Critters, Creatures and A Little Bit of Craziness

We have a critter living under the deck.

And I know some of you are saying “Yes, we know, you’ve talked about that stupid bunny 10 times. Nobody is really interested in your bizarre bunny banter!”

First of all, while I am always a helpless slave to alliteration, that’s just rude. This is my blog and I can talk about whatever I want. But, more importantly, this is NOT the bunny but an entirely new critter. See, the deck runs the entire length of the house and the bunny lives on the far right end. The new critter, the critter of unknown identity, lives on the far left end of the deck. The end, might I add, that is closest to the back door.

No, this obviously isn't a real
bunny and this blog has nothing
to do with Pipsqueak Meow...but
this is a hilarious picture and
marginally relevant.

Which means every time I step out of the house,  I keep imagining some practically preternatural monster sticking a claw up through the boards of the deck, grabbing my ankle and dragging me down to its lair.

And if you’re scoffing at the idea of my slightly chubby frame being dragged through the tiny space between deck flooring, then you obviously haven’t read Stephen King’s short story The Raft in which a very similar thing is described in horrifying detail.

Since I have read The Raft, I can (and DO!) imagine my bloody, painful death every time I step onto the back porch. Plus, I’m having horrible flashbacks to 2005 when the vicious, mutant-sized raccoon and I battled for possession of my house.

An experience that should have taught me never to do critter research on the Internet.

But I get ahead of myself.  I should probably start by explaining how I discovered the presence of the critter. What happened was, I was out in the yard with the ridiculous dogs and I noticed a hole in one corner of the flower bed in front of the left side of the deck. I inspected said hole and thought to myself, “Self,” I thought, “those look ever so slightly like claw marks in the dirt around that hole.”

I consulted with the dogs and they not only agreed that we had a mysterious mystery on our hands but immediately began sniffing around the hole and then all along the side of the deck in their best imitation of drug dogs on the job.

Unfortunately, these are NOT drug dogs so they don’t realize that alerting the suspect that he (or it) is under surveillance is sub-par police work. Instead, they sniffed all along the left side of the deck, right up to the house, and both began barking and digging and running around like a couple of lunatics. Then they ran up the steps toward the back door and resumed barking and digging at the deck right in front of the back door.

Then I – also woefully poor at hot pursuit and thinking only of keeping the deck from doggy destruction – ran over, pushed Bubba out of the way and reached down to snatch Sassy up in my arms. And that’s when whatever is currently lurking under the deck growled at us.

At this point, I walked the dogs calmly in the house and told Opie we might need to call an exterminator.

Or, as he tells it, ran in the house with the dogs yelling about monsters and using the F word like a comma.

“It’s the bunny,” he assured me when we all calmed down.

“Bunnies don’t growl!” I retorted.

Except, of course, I have no idea if bunnies growl or not. I mean, I’ve never heard one growl but I don’t get into violent arguments with bunnies very often so I guess I can’t be sure.

And that’s when I made my biggest mistake: I started researching on the Internet. Which is not, you’ll be stunned to hear, filled with sweet stories of critters and and canines and Kimberlys living together in joyous harmony.

It is interesting to note that even in an urban setting, there are an alarming number of creatures that have been known to make their home underneath people’s homes…which means Opie had an entertaining evening in which I randomly shouted out possibilities, rabies statistics and other informative information.

“It’s the bunny!!” He kept insisting.

Which just goes to show you Opie doesn’t really understand the wily ways of wildlife. Plus, he wasn’t at all interested in listening to the various recordings of different animals growling and was unimpressed when I told him the skunk sound on this website: Critter Control sounded the closest to what I’d heard. He even went so far as to imply it sounded more like a whine than a growl.

Which also goes to show you that, as much as I love him, Opie isn’t really at the top of the animal identification game.

This is probably also why he didn’t want to come outside and help me tie the GoPro to the deck post above the hole in an effort to time lapse video the creature’s egress and ingress throughout the night.

So, the long and the short of it is, there’s a critter living under the deck, it might or might not be but probably is a skunk, and if I manage to get video evidence, I will only mention it to Opie once a day for the rest of our lives.