to the attention of human mothers). Finally, pack rats are meaner than they are cute. We aren’t talking field mice here. Because of sexual dimorphism in the species, a male Neotoma cinerea can weigh in at a whopping six hundred grams, which is about the size of a big burrito—only a ferocious burrito with razor-sharp claws and teeth. In fighting with other pack rats, which he does viciously and from a young age, he’ll stand upright on his hind legs and bite and scratch for all he’s worth, even leaping into the air to use his powerful hind claws to slash at and lacerate his opponents.

  So what advantages are enumerated in the Nature Boy column of my list? Not many. I have an overdeveloped cerebral cortex, which, though helpful for executing such abstract tasks as making lists, is proving virtually useless in the practical conflict at hand. I do find that I have some things in common with Rat Bastard, who is described as “unsocial, solitary, and strongly territorial,” but identifying his weaknesses is another matter. I did locate a few general sources devoted to how to get rid of rodents, but all the prescribed methods had attendant perils. “Exclusion” sounded obvious, but it came with the assumption that I knew exactly where they were getting into the house, which I didn’t. “Toxicants” wasn’t a great option, as pack rats will carry poison bait away and cache it in their dens, sometimes not eating it for weeks or even months; besides, my collateral damage assessment suggested that, considering both the domestic and wild animals around, there were plenty of “non-target species” (including our daughters) to be concerned about. “Biological control” for pack rats is more or less limited to cats, and our cat, Lucy, who has an impressively fat ass and who in any case spends most of her time trying not to become dinner for a coyote, is far too slow to dream of going to the mat with a fierce, burrito-sized street fighter like a pack rat; indeed, Lucy is the kind of feline who would have her paws full in a smackdown with an actual burrito. “Ultrasound repellers” sounded encouragingly high-tech but had been proven ineffective after a very short period. This left only “Trapping,” which had plenty of complications. Rat Bastard was too big for a glue board, which seemed cruel anyhow, and a conventional snap trap would certainly catch me or my kid or my obese cat before it ever caught him. And anyway, think of the splatter. I knew my desperation had peaked when I found myself actually considering a plan enthusiastically proposed by my father-in-law, who is an impressively resourceful guy: fabricate a steel mat and wire it to a battery system by which we could electrocute the pack rats.

  It was then that the owls showed me the light. Eryn and the girls and I went away for a single night, mostly to get a short b
reak from my ratty nemesis, and when we returned it looked as if a fifty-five-gallon drum of half-and-half had been poured on the peaks of our roof and onto the ground below. “That’s bird doo-doo,” I explained in answer to Hannah’s question, though it seemed inconceivable that anything smaller than a pterodactyl could produce crap this voluminous. “Yay, the birdie went poopie all by his self!” Caroline screeched, hopping up and down. Soon afterward I noticed that for once there were no turds on the porches—not one pellet. Aha! Rat Bastard, I have found your weakness! My presence here had disrupted a predatory cycle and had given Neotoma prime digs—not only a good place to hang out but also protection from predation by Ye Olde Nocturnal Raptor. Combining what I learned from reading about wood rats with my feces-induced epiphany about the vulnerabilities of my furry antagonist, I rededicated myself to getting something other than my frontal lobes on the Nature Boy side of the power tally.

  How does the genius detective catch the genius criminal? By thinking like the criminal. If I were Rat Bastard, what would I want, and what would I fear? He’s got plenty of chow and women, and he doesn’t even need to drink, but he has the willies about being out in the open. He needs deep cover to nest, cache food, and thermoregulate—and to avoid being suddenly eviscerated by that silent-winged death from above. And pack rats are fiercely territorial and agonistic. As do other agonistic species, like alligators, they’ll live close together but do not like each other much, and they’ll fight fiercely for cover when it is scarce. As one study put it, “Possession of a house is so important to wood rat survival that a high level of aggression and solitary house occupancy are basic to the genus.” A glance around our property suggested that I’d inadvertently created pack rat nirvana. There were several tarped pallets of rock, old PVC pipe lying around the foundation of the house, and heaps of scrap lumber here and there. Because we heat primarily with wood, there was a pile of stove wood the size of a train car—at least eight cords that I’d hauled, bucked, and split. How many rats might be living inside there? At the top of Rat Bastard’s column of advantages over me was the superb cover that my own trash had provided him.