Okay, so it’s not the most genteel thing that happened today…

Landlady and I were working in her barn late this morning when her dog Dharma started going nuts out in front. Dharma doesn’t have a lot of attention span for most things, but she is a born ratter. There’s a big picnic table under the front awning, sitting on an old piece of OSB, and Dharma wanted under that OSB in what the rat she was after must have surely considered the Worst Possible Way.

Landlady and I had discussed that table before. Years ago it seemed like a good idea but nobody has used it in six or seven years and it’s getting awfully ratty. So she made an executive decision that we would haul it to the dump next trip, and that in the meantime we’d move it and that sheet of rotting OSB.

By this time Dharma had given up trying to claw a hole in the sheet and was doing a workmanlike job of tearing it apart with her jaws. I pictured a packrat desperately trying to tunnel out the other side in the dwindling time available to it. We moved the table, got under the OSB and raised it, Dharma was in there like a shot…

I oopsied and dropped my corner – on Dharma’s head – and she didn’t even comment. She came out of there and started banging a big fat rat on the ground like…well…

Yeah, like that. But without all the distracting conversation.

And of course Hulk didn’t eat Loki afterward.

Alas for future generations it turns out the rat wasn’t really especially fat, it was looking for a quiet place to give birth. And nothing speeds that process along, it seems, like getting slammed back and forth like you’re reenacting an Avengers scene.

Landlady’s cool with Gulch Life, but there are parts she’d just as soon we keep behind the curtain. So as Dharma settled down to her crunchy snack and I started picking up dying rat babies with an explanatory “The chickens love these!” … well, she didn’t exactly swoon.

I did hear her mutter something about “Welcome to the backwoods.”