Life with Predators

Blood stains in the foyer make such a terrible first impression. I’d like to be a crime novelist as much as the next writer, but even I know that when company comes over, the Windex comes out and the evidence gets hidden under the rug.

I live in The Predator Zone. One cat and one dog on the inside, countless things with sharp claws and teeth in the woods outside—hawks, falcons, coyotes, mink, foxes, and the occasional feral cat scoping out the bluebird nest boxes. We’re not even going to get to the camouflage wearin’, compound bow-totin’, pheasant and deer huntin’ son who parks his portable blind next to my car in the garage, making me slither sideways into the front seat while packing heels and a tapestry tote bag in the morning. I’ve still got venison from last year’s whitetail sitting in the freezer, waiting to be turned into stew or chili.

Indoors, Smokey the cat holds court as the resident evil genius. He has readjusted and visibly relaxed at being the only feline on the premises, now that my daughter has taken the “spare cat” back to college with her after eight months of sub-letting the litter box. The humans get more attention now, more purring, more lap-sitting, more curiosity now that he’s not looking over his shoulder tensely anticipating the next ambush. No more triangulating prey with a competitive partner, no more jockeying for the best bird-watching spot at the bay window.

He rules his fiefdom again with a one-track mind: mice. With the advent of autumn, the white-footed mice outside have again started to migrate indoors through undiscovered cracks, and Smokey is on patrol. And he proudly displays his conquests with artistic flair that would do Madison Avenue proud. Calculates the human traffic patterns, and then places his meticulously cleaned corpses for maximum admiration. Squarely in the middle of the bathroom doorway, centered on the bone-colored tile. Laid out with funereal splendor on the plush bathroom rug where you stand to brush your teeth in the morning. On the top step leading to the living room. Watch where you step in bare feet in this place!

At times the display has the perverse flavor of live theater, as he drops some tiny misbegotten rodent on the floor beside him, barely alive, with four paws in the air, quivering with shock and waiting for the inevitable coup de grace.

Somehow screaming like a chick in a horror flick has still not gotten old after two years of this sort of creative play. If he had a jewel box and opposable thumbs, I’m sure he’d be presenting his kills even more theatrically. For now we all have to settle for improv. And the knowledge that if he was sixty pounds heavier, he’d have us for breakfast in a heartbeat.

At the other end of the predatory spectrum, a few branches down the family tree from prehistoric wolves, is Bandit, the co-dependent retriever. Also lovingly referred to here as the village idiot. Nine and a half years old, we adopted him as a quivering stray puppy from an animal shelter and discovered later that there are some broken spirits you can’t entirely repair. He has all a standard Labrador’s love of chasing things—balls, sticks, cats, and boy you should see the speed he turns on when there’s a squirrel involved —and none of the happy-go-lucky spirit that naturally goes with. Once medicated with anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants, now just wearing a world-weary Gallic droop, he walks around the house with a look in his eyes of “pet me or I’m going to kill myself!” On the up side, he’s never too stand-offish to be petted.

His take on the predatory food chain is not to hunt down a mouse and then kill it, it’s to find a dead mouse and then roll in it. Left to his own devices in the cold cruel world, he wouldn’t last five minutes. Senior dog chow doesn’t grow on trees. At the age of nine and a half—close to seventy in human years—the mind isn’t all that it should be anymore, and he has some visible senior moments from time to time. He’s developed a taste for anything that’s dropped on the floor or been left on the sofa and reminds him of us: used Kleenex, pencils, granola bars still in their foil packages, toothpaste, gum of all flavors, the chocolate my sons and I brought back from Germany in our carry-on luggage and forgot to unpack right away and whisk to safety.

But despite senility and domestication, he has managed to keep an ability to follow a blood trail. Right to my flower beds.

This year was the first time I’d set to gardening with serious fervor—or any fervor at all—for the past fifteen years. Peonies, roses, coneflowers, feverfew, phlox, coreopsis, butterfly bushes, all took root and flourished remarkably for their first summer. (Okay, so one of the transplanted peonies finally died, I’m sure it’ll be back next spring!) But the delphiniums were another story. One day they were growing by leaps and bounds, the next they’d been nibbled down to the ground by neighboring rabbits like fresh spring salad.

I checked around with other gardeners, and my sister-in-law suggested a tried and true idea: dried blood meal. The smell of the stuff would keep the rabbits at bay like garlic repelling vampires. I sped to the garden store, bought a bag of blood meal, sprinkled it like pixie dust around the garden. Felt not unlike like Tinkerbell, d/b/a the “Dried Blood Fairy.” The blood meal drew a magic circle around the plants, and the cottontails kept their distance. Unmolested by the rabbits, the delphiniums once again began to grow. But every few days thereafter I noticed that something had been digging by their roots. The plants started to look spindly despite the new health regimen.

The mystery was finally solved one evening when I followed Bandit around the house to hurry him back inside. Attracted by the smell of dried blood, he was industriously digging, trying to find whatever smelly thing naturally lay beneath that he could roll in. He gets a lot more supervision when he’s outside now, and my delphiniums have started to look a whole lot healthier again.

When all is said and done, when I need amusement and the occasional heart-thudding ambush, not to mention the blood-curdling screech that comes when he takes his lounge act too close to the kitchen traffic and gets his tail accidentally stepped on, I’ll take the cat.

When I need adoration, devotion and pure, uncomplicated companionship, I’ll take the dog.

And if I want to keep my delphiniums alive…I’m putting my money on the rabbits.