When my parents bought my grandfather’s chicken ranch, Teddy (as in Teddy Roosevelt), a rat terrier, came along with it. Among Teddy’s talents was the ability to climb an eight-foot chicken-wire fence in pursuit of cats. I never saw Teddy catch a cat.
My father posted bounties: $0.01/mouse, $0.10/gopher or mole, and $1.00/rat. It was relatively easy to catch mice. My brother, Jerry, and I would take Teddy with us into the hay loft. There we moved hay bales and the mice would scurry about. Teddy, Jerry, and I would each catch our share of mice.
Catching gophers and moles was not quite so easy. Teddy did not seem to be interested. We caught a few using traps. Rarely, when a particularly pesky gopher invaded our vegetable garden I stood guard with my 12 gauge shotgun. When the gopher pushed out a mound of dirt and stuck his head out I would blast away. Of course this left very little evidence with which to claim the bounty.
Rat catching, on the other hand, was a mixed bag. We did catch a few with traps. The gold mines were under the chicken houses, of which there were over thirty. Under a typical chicken house there was a vertical clearance between the ground and the floor joists of twelve to eighteen inches. Teddy, Jerry, and I crawled on our stomachs, Teddy digging down the length of a rat burrow. There was always at least one rat burrow under every chicken house. Upon reaching a nest, an adult rat would run out and Teddy promptly caught it. (Remember, Teddy was a rat terrier.) Jerry and I would then gather up as many as a dozen baby rats. It only took a couple of such episodes for our father to amend the terms of the bounty: $1.00/adult rat, $0.10/baby rat.
I am not certain now whether the primary motivation for the efforts was the monetary reward or only the “thrill of the hunt”. Maybe I should pay more attention to why I say and do the things that I do?
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