There is a critter at Cooter Hollow.
There are lots of critters of many varieties at Cooter Hollow, obviously, the usual variety of woodland creatures, which, as a general mushy lover and non-muncher of things fleshy, makes me all aglow with hippie love. For him (he who hunts and easily chews things that coo and bleat), this presents an opportunity to grab the nearest shotgun.
I mean this with nothing short of utmost adoration. Don’t knock it till you’ve seen it. Let me explain.
So there are critters, often heard hooting or ambling or trotting or gaggling (or whatever it is that domesticated game birds belch forward). But I’m talking about a specific critter coming around lately, hovering right outside our bed’s window and emitting a persistent quiet sound not unlike the snoring wheeze of a congested mild-mannered child doped up on benadryl. A charming sound: sympathetic, but unidentifiable.
After a few days of thinking it a partridge, or a fox, or something else whose presence would be welcome here, it occured to me that it may just as easily be a skunk, or a porcupine, two creatures which might be cause of A Really Bad Day to the Cooter Hollow’s resident quadrupeds. Which, as might be obvious, would suck for the rest of us as well. Because while it might be true that you haven’t lived until you’ve wrestled a sheepdog for quills stuck an inch beneath her snout’s surface, armed with your own flesh and a pair of pliers, you should trust me that in this case, it’s okay to live vicariously through us. We’ve still got scars to prove it.
So, given this new reason for panic, I began scouting a source of the phantom sound more attentively. We’d hear it exclusively at night, low in the grasses, not up in the trees. It would pipe down and take cover whenever we’d get too shifty. I was more convinced by the day that it was up to no good.
And then, out of nowhere, it reared its malevolent head one morning, early, on one of those mornings where time in bed is supposed to last as long as imaginable. And he, because he is a wonder by definition, leapt from bed, grabbing the shotgun in what must have been a choreographed act of grace, and swiping an extra buckshot shell on his way out the door which he tucked between his teeth, went on a stakeout, while I watched, with equal parts admiration and lasciviousness as the morning’s tinnitus hummed the Fuddian leporine remake of Ride of the Valkyries.
Not that I associate my baby in any way with Elmer Fudd, okay? And not that a rabbit was what I was hoping he’d find and kill. It’s a metaphor, okay? This is what is classically known as the fine line between creative license and total bullshit (citing baby).
In any event, he returned with neither a carcass nor any further evidence to the identity of our squatter, but we haven’t heard from it in the days since. So let this be a lesson to any uninvited entity serenading the windows at Cooter Hollow: expect the He Means Business charge of a naked man with a shotgun shell between his teeth.
