Homesteading stories. You gotta love ‘em.
I’ve always enjoyed reading Homesteading stories as they tend to deliver a heaping helping of “you gotta hear this” and “say what?!?” and “oh, no you didn’t!” Real life happening here. And I do love to tell a story, but some of this stuff I don’t even think I could make up.
Today’s story comes to you from around year number 4 after we moved here to Kentucky. We brought several indoor cats with us during the move. And then inherited some outdoor mousers once we bought this farm. Jack is one of the outdoor mousers. He’s a long-haired, black male cat.
One day some friends came over, to ride out with me to a musical concert a little outside of town. I had done my best to gather all the things together that I needed for the evening, since my husband was out of town and I knew I’d be getting home late that night. When we arrived back home it was dark and had been raining for a few hours. The kind of rain that had already soaked everything and was still steadily coming down. I waved goodbye to my friends who dashed quickly to their car in the downpour. Pretty wiped from the long day, I too was hoping to dash inside and begin to wind down for a quiet evening. But as I was turning out my headlights, I noticed something out of the norm.
Was I seeing a wet chicken standing on the wall near my back door? Yes. It was a drenched chicken, hunkering down in the rain. “Why was my chicken outside in the rain,” you ask? As it began to dawn on me that what I was seeing was not one, but ALL my flock of chickens scattered all over the wall near my coop, I thought to myself “where am I….the twilight zone?” Now I have a perfectly good chicken coop, with walls, and a roof, and doors, perfect for chickens to roost in. But why were they all over the place at night, outside? Well, as I inspected the gate to the chicken house, I noticed it was shut and locked. Oh yes, I recalled that earlier in the day some workers were over finishing up a project near the chicken coop and I guess had unknowingly shut the gate. So, when my free-range flock tried to go in for the night, they couldn’t get into the coop.
“Well,” I thought, “it’s raining and these chickens are already hunkering down, so it shouldn’t take me very long to round them up and tuck them back into the coop where they need to be.” Oh, the naivete. That task can be daunting even for a few folks working together in calculated unison. But just me by myself?? I should tell you that at the time we had about 12 chickens. And some of them were rescues that were half-wild. I told myself that if I could catch the wildest one first, then even if I spooked the others in the effort, they shouldn’t be as difficult as the one we called “Speedy.” As in “Speedy-Gonzalez.” She had earned that name well before this day, trust me.
My plan was a success. One at a time I snatched the wet hens up off the various positions hither and yon, starting with Speedy. As I shut the door on the coop after the last hen was safely inside, I thought to myself “heh, look at me. I’m tired, wet and all alone with this flashlight, but still I got it done.” As I turned my flashlight toward the house to make my way inside, it caught a flash of something. Something also not quite right. Were my eyes playing tricks on me, or was that my cat Jack, slinking along the wall in the rain too? He was literally slinking. Hunched down in an odd posture as he slowly walk/crawled along. “Weird,” I thought. And of course he was also soaking wet. But something about his mannerism told me to inspect further.
As I approached Jack, I noticed something dangling from his black, hairy, wet belly. It was one of those sticky mouse pads. A Tomcat Glue Trap to be exact. “Mouse size” says the package. “Captures Mice” it advertises. Now I remembered putting a couple of those glue traps WAY UP HIGH in our metal workshop. To catch the mice that kept trying to break into our chicken feed bins. Jack, being the expert mouser that he was, must have thought that catching the mice in the workshop way up high was also the best way to get the job done.
So I’m soaked to the bone at this point, having already rounded up all the chickens. And now this. But you know the saying “when it rains, it pours.” As it dawned on me that a glue trap was stuck to the undercarriage of my wet cat, and that I now had to wrestle that cat to try and remove the trap from his belly, I heard a crack of thunder. It was like the bottom dropped out of the sky. The kind of rain like somebody just turned the knob all the way open.
For pity sakes. I grabbed Jack as fast as I could. Brought him into the workshop out of the downpour. And to my surprise, he was amazingly compliant as I painstakingly and very carefully cut the wet fur from the glue trap. He must have been pretty drained from the experience of being glued to a plastic tray, before I even got home. And wanted my help. When I peeled off my dripping clothes and headed into the shower to take off the day, I thought to myself “did that really just happen?”
Fast forward 10 years and this story came to mind today because we were taking Jack to the groomer to shave off this winter’s matting that, despite my best efforts to keep his long hair combed and free from the cockleburs that grow all around this property, was all knotted up along his undercarriage. He’s looking easy-breezy, post grooming. Trimmed, and cool. Wonder if he’s also having flashbacks of a freshly trimmed belly, thanks to a mouse pad?