I went to the museum in the city the other day to kill some time between doctors’ appointments. Recent renovations forced a detour through the Natural History department and as I rounded a corner I came upon a figure in a glass case that made me freeze in my tracks. Not a cobra, not a charging rhino. It was a common Canadian groundhog standing up on its haunches, staring straight at me and sniffing the air for danger.
Old habits certainly die hard. I started hunting groundhogs on the farm six decades ago when I was eight. It’s not a popular notion these days to put firearms in the hands of children, but a single shot .22 rifle was what boys used to carry before they discovered cellphones. I whiled away at least a thousand man-hours in the hayfields every summer, sneaking up on the wary little creatures, taking advantage of every fold in the ground, crawling on knees and elbows and freezing whenever they stood up straight to check for danger.
We were brought up to believe that groundhogs were pests that made dangerous holes in the pasture for horses to cripple themselves in. This had never actually happened to any horse I knew, but it happened all the time in western novels and it gave me the necessary cover to indulge a naturally murderous instinct.
A youth filled with violence turned me into a pacifist and the groundhog fascination eventually wore off. I drifted off to the city for a succession of white collar jobs for fifteen years before I wearied of life under fluorescent lights and decided to return to the country. Imagine my surprise when I found the groundhog population had dwindled to near extinction in my absence along with rabbits, grouse and every other edible creature in the woods. I assumed this was due to over-hunting by eight year olds but the cause turned out to be more subtle. As the old farmers retired and moved into town the coyote population gradually swelled until they cleaned out the woods of everything except raccoons. It was ironic that an urban writer worried about Peak Oil should return to his small plot in the forest to raise sheep and poultry just in time to encounter Peak Coyote and Peak Raccoon.
“Do you hear the coyotes at night?” my city friends would ask. I heard them all right. They were so close I could hear them take a breath before they howled. I married into the most heavily armed family in Dufferin County and my brothers-in-law handed me an arsenal of weaponry to deal with the problem. But it was like shovelling water. I waged a costly land war against raccoons and coyotes for about a decade before I learned that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of retaliation. Electrified pasture huts, motion detector lights and a loud radio are far more efficient than sitting up all night with a shotgun. My studies showed that talk radio is easily the most effective control. No predator will approach within a quarter mile of a CBC interview with Michael Enright or a late night re-broadcast of ‘Q.’
At my age, I don’t shoot anything anymore and I am wary of flashy new technology that promises miracles. This may have something to do with a very bad experience I had one winter a few years ago, during an experiment with those new sticky traps you put on the bottom of drawers and cupboards to control mice. They were $3.99 each and when I woke up to find only one mouse on each trap I was reluctant to just toss them in the garbage. So I nipped out to the veranda in my underwear, leaned against a post and banged them together to shake the mice off into the snow. The traps stuck together and my fingers stuck to the traps so that I was ensnared with my arms around the post. It was cracking cold and my wife, who was having a sleep-in, could not hear my cries for help. I stayed there shivering until the school bus went by. I think only one kid saw me but, since we live on a dead-end road, he had time to alert the rest of the kids for the second pass.
After my wife cut me free, I threw out the traps and invested in a very tough cat from Sudbury.
- Dan Needles