I started smelling it day before yesterday, and I should have known. Somehow I misidentified it, I thought it was sewer gas. I convinced myself it was sewer gas.
I should have known. I’ve smelled a corpse before.
Honestly, crawling into tight spaces in search of dead things is one of my least favorite activities.
So I crawled into the meager spaces I’d left for servicing what little needs to be serviced under the Secret Lair, and as soon as I got there I recognized my mistake. This wasn’t a problem with the sewer line, this was something large and dead. And oh by the way, Sacred Spaghetti Monster on a Stick, that is the biggest packrat nest I have ever seen in my entire life!
So I jumped to a second false conclusion. In fact as I hauled pound after pound of packrat debris out from under the Lair, I was mentally composing a blog post titled something on the order of “Go Ahead and Guffaw, Zelda.” Somewhere under all this garbage I expected to find the moldering, maggot-infested corpse of a very large, old and well-to-do rat.
Instead I found the moldering, maggot-infested corpse of a cottontail rabbit.
And how did it get so dead, right at that particular place?
I wonder.
Oh Joel, you just can’t win can you. We had a field mouse get in back in February of 2015 and it caused a hell of a ruckus. The stupid thing got into the furnace and when the blower came on there was some serious metal screeching. I checked and couldn’t find anything so in came the tech who took things apart a little more then I wanted to go and there were the remains of the little field mouse plus the skeleton of another. How they got in there was (and still is) a mystery.
Blower motors near warm pilot lights – it draws them like flies. Someone should design something like a little ash bucket so’s one could empty/clean them out easier – all the ones I’ve had to deal with involved slipping my shoulder out of joint and employing exotic tools – and liberal cursing.
Joel – when you brought up doing the sandbag skirting I almost asked what you thought about the potential for packrats and all their cousins – and their reptile buddies. I don’t deny the benefit of the skirting – it had to keep you warmer.
I’ve developed this theory around here that anything you set down is going to wind up as shelter for some opportunistic feral creature. A woodpile will work fine – things on pallets – a brush pile – old cars. Come back three days later and someone’s already moved in.
Dogs and barnyard cats have their uses – the closer you get to ‘civilization’ the more of them you tend to find.
This heat that’s been over the SW states has been revealing. All the little animals have tried to tuck themselves into shady niches – moist earth or standing water is particularly revered. I walked past a jack rabbit today lying the the shade about 25′ away and it didn’t even bother to move. All the creatures that are usually staying furtive during the day are all just congregating in the nice digs we’ve set up here – they don’t have the energy to even put on a show. Nor do I have the energy to give them even a stern talking-to about the breach in decorum.
Dead rabbit in a packrat nest?
Am I misunderstanding this?
You got it, Kentucky, but I think they’re coincidence. Little Bear loves to eat rabbit, and rabbits are so stupid they’re born to be food. This is, I kid you not, very much not the first rabbit I’ve found missing a portion of its ass that proved vital to life. They wander into range of LB’s teeth, even though he’s on the cable. He nearly gets them, giving them mortal wounds but leaving them just barely able to stagger out of his cable’s radius, and there they die. This one died under the cabin, and when it reached the goo-and-stench phase of its return to Gaia it unknowingly alerted me to the presence of this amazing Rat Palace in a part of the Lair I prefer to ignore.