The Uninvited Houseguests

I may be a girl, but I’m not a wimp. I’m eleven, and by the time we moved to Arizona from Texas I’d been exploring on my horse with my dogs following along for four years. I collected tadpoles, frogs, horny toads, minnows, orphaned rabbits, wounded birds, and whatever else I ran across. If it was alive and I could catch it, I brought it home to watch and take care of. I was riding with a friend one day when we found a possum asleep on the ground. I picked it up and carried it dangling by its tail all the way back to my house. My dad freaked out, but how was I supposed to know possums have fifty teeth and very unpleasant personalities? Since then I try to find out something about the pets I bring home.

I hadn’t been in Cave Creek, Arizona, long before I realized that even a non-wimp had a lot to learn when it comes to the desert. It wasn’t just the thorny plants that were unfriendly. Coyotes climbed over fences just to grab someone’s dog or cat to eat for dinner. Then there are the javelinas. They look a lot like pigs but are really peccaries. When I looked them up, I found out they aren’t supposed to be aggressive unless they have babies with them; but they must all need glasses. If you startle them by barging into their herd, I figure they might take a chunk out of you. There are also cat-burglar bobcats, scary mountain lions, sleek deer, and slithery rattlesnakes.

It was heaven!

Anticipation of a critter meeting had me hanging out in the backyard a lot last spring. Two things had put my critter radar on high alert. The first wasn’t new or all that exciting. In bed at night, we were hearing the pitter-patter of little feet above our heads. We’d had packrats in our attic before. These crafty critters can sneak into the attic through the tiniest crack. I didn’t know about the social habits of packrats before moving to Cave Creek, but I found out they are party animals. Once they set up housekeeping, wild celebrations go on all night. All that dancing and chewing makes it hard to sleep down below, and Mom has to call Lee from Critter Control.

Lee’s last visit followed the unpleasant discovery of a rat tail dangling down into the bathroom through the vent in the ceiling. I’m the one who spotted it. The tail pointed directly at the only seat in the room. I love all kinds of animals, but watching that tail wave gently back and forth in the breeze from the AC made me shudder. I showed Mom, and she called Lee.

As he was leaving the rat man reported, “That’s it. Everything’s sealed up. You won’t have any more problems with packrats in your attic.”

Lee says that every time he visits, but the notices he posts informing the packrats that our attic is off-limits must blow away before they’re seen. Either that or the local packrats need to take a course for slow readers. They keep finding new ways to enter attic heaven, and I figured they were back again!

The other situation wasn’t so easily solved. It affected one of our dogs, Leezer Beezer, our Jack Russell. JRs aren’t very big, but Beezy doesn’t know that, and she takes her guard duties seriously! She had located a threat in the yard that was grave enough to keep her barking for days. Mom was really getting mad at her, but I knew she was trying to tell us something. It wasn’t her fault her humans were too dumb to understand.

It was her non-stop barking that brought me out to the backyard one more time. This time instead of peering closely at various areas, I half closed my eyes and let them drift, looking for a movement or something I’d missed the past twenty times I’d looked. Suddenly my eye caught a flash to my right. My eyes whirled, my heart gave a thump, and a big grin broke out on my face. A tiny cat face was peering at me over the parapet surrounding the flat part of the roof. There was a baby kitten on our roof! Now that I knew where to look, I spotted another tiny cat face a few feet further down. My brain was grinding along in low gear, but it still took only a minute to realize that those darling little faces didn’t belong to stray kittens. A light bulb went on in my head, and everything made sense. The pitter-patter over our heads at night wasn’t packrats dancing a jig in our attic. Nope! It was bobcats pacing on our roof! The grin slipped off my face as quickly as it had appeared as a new thought popped into my buzzing head. What about the dogs?

Mom spent the next few days talking to various people and offices trying to get a handle on how dangerous this was for Beezy and Bitsy, our little couch potato, and what options we had as landlords for a family of bobcats. The call to Game and Fish was wasted effort.

“Ma’am, we don’t go to people’s houses to check on wildlife.”

“Well, can you give me an idea how dangerous the situation is for our dogs in the yard below?” Mom asked.

“No ma’am, I wouldn’t have any information about that at all,” the bored voice on the other end of the phone stated.

Next, she tried the wildlife groups in the area.

“I’m sorry, we don’t do bobcat removals, ma’am. I strongly suggest you just let momma and the babies stay there for the time being. She’ll move along before too long.”

“How long do you think she’ll stay on our roof?”

Mom was pacing the kitchen by this time, the phone pressed hard against her ear.

“Oh, she’ll move them someplace new in a month or two.”

A month or two! What would happen in the meantime? Apparently, the wildlife groups considered the loss of one little dog or even two a small price to pay for leaving our wild visitors undisturbed. But these were my pups we were talking about! Beezy and Bitsy were my buddies. They snuggled with me at night. I wasn’t going to let a bobcat family eat them for dinner.

That night I had a nightmare about a curious baby bobcat climbing down the tree that hung over the edge of the roof. In my dream Leezer Beezer spotted the intruder and rushed to defend her yard, ignoring my repeated command to “Come here, Beezy!” The sight of Mrs. Bob Catt streaking off the roof on a rescue mission sent me bolting upright in bed, panting with fear and feeling around the bed for my dogs.

I didn’t leave Mom alone the next day until she agreed to call Lee.

“Lee, we have a problem. There’s a family of bobcats living on our roof. Can you help me?”

“Sure! I can trap the whole family and move them for you,” he said with assurance.

“Wow, that’s great!”

I could only hear one side of the conversation, but I heard enough for the knot in my stomach to relax and a smile to tug the corners of my mouth up. Then my mom’s eyes got all big.

“I’ll get back to you on that, Lee,” she said.

“He wants $1,000 a piece!” Mom fumed. “Three thousand dollars in charges to get our roof back. I’m sorry, sweetie. That’s too much money.”

She continued. “OK, we have to face facts. We’re on our own unless we win the lottery, and I’ve been sending our entries in for years without any results.”

“But what about the pups, Mom?”

“I know, I know. We’ll just have to come up with an answer on our own. Get us a pencil and paper and let’s sit down and think. The wildlife people gave us a few ideas, you know.”

I got a pencil and paper, and we started talking about the possibilities.

“Remember they suggested squirting water might send them packing,” I said.

“Yes, but spraying the roof with enough water to bother bobcats would be a challenge. We’d probably have to stand on a ladder with the hose. What if Mrs. Bob Catt decided she didn’t want a bath? I don’t think I’d be very good at making a quick exit from a ladder. Let’s shelve the water plan for now.”

“OK, what about bright lights like the other lady suggested?”

“That has the same drawbacks, honey. The light has to be placed up high so it will shine  on them. I hate ladders to begin with, but the idea of my head creeping up over the edge of the parapet to come face to face with an angry momma bobcat freaks me out. I’d probably panic and throw myself backward, pulling the ladder over on top of me.”

I loved my dogs, but I wasn’t ready to give up my mother to protect them. Then I remembered the other suggestion that had been made, and I smiled.

We need to set up a noise attack, Mom!”

Slowly Mom smiled back at me.

“You are right, Smart Girl! That’s something we can handle!”

A few minutes later we were on the way to the drugstore. We purchased a fifteen-dollar radio and were ready to do battle. With Beezy dancing around our feet in excitement, we carefully placed our “noise saber” on the far side of the house, beside the tree from my nightmare, and ran an extension cord out the window. We searched out the most unpleasant hard rock station we could find and cranked that sucker all the way up.

In a couple of days we were no longer hearing feet padding about on our roof after we climbed into bed at night, and Beezy was no longer going bonkers in the backyard.

“Don’t get too excited!” Mom cautioned me. “After all, our guests might be enjoying a quick trip to Disneyland or visiting relatives so Mom can show off her new babies.”

So, we left the radio on, but out of sympathy for the other wildlife in the area, we turned the volume down.

Our guests never returned, but there’s still a bobcat that claims the territory outside the walls around our house. Twice recently I’ve rounded the corner of the barn on my way to feed my horse only to stop short when I spotted him three feet away, resting against the wall atop two old logs that have lain in this same place forever. My breath always catches in my throat when I see him, but there’s never any panic in his reaction. He rises slowly, stretching insolently before stalking off in that regal cat way that makes it clear he’s none too pleased his nap was interrupted. Meanwhile I stand rock still, my heart pounding, until he’s well out of sight. I don’t know if this bobcat is one of our babies all grown up, baby’s mother, or some stranger I’ve never met before, but he’s beautiful. He’s also welcome — as long as he stays out of the yard.