Wuff with the Smooth: The boomtown rats (part two)

The story so far…

Thinking that there might be a rat town underneath an old door on the ditch below my hen house, me and the Waff had decked ourselves out in battle gear. I was sporting leather gloves, wellies, a workcoat and a woolly hat – I’d even taken a spade from the shed in case there was any whacking to be done. Weirdly, Waffle looked like a member of The Village People, decked out as he was in a Minnie Mouse t-shirt.

Kite or bust,” I told Waffle and, sticking the spade into the ground for easy retrieval, I bent down and pushed my leather-clad fingers underneath one end of the door.

“Right, yous fuppen baxters!” I shouted and hauled upwards.

The door turned, we gazed on in silence. Waffle barked and then looked at me and I looked at Waffle.

Nothing.

On one hand I was glad the rat town didn’t exist but on the other, I was slightly disappointed that we’d got all dressed up for nothing.

Then I noticed a hole in the ground where the door had been. Then I had a theory. Then I had an idea.

Running out to the front of the house, I broke a long, slender branch – about two metres in length – off a willow tree and shuffled back to the ditch.

Tentatively, I pushed the stick into the hole in the ground at the ditch and fed it through until – yes! – it emerged from the hole inside the hen enclosure.

“A rat bivouac!” I told Waffle.

The space underneath the door hadn’t been a town at all but rather a temporary camp used by worker rats to steal crumbs of hen food. The hole – or the tunnel – had been used as a quick in-out.

“You think they heard us coming?” I asked Waffle in his Minnie the Mouse outfit. “They probably heard you whinging – well done with that, by the way.”

True to form, Waffle whined in reply.

The two of us spent the next few minutes examining the hole and the various burrows which seemed to have terminated under the door. A damascene moment suddenly arrived when I considered how tragic it might be for a sniffy Waffle to inhale some rat-infested fumes or licks some plague-infested rat poo.

“Get-away-outta-that-dog!” I hastily blurted when I noticed Waffle’s tongue out. “Lord Almighty, but Mickey didn’t have these kinds of problems with Minnie – you’re practically asking for leptospirosis.”

Shooing Waffle away, I plugged both sides of the rat tunnel with large stones before concluding that a poison purchase was now necessary and imminent.

I had previously Googled ‘rat poison’ and decided that the most appealing stuff was called, ‘Deadfast’ – for obvious reasons. Apparently I needed the poison and also something called a bait station – presumably a little house which the rats could use as a café – and then hopefully a morgue.

“No bother to us,” I told Waffle. “So long as we don’t lay down some poison and then pick our noses by mistake, the only casualties here will be the hateful rats.”

Only then did I notice that I had been talking to myself. I glanced around but the Hairy Fool was nowhere to be seen.

“Waffle!” I called. Then remembering Waffle has to be told twice to do anything I added, “WAFFLE!” with a bit more oomph.

The word had hardly stopped echoing in my throat when the hairy fool appeared around the corner of the hen house. At first glance, I thought he was carrying his rubber bone and was wrongly assuming that we might play a game of fetch. Then I noticed the bone had a tail and then I noticed the bone wasn’t even a bone at all – in fact – it had a head and lots of hair.

As my mind screamed, “RAT!” my mouth was able to command, “Spit-that-fuppen-thing-out, dawg!”

To give him his dues, Waffle immediately obeyed and the dead rat was unceremoniously spat out, landing at my feet with a soft splat.

I sighed then, as I am sighing now. I realised, of course, that it would be up to me to deal with the corpse before Waffle chewed on it some more. This thought made me irrationally angry.

“Seriously dog? And now I suppose you’re planning on bringing that filthy mouth of yours into the house.”

Does toothpaste for dogs exist?

After disposing of the rat (twirling it around by the tail and then firing it as far as humanly possible into the field), I spent the next few days on tenterhooks. I was dreading the moment that Waffle started to exhibit symptoms of whichever dreaded malady he had contracted from the dead filth-ball in his gob. I even looked up ‘leptospirosis’ online to see what those symptoms might be.

Thankfully, as you might of guessed by now (this not being an obituary for one Waffle J Devlin), the Hairy Fool is still alive and kicking.

Moreover, the Deadfast and corresponding bait station have been purchased and the boomtown rats’ days are numbered.

Now all I have to do is bait the station – and remember not to pick my nose.