PACK RATS AND POM POMS

I once owned a beautiful little place in the wilderness of British Columbia, Canada.  It was 80 acres in the Coast Mountains on the Frazier river plateau, with a river forming its boundaries on 3 sides.  A million acres of Crown land surrounded it.  The elevation was about 4000 feet and the climate was cold and dry.  In mid-winter the temperature would drop to -35 F with a foot of snow.  The river would freeze solid making a natural highway for our many long hikes.  Wildlife was plentiful and included moose, deer, bear, wolves, coyotes, fox and an assortment of smaller critters.  Bears were always a concern, but the critter that gave us the most trouble and sleepless nights was the notorious pack rat.
Now these pack rats would steal us blind.  I routinely had to dig out nests to recover stolen articles.  They were huge rats with great bushy tails.  The problem was caused by the fact that we were seasonal visitors to the place.  In our absences they would take over the cabins.  The rats considered us the intruders.
We could have dealt with their thieving habits.  What made cohabitation impossible was that these little monsters were nocturnal and, boy, did they love to play!  Our old log cabin was filled with neat places for them to hide and play.  So when we arrived for a visit, the first order of business was to evict them.  No easy task.  Until this was done no one could get any sleep.
At first, I tried to be merciful and chase them out.  What a joke!   They thought it was a game.  I then tried poison.  They wouldn’t touch it.  Then, as a last resort, I bought rat shot for my .22 pistol.
You may think me cruel, but I’m telling you sleep was impossible.  They would jump, bounce and scamper all over the place.  One of their favorite tricks was to bounce on our beds with us in them.  They would run across us as we lay in bed trying to sleep.  They made an awful racket knocking things over and gnawing on things.  We were terrorized by them - especially my 15 year old daughter.
On one visit, she and I were hiking along the frozen river and heard a loud commotion in a spruce thicket next to us.  It was obviously a very large animal.  We both froze in our tracks.  I was armed with a large bore flintlock called a Brown Bess which fired a .72 caliber round ball.  I told my daughter not to worry that this Brown Bess would stop a bear, no problem.  With the noise coming closer, she turned to me an asked, “Dad, what if there are two of them?”  As my Brown Bess was a single shot, I said, “Let’s get outta here!”  We beat feet back toward the cabin laughing all the way.  She was a game kid!
Even though she was a tough young lady, these pack rats were pushing her over the edge.  She was a cheerleader back in Texas and, on this particular trip, had brought her megaphone and pom-poms so she could practice.  The fateful night came when the pack rats started playing with her pom-poms, which were lying beside her bed.  They had been unusually active that night, bouncing off the plywood floor, taking a berm shot off a log in the wall, landing on her bed and doing a swan dive into her pom-poms.  After they had made several of these circuits, my daughter yelled, “Dad, get up here and shoot these little bucktoothed farts before I go crazy!”  I crawled out of bed, grabbed my flashlight and pistol and climbed the ladder to her sleeping loft.  I sneaked across the room and quietly climbed on her bed.  Leaning over the far side of the bed, I shined the flashlight down on her pom-poms.  There the demon was, eyes reflecting up at me.  BANG!!  The .22 sounded like a cannon going off.  The pack rat let out scream and jumped straight up in the air at least six feet.  He landed on the foot of her bed and took off past me, across my daughter, onto her pillow, jumped up on the window ledge and back down to the floor and under the bed.  Blood was everywhere, all over the bed, me and my daughter.  All the while, my daughter was screaming, “Kill it! Kill it!  I jumped down on the floor and saw it under her bed.  BANG!  Another canon shot!  This time I shot it point blank.  Blood and pack rat guts were blown out the other side of her bed all over the already bloody pom-poms.  The room looked like a war zone.  My daughter was fit to be tied.  I helped her down the ladder and my wife consoled her as best she could.
My two sons came running over from their cabin with high powered rifles.  They burst into our cabin and, seeing us covered with blood, thought the worst.  They both immediately went into a defensive stance with rifles ready as they rapidly looked around for the bear or wolf or whatever had attacked us.  I yelled, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it was just a pack rat!”  “A pack rat? A pack rat?” they yelled back.  “Do you mean to tell us a pack rat did all of this?  You scared the daylights out of us!”  I apologized and explained to everyone what had happened.  Calm was gradually restored.
The next day we cleaned up the mess.  It would be a long time before my daughter could look back on this episode and laugh about it.  However, now she tells people of the night that her dad stood on her bed clad only in his underwear, covered in blood and waving a flashlight and pistol around like a madman.
The Packrat War raged for three years.  Finally, with our troops exhausted, resources depleted and supply lines threatened, we withdrew from the field of battle.  We try to save face by saying that through negotiations we had reached a peaceful accord with the packrats, but the truth is, they had won the war.  We had been soundly defeated!
That defeat was a dark day in the Warren family history.  But, like true Americans, we put it behind us and pretend it never happened.  I eventually sold the place to a Minnesota couple.  They had called to tell us that they were on their way up to the place for their first stay and expressed how excited they were.  We never heard from them again!

Kim Warren