the rat esta muerta

The rat is dead.  

It's time had come.

We must go to the city to start fabrication on a job and I did not want to leave with a live but poisoned rat in the walls of my house.

I sleep on the couch a lot.  It's comfortable, I like something at my back.  I like to wait til the snoring dies down before I stumble into bed.  And last night about 2 o'clock I heard the rat gnawing, not in its usual place, in the wall behind the toilet, but in the most diametrically opposed part of the house as was possible.  Which is the corner of the combo living/dining space. Where the couch is.

damn damn damn

I'm stomping on the floor, smacking the wall with the spine of a book.

stop it stop it stop it!

Oh, all the gods that are and ever were, please let this be the same fucking rat.

If you are squeamish, I recommend that you don't read any farther because I commenced to dispatch that rat the next day.

I made a trip to the store to find a pair of long handled tongs of the barbecue kind with which to grab the rat with the intent of dunking said grabbed rat into a five gallon bucket of water.

I couldn't find any.  But what they did have was a 2 tined fork with sharp pointy points on the tines.  For $1.  Not my first choice but you go with what you got.

On the drive home, I'm psyching myself up for the deed.  I can do this.  I can stab that rat and dunk him in a bucket of water.  I can do this.

So, I get home and assemble my tools.  I go retrieve the old mop handle from the small garden that I am using for a divider between the carrots and the lettuce and duct tape the handle of the barbecue fork to the end of the pole to make it a spear.  I'm having fantasies of a warrior preparing for battle against a rat asleep in it's nest.  Then I fill the 5 gallon bucket with water and cart it into the small bedroom.  I gather the screwdriver and the flashlight and the stool.  

So I have everything in the little bedroom, outside the closet.  The whole time I'm talking to the rat telling it that I'm sorry that I am the agent of its death, that its time as a rat is up and I hope that it climbs the incarnational ladder.  I am giving it a step up.

Are you praying in there, Marc calls.

Yes, I tell him.  Because that's what I'm doing I guess.  Though I am not praying to any deity but to the rat.

And so I opened the panel and tried juggling the flashlight, panel, and spear.   There was the rat in its nest waked from his sleep.  My hope was a single successful thrust through an opening about 3" x 10" at an angle...which was of course a failure.  The clothes interfered, the flashlight not aimed well, the rat evaded.

I removed clothes from the closet, I called to Marc to come hold the flashlight.

My second thrust is successful though I cannot tell exactly where I have it pinned.  I'm pretty freaked out that I have just bayoneted this rat with a barbecue fork duct taped to a broken mop handle.

If you are one of my FB connections you probably saw this:

OMG!  I just bayoneted a rat with a barbecue fork duct taped to a broken mop handle.

Now, I was afraid to try and pull it out for fear it was not well skewered and I would have to do it again.  But I did finally get it into the bucket of water and ended its misery as soon as possible.

After I cleaned out the nest, rat mummy and all, and found the hole in the sub-floor that it had gnawed next to the sewer vent, I buried it at the edge of the field.  I didn't want to throw it in the trash because it would rot and stink and I didn't want to just throw it out in the field for fear that the poison bait it had eaten would poison anything that ate it.  So, I buried it.

I stuffed the hole with steel wool and we will get some of that expanding foam to help seal it.  

I just hope I don't hear any gnawing tonight in the front corner of the house.

edit: and indeed I did not.