If You're Eating, Stop Reading Now

I know it's never going to be anything good when I catch The Smell. That particular Smell with a capital "S" that means one thing: a decomposing animal.

This time The Smell was located within smelling distance of the dining room door. I caught the scent a few times while I was going in and out, yet I found myself not-so-strangely reluctant to seek out its source. But knowing that nothing good ever comes of ignoring The Smell, I went on a search and destroy mission.

About ten feet from the door, behind the magnolia tree, I found it. It was the remains of some kind of rodent, a rat or a chipmunk maybe. So little remained of it that it was hard to tell its original shape, thanks to the fact that it was literally writhing with hundreds of maggots.

Oh yes. It was just as vomit-inducing as it sounds.

Charlie heard my exclamation of disgust and came over to investigate. I instructed him not to touch it and grabbed a handy shovel to scoop the whole mess up.

It broke in half.

I KNOW. Just when I thought it couldn't get any more foul, I end up with half a maggoty corpse on a shovel and the other half splatted on the ground with maggots wiggling away all over the place.

Do you want to throw up yet just reading about it? Yeah, me too.

I asked Charlie to grab a stick for me to push the rest of the filth onto the shovel, which he obligingly did. Then I asked him to take a nearby watering can, fill it with water, and wash all the maggots off the stone while I went to the gully to dispose of the horror on the shovel.

He got most of them washed away. I completed the flooding with a large bucket of water and then decided to share the whole happy episode with you.

Hey, at least I didn't take a picture. You're welcome.

Edited to add: Oh, BUT WAIT! There's more! About twenty minutes later, I was up on the front porch with Jack when Cubby wandered down to the front lawn by Otty and said, "Yuck. There's some gross meat here that Otty brought." It was a big piece of a deer lung or something. God knows where she found it. It was already covered in flies and starting to get The Smell. Back for the shovel and a stick for scooping, then flinging. 

What a beautiful day this is turning out to be.