standing feature
north of unreal
"Pop! Goes the Weasel"
One night, a wild white weasel came waltzing across our kitchen floor and wouldn’t leave.
Outside, the animal had seemed much sweeter, frolicking with its pale-haired partner around the garage. Even when that weasel followed the smell of garbage and crawled into the front seat of our small car with the bad muffler for a noisy trip to the dump, we didn’t mind. It made for a good story.
“Ermine,” my husband had said, satisfied.
It was a feral time for us all. Our freshly born baby was teething and biting and bucking. My husband was working late every night, coming home with a black stripe down his face, his clothes clotted with pulp. And every day, I was in a battle of wits with a weasel, which scoured our walls for mice, and left dry twisty turds and triangular puddles in every room of the house. He was everywhere, and I could smell him.
Round and round the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought ‘twas all in fun
Pop! goes the weasel!”
I was frantic. I called the government. I called my family. My father advised me to barricade myself in a room with the baby until my husband got home. I called the neighbours. The neighbours said, “Try a mouse trap.” They said, “Watch your baby. Those weasels are like vampires. They suck the blood right out of baby chickens.”
I went online to learn that weasels in New Zealand carry tuberculosis. I learned the University of Missouri considers them “fearless fighters who do not hesitate to attack victims many times larger than themselves.” I learned that weasels could be captured in live traps in which “fresh meat is suitable bait.”
Meanwhile, the baby is learning to chew her own toes. I am weeping on the front porch.
“Relax,” says my husband, wiping the grit from his face. “He’ll catch all the mice in the house and then he’ll disappear.”
The next day, I call Prince George’s pest control companies, who are willing to kill rats and cockroaches but are cowed in the face of a weasel. I call another new mother, who tells me they, too, had a weasel in their house, that ran across the sleeping shoulders of a visiting cousin. The weasel forced them to set live traps with cans of fish as bait until their whole house smelled like a salmon cannery. They finally caught the weasel in a rat trap, but it ran around their house dragging the trap on its back, until it was slain with a block of wood.
I call the government again, but the regional district laughs at my inquiry, and the conservation officers are busy with bears and poachers, and can only advise me to leave a trail of cat food for the weasel to follow out the door. Finally, I am patched through to an angel of mercy disguised as a government secretary. Pam offers to come by our house after work, with a live trap and some bait. Pam once helped another woman who had a squirrel loose in her house. “She was terrified,” says Pam. So, Pam drove over to the woman’s house after work and together they closed the curtains and contained the perimeter until Pam captured the snapping squirrel in some big mitts. Pam came out to our house and said, “I think I hear him!”
I set the live weasel trap downstairs and baited it with Friskies Chunks Chicken Dinner in Gravy on a blue plastic plate. Then, I sat down to wait.
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