akirlu | Tinka Gets Her Groove Back (Reply)

Moles have such lovely fur. Very dense-looking, velvetty stuff. And their digger claws are fascinatingly translucent -- they're really almost pretty. And when you have a dead mole on your back porch, you can observe in in very fine detail, as you delicately pick it up with an inverted plastic bag to dispose of it. (Is there an optimum environmentally-sound and public-health-approved way to dispose of a mole, I wonder? Yard waste, recycling, trash, or toilet? Probably not recycling.)

So after a long interregnum, Tinka has her game on again. My first clue was coming back to find a small deceased rat on the doormat after I had taken Sarah out for her walk. I'm pretty sure the rat was not there when we left the house, because the screen door didn't quite clear the corpse. I had to fish a spare dog-walk bag out of my pocket to dispense with the thing before I could even take Sarah into the house. Happily, she was not overly curious.

When we got back from our LA visit, the sitter wanted to let us know that there was a dead rat in the lidded can where we usually segregate the filled dog bags. "Yeah, sorry about that," I said. "It was the easiest place to ditch it," I said. "No, I mean I found a dead rat and dropped it in there," she said. Oh.

Then there was the one we found decomposing in the middle of the front lawn, and then the sad little pile of feathers that appeared on the back porch over the weekend -- Tinka somewhat offsets her penchant for birds by actually eating them -- and today the mole. I'm not sure she's despatching local fauna at the rate of one per week, but it's close to that. Definitely got game. If she can only inspire Spike and Lefty to make an effort, the squirrels may live in fear yet.