The Crazy Squirrel from Hell

I'd like to say I didn't post on Monday because of the holiday. Or I forgot. Or a myriad of other reasons that might actually make sense.

No, I didn't take time to write the freaking post because I was dealing with the Crazy Squirrel from Hell.

Saturday night, I had just fallen asleep when I woke to the most godawful racket. At first, I thought Wonder Dog had managed to get himself shut up in the master closet. But no, he was asleep in his bed.

This is the dog that barks at a leaf blowing across the yard, but he's totally sleeping through what sounds likes a wood chipper in my closet.

I'm now awake enough to recognize the sound as a rodent filing his teeth on the house's wood frame. Except whatever's gnawing on my house isn't a field mouse. It's wa-a-a-ay too big.

We've got a fucking rat.

DH is sleeping on the living room couch, thanks to the flu he brought home from a business conference. I go down, wake him up and drag him upstairs to hear my wood chipper. "We've got a rat."

"Or a squirrel," he says.

"Either way, I'm not letting a damn rodent rip apart the house we just got fixed." I glare at DH.

"It's two in the morning. We'll deal with him when the sun's up." DH stumbles back down to the couch.

I pound on the wall until my new roommate stops chewing and go back to bed. I lay there for nearly two hours, waiting for the wood chipper to start up again.

Over lunch, DH and I discuss the problem. He votes for rat bait.

"Really?" I look at him like he's a city kid, which he is. "We're trying to get the house on the market. If that thing dies inside the wall, we won't be able to show the house for at least three weeks to a month." Unfortunately, I know from bitter experience the decompsure rate of the average field mouse and can calculate it out for a larger rodent. "We still have some fox scent. Let's try that first."

(For those of you who may not know, fox scent is concentrated fox urine. It's very useful for getting rid of varmints such as the mama raccoon who thought our attic was a marvelous maternity ward. It's amazing how many men in Texas, the gun capital of the U.S. and especially those with penises who work at FUCKING HUNTING STORES, have no fucking clue what "scent" is.)

So DH and I spend Sunday afternoon cutting up an ancient polo shirt, spraying  the pieces with fox piss, and distributing them in crawl spaces and the attic.

Sunday night, DH's fever has broken and he's not coughing like a Mustang desperately needing its carb tuned, so he's back in bed with me. Around 1 a.m., our buddy decides the wall between our bathroom and GK's has better chewing material.

"The fox pee's not working," DH says as we listen to the gnawing.

"Maybe we missed where he's coming in," I say.

On Monday, DH checks the exterior of the house, but he can't find another possible route besides the attic vent and the hole in the garage wall where the water line had to be replaced (and is on our list of things to fix). Meanwhile I redistributed a few fox pee rags closer to GK's bathroom.

Monday night at the same rodent time, he decides to return to our bathroom wall. Except this time, it sounds like gnawing on the bathtub itself.

"The pee's definitely not working," DH says as we lie there in the dark.

It's time to poison the bastard.

I stop at Ace Hardware. I love the guys there. Most of the time. I tell the clerk my problem. "I've got a rat living in my wall."

He takes me back to the pesticides. "It could be a squirrel."

"Either way, the fucker can't take a fox pee hint and needs to die." I buy the huge blocks of rodent poison bait.

I get home and muscle the bedroom dresser away from the plumbing access panel. I pop off the panel and shine my flashlight inside the hole to set the bait. Sure enough, a ball of gray fur sits on one of the frame joints. Beady eyes stare at me from over a fluffy tail.

I slam the panel back into place. GK finds the whole thing hysterically funny. I'm ready to shove one of the poison cubes down his throat.

After lunch, DH has the brillant idea of flushing the squirrel into the main part of the house, once again showing his lack of country smarts.

"Are you insane! That thing could have rabies! I'm not getting rabies shots!" I generally don't shriek about wildlife, so DH backs off his plan.

Instead, he checks for the squirrel. Since it's no longer curled up in the joint, DH places the bait inside the wall and replaces the access panel.

I'm writing this shortly before dinner on Tuesday. Hopefully, the Crazy Squirrel from Hell dies painfully tonight, and I get to sleep through the night.


(Edit to add: DH heard CSFH in the walls between the master bathroom and GK's bathroom around 7 PM last night. We haven't heard a peep since though I was awake until after 2 a.m. waiting for him. Thankfully, DH took GK to his orthodontic appointment this morning and let me sleep in. After eight hours of real sleep, I feel a lot better.

Though I still want the bastard to die a slow, agonizing death.)