The Last Supper

Practice Makes Perfect

From my desk upstairs tonight, well past midnight, I heard a ruckus going on in the side yard, near the barn.  This farmer’s wife knows the sound of livestock in trouble.  John had gone to bed so I, quick, grabbed his Kimber 45 with the laser grip, popped in a clip, racked in a shell and turned off the safety.  Whatever it was out there, it was gonna die.  Good thing I did some target practicing last week using an old campaign sign–kind of poetic, eh?

John made me laugh as he shot up his own sign. Love his tee shirt, too. That’s my man!

A heavy drizzle was coming down, creating ghostly shadows against the barn lights.  There was a small LED flashlight in my rain gear which came in handy as I neared the chicken coop and saw some of my girls running around outside in the dark. Chickens are blind at night and roost; this could only mean trouble and an unhappy ending for the trouble maker.   I was surprised that an intruder got through the coop’s electrified fence.

I killed the power, opened the gate, and peeked through the pop hole. The glassy eyes of a big ‘ol egg eating opossum stared back at me.  That explained the frantic cluckers and all their squawking.  The only good opossum is a dead one and this one was going down.  You can mess with a lot of things on my farm, but NOT my girls.

He found a hiding spot in the corner of the coop and it was a tough shot.  I put a red bead on his body and fired.  He began to drag his carcass out of the hen house and I could see yellow egg yolk all over his face.  That dirty ‘ol egg sucking bastard.  Opossums will eat the eggs first and the hens next.  My mind began to flash with movie quotes from Al Pacino in Scarface:  “Say hello to my little friend.”    I couldn’t believe the thing  was crawling right at me, almost over my boots.   “Oh, so you want to play rough.”  I popped another cap into him and thought “For a green card I would carve him up real nice.”

People think farms are happy places where the sun shines and the sheep,  pigs, and horses graze.  In reality, there is a lot of carnage as we try to protect the lives of our animals who can not protect themselves.  We worry about coyotes, skunks, and especially raccoons.   I did what I had to do and laughed to myself that my big, strong swamp buck hunter of a husband heard the shots and rolled over in bed, confident that The Farmer’s Wife had taken care of business.