There are some simple rules to staying married for a long time. If you love your wife, you’ll kill for her. If she gardens, and gophers invade the garden, the targets have self-identified. Last summer, with knee surgery, it was a challenge to get steady enough to hit the target – so this year there are more targets, and I’m a bit steadier.
The problem is neuropathy – there’s enough pain in the feet to make steady a really hard thing. Mornings I have a chance. After dinner, I have a chance. It’s kind of shameful, but I’m hitting about one shot in three. Last summer, unable to shoot decently, I indulged my inner Borgia and bought a bait station. Renata tells me that the bait is emptying out too quickly – my thought was that the more poison they eat, the quicker they will die. Nothing says love quite so eloquently as gopher genocide in your wife’s garden. I’m trying some pocket gopher traps down the holes – ideally they’ll stab the gopher in both sides of his belly. Never saw them work before – but over fifty years ago, I used regular double O traps, and instead of catching the gophers I caught a mother badger.
I shot a gopher, got a stick, and got her out of the trap. I’m fairly sure that she credited me for the rescue and never realized I set the trap. So far as she was concerned, she had a hunting partner that didn’t want his own share. That’s probably a great thing for a mother badger – we hunted together for the rest of the summer. Never all that close, but she was good at making sure that a gopher didn’t get back down the hole with a bullet in it.
So I’m trying to kill off the gophers in the garden before they harvest everything. It’s harder to shoot well than it was a half-century ago. Columbia Ground squirrel learns quickly, and doesn’t give many close shots. They are delicate eaters, so poison doesn’t work all that well. I’m using a second-rate trap so I won’t catch a non-target species. If you love your wife, you’ll kill for her. Even when you’re missing two out of three shots.
Leave a Reply