by Jan Fielden
We certainly had an interesting week last week. It was a little scary, informative, amusing, frustrating, amazing, and about 50 other adjectives. We were working in the yard, sawing up limbs that had fallen off trees, picking up the “leaflets” that the wind blew out of the trees, and other assorted yard duties. We were using “Ole Blue” to haul the debris away. On one of my trips, I noticed a couple of wires hanging down in front of the truck. I asked The Colonel about them and that’s when the fun began!
He opened the hood to try to trace where the wires came from. He looked here and there and suddenly he said, “Jan, look at that”, pointing to the breather. I looked and was stunned! There on top of the breather, in various stages of shapes were cubes! Cubes that we feed the cows! We always feed the cows from the bed of the truck if The Colonel doesn’t walk out dropping them in a line for the cows to eat. So…how could the cubes get on the breather? We just looked at each other. Then, he said, “my stars! Look over there”!! Well, over there was on the passenger side, in the inside wheel well. There are three or four different little slots there. Inside this area, were stuffed, from the bottom to the top, more cubes! It almost appeared to have been perfectly lined up with the cubes all in a row. Not just one or two but probably 60-100 cubes!
We discovered that a rat had chewed through the plastic bag holding the cubes, took one cube at a time in its mouth, jumped down from the feeding table, ran over to the truck, climbed up under the engine, went to that area and stored the cubes! It must have taken a long time to do all of that. Next on the agenda is to write to the President and beg him to tell the EPA we need D-Con out in the wide-open spaces. We never had a problem until we couldn’t get D-Con. The little “huts” that hold some kind of something don’t work. Rats won’t enter it to chew on the stuff. The Red Oak Ranch is going to keep a letter going to the President, Congress, EPA, and anybody else we can think of!
