New Orleans

[laughingwillow]

space: I'm eagerly awaiting that next installment, bro.

lw

[JRL]

I bet the terrorist types have big ole hard ons watching our obvious arrogant unpreparedness.

[CJ]

ya,there has been some noise that way...Private Katrina,Allah`s blessing,a bit of that.

     What would one expect,but they got their own ingrained problems. Such is the nature of bigoted religion of all faiths,that they covet 'God'as a weapon of violence. To me,that is a very plain indication of of how narrow and sick a society , that they either come from,or would like to impose...Something rather fasciastic in tone.

      Our way,or the 'worst' will occur.

      God said.

[space]

To tell you about the ferret, first I have to talk about the rats.

Way, Way back:
I grew up on a flood plain.  Our rats weren't just a species, they were a whole effin' phylum.  It changed your life to see one of these guys trotting across the road, glaring red-eyed up at you as you drove home from the drive-in (cheap entertainment for a family of six kids).  There was the city dump rat clan and  the stockyard rat clan, both too big and kinda lumpy in a disturbing way from what they ate, I guess; the creek bank rat clan (smaller, more decent sort of rat); and the sewer rat clan centered down at the sewage plant, who took shit from everybody and nobody, rats with serious attitude... We lived near all those places, so our neighborhood was sorta the crossroad of rat life.  Babies got bitten in their cribs at night (and worse); if old people died alone, there wasn't much left by the time they were found.  A boy came of age in that place by hunting rats, not deer:  slingshots first, pellet guns, .22s.  Poison had stopped working many rat generations before, and traps were a joke.  They chewed right through wood-frame houses; cats didn't mess with those rats:  your best bet to keep 'em away from the house was a good rattin' dog (Dino was top-notch), who would grab 'em by the neck and shake until it snapped.  When cornered, they had a disconcerting habit of running right up your leg.  We all hated the rats, yet at the same time had a grudging respect for them, 'cause they were a lot like us.  Still, you had to stand your ground, or they would take over.

Way Back:  
In the early 1970s, after my combat engineer battalion rotated home from far, far eastern asia, I wound up assigned to the United Nations Command in Seoul.  This was considered excellent duty, as by then the city was booming, with nearly 10 million people, a rampant consumerist society, a magnificently in-our-favor currency differential, and those three things most wanted in a colonial outpost:  good cheap food and booze, young girls, and a thriving black market.  Less than a generation before, the city had been leveled by the Korean War; many people in those war days survived by eating rats.   So the Seoul rats were the equal of any:  in addition to their general down-and-out toughness, they had been winnowed by artillery bombardment and hordes of starving humans hunting their stringy asses for bare survival.

I moved into an apartment near the post, alongside the river.  Both the ground floor and my second floor apartment were built into the hillside.  Spacious, great view, central steam heat...and infested with rats.  The day I moved in, we got everything settled, ate Chinese carryout (yup, it's everywhere), and hit the sack.  I woke up in the morning to a furious thrashing and squealing from the kitchen:  two rats were in the sink fighting over the empty carryout cartons.  Big, plump, sleek brown rats:  they ignored me at first, and when I tossed something at them they leapt from the sink, ran right at me, feinted left and then ducked right down one of the holes cut in the floor for radiator piping.

Well, I knew rats so I knew better than to waste my time with poison bait and traps.  I got a big box of coarse steel wool, some powdered lye, a bunch of empty tin cans and some nails.  I stuffed every access point I could find (heat pipes, plumbing pipes, holes chewed through the walls) with steel wool dusted liberally with the lye, then flattened out the tin cans to nail down over the holes.  It took a while--for a few weeks I still tiptoed around the place, and made lots of noise before I came in or got out of bed so they would have time to clear out.  I went down to the river and collected a bucket full of nice round river stones, not quite baseball sized, to keep by the sofa, so I could peg 'em at the rats that would run along the baseboards then snigger at me from under the TV.  Eventually, though, I sealed 'em all out:  you could hear 'em squealing when they tried to chew their way back in and hit that lye--powerful deterrent to a gnawing rat.  The landlord lived downstairs, and he pounded on my door one night, furious, because his apartment was full of rats:  they couldn't get in my place, so they chewed their way into his.  

Back When:
Jimmie and I grew up together on that flood plain.  When I came back from Asia, he was still living in the old neighborhood in a grand, shambling old Victorian.  I came to get reacquainted, and we sat up late burning down a few. I asked him if he didn't have trouble with rats in the old place, and he answered, "Yeah, at first, but then I got Jack, and he keeps 'em cleared out pretty good."  I looked around again, as I had when I came in, 'cause Jimmie always had pets, usually multiple dogs and cats, but I didn't see anybody.  "Yeah, Jack's shy," he said, "but you'll see him tomorrow when he's lookin' to eat."

Jimmie headed off to bed, and I streched out on the couch, watching late-nite TV, still a real treat after being in Asia so long.  I drifted off to the white noise of monster movies and the gurgling rock garden Jimmie kept on the coffee table.  

In the wee hours, something squealed.  I came to instant combat alertness.  I glanced over at the TV and by that gray, off-air static light I saw something slinky and brown glide under the TV.  My hand found one of the water fountain rocks on the coffee table, right where I used to keep my bucket of 'em in Seoul.  I sat up slowly, cocked my arm back, and gave a little whistling hiss like I had learned to do to make 'em sit up and turn:  I saw a pair of beady eyes and bared teeth, and I let fly.  My aim was true.  Thinking Jack didn't have as good a handle on the rats as Jimmie thought, I drifted back to sleep.

Well, you know by now.  By the cold light of morning I saw that dead critter under the TV was no kinda rat I'd ever seen before--I had never heard of keeping ferrets up to that point, and only learned about them as pets when I stood up with Jack dangling from my hand, and Jimmie walked in, dropped his coffee and screamed, "Jack!  Oh man, you killed Jack!  You killed my ferret, asshole!"  

I told Jimmie--also an Asian vet--that he knew better than to put a man to bed in a room with an unknown animal species, and that the damned thing looked too much like a rat to live with people, anyway, was he turning on his own kind?  He allowed as how I had a point about the unknown animal in the night thing.  That day we buried Jack with full honors and drank ourselves into oblivion at the arbitrariness of it all--we were all victims and victimizers, none of us pure or whole--and eventually Jimmie forgave me.  He never got another ferret, though, and he put the Japanese stone fountain away whenever I came to visit.

So that's how Uncle Spacey killed Jack the ferret.  I'm glad we never got properly introduced, or I'd've felt a lot worse about it.

[laughingwillow]

Great story, spacey. And one hell of a shot to boot. I could see owning a ferret under similar conditions. But then its more of a symbiotic relationship.(The way it should be, imo.)

My cousin owned a ferret for awhile, too. At least it didn't bite too hard. Damn thing managed to get away a couple of times, but his black mutt always managed to sniff out its trail. Never failed.

To be completely honest, rats are the only animals under the sun that have given me the heebe-jeebes since I was little. I must confess that I refused to take care of my bosses rat collection at the pet shop. (He had a passle in round cages in the basement of the shop.) They creeped me out. And I've owned snakes, alligators, gerbils, hamsters, etc.

lw

[senorsalvia]

:!:   -----   Fine fine tale-----   Really excellent Sir Space:--  Mucho Thanks-------- sal

[Avery L. Breath]

Yeah yah know, my dad, whom I've always thought of as a stand up guy once told me he had an old irrational fear of rats which I often thought was the oddest thing because I've never seen fear in him.  How growing up in garden city idaho as a kid, his parents owned a grocery store called the penn market (short for pennsalvania, where my great grandfather immigrated to from poland) and how he used to have to stand guard over the root cellar with random instruments of effectiveness, killing rats after the stores..... and it just terrified him.

Good story spacey.

[laughingwillow]

There isn't much that REALLY scares me, either. I have no explaination for the rat-phobia. Nor have I ever admitted this to anyone before mentioning to it earlier at the old spf.

One explaination might be the fact that the first dead animal I ever came across was a rat in a field when I was 3 or 4 years old. (I can still remember that walk with my dad.) But it didn't realluy seem to bother me at the time. I remember being terrified at the thought of watching Willard or was Ben the first rat movie? That shite hella scared me. The only other viable explaination I can come up is that it was a past life issue.....

lw