"Woodchuck" is a slang term for redneck used by A.'s friend J., the one who fishes ALL THE DAMN TIME. I think it's much funnier than the word "redneck." At least I did, until I realized that I had become one.
Yesterday I was sitting on the front porch, enjoying the beautiful day and the beautiful view, when Leda the Fluffball came trotting around the corner with a freshly killed woodchuck (a real one, not a redneck) in her mouth. She was very pleased with herself. I was not so pleased, knowing I would eventually have to dispose of the furry corpse that she would inevitably leave on the front lawn. But when she first catches them, she likes to carry them around for awhile, maybe chew on them a little, then she abandons them. She doesn't usually eat them. So I left her to it and waited until she got bored. Except . . .
An hour or so later, after I had gone back inside to do one thing or another, I walked out the door and Leda comes prancing down the path looking like something out of a Stephen King movie. She had blood all down the white fur on her chest, all over her white legs, and smeared all around her mouth. She looked more like Cujo than Lassie. It was quite disgusting. Apparently, she had decided she was hungry enough to snack on the woodchuck.
Now, our dogs eat nasty things all the time, but I try to keep them from doing so when I can, if only to avoid worms. So I locked Leda in the pen and went to wrangle the puppies away from Leda's leftovers. Since I was just about to start dinner (and nothing stimulates the appetite like a half-eaten woodchuck), I left the corpse on the lawn until after dinner, when I could get the pitchfork and dispose of it by flinging it over the fence into the gully.
Fast-forward a couple of hours, I'm down on the front lawn contemplating the mess Leda had left. She had eaten the middle part of the woodchuck, so that the back legs and the head flopped all over the place when I hooked it with the pitchfork. And at just that moment, as I was standing on the front lawn right next to the driveway, with a disemboweled woodchuck on a pitchfork, the MiL's fancy friend drove up in her Land Rover, with her window down. She was all smiley and affable, until she got a look at what I was doing. So I told her, "Just hang on a minute while I fling this."
"Just hang on a minute while I fling this." And that was the moment I knew: I have become a woodchuck.
5 comments:
Love it - I laughed out loud. I can picture this scene...!
Alyssa
As long as you don't end up like that other woodchuck. Ugh.
You can't be a woodchuck if you call yourself one (that has something to do with subversive identity things that are too modern for me to understand and explain, so take it on belief).
However, dear, have you been vaccinated for rabies recently? The dogs are safe, make sure you are too! (yes, yes, I know there is no human vaccination, only the post-exposure thing) But, mother of woodchucks that I am, it was my first thought on reading your bloody bit. Mikey
LOL. You're so funny. This reminds me of when we got our hunter dog and cats. At the time, my mom worked out of her home, so she always had her assistant/occasional clients or deliveries coming to the house. And these little boogers, nearly every day, left little dead body "presents" on our front door step to welcome them all! LOL. I'll never forget the day our pup decided to play with a dead skunk. Gads. Skunk is bad enough, dead skunk is something I never want to encounter ever again, haha.
According to some sources, when cats leave dead animals on the doorstep they're not leaving "gifts". That's what they do to their young when they're teaching them to hunt. "Look, see this? This is a bird. We kill these and eat them."
So basically your cat is calling you a poor hunter.
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