Licorice and the Gopher Bait

     Licorice was down in the wet grass, not the mowed stuff, the long stuff.  It was a foggy damp morning.  But he wasn’t on his back, his back legs extended, front legs bent at nearly a right angle while he twisted and wiggled like an alligator swatting flies, groaning with pleasure.

     No, he was on his side, his front feet extended past his muzzle as if in full stride, his back feet stuck out behind him, also as if in full stride.  I couldn’t hear his groan because I was astride the Ford tractor, backing towards the red barn.  Licorice lay too close to the path I was taking.  He wasn’t moving out of the way as he normally would have.

    I depressed the clutch pedal on the Ford and turned to yell, “Licorice, get out of the road!”  The words never left my mouth.  Something was wrong.  I shifted to neutral and jumped off the tractor.  When I stooped over him, I could see his eyes vibrating back and forth. 

     When I shut the tractor off, I could hear him groan.  It wasn’t the groan of ecstasy Lik would utter when he was rolling in fresh green cow poop.  It was more like the groan of Atlas struggling to shoulder the universe.

     I picked him up.  He didn’t relax or squirm to get down.  It was as if I had picked up a six-inch log two feet long.  He stayed stretched out, as if caught in full running stride.

     What could be wrong?  It didn’t take long to come up with an answer: strychnine.  The pocket gophers had been a nuisance for years, undermining Granny’s garden, tunneling down the planted row eating the planted seeds before they could even sprout.  They had even invaded the bluegrass lawn, throwing up their mounds beneath the clothesline. 

      The most effective bait for the gophers had been a poisoned wheat of some kind.  Granny ordered it from one of the many garden catalogs she got.  It came in a cardboard box about half the size of a crushproof cigarette pack.  A dozen wheat kernels into a rodent tunnel near the gopher mound assured that the fan-shaped mound would grow no more.

     At first I was skeptical of the marvelous claims made on the package, but when I found out how effective it was, I quickly used up the three boxes Granny had ordered and received in the mail.  She was able to order another batch, but a year or two later, when she wrote to the company because the stuff was no longer listed in their catalog, she got a reply stating the bait was discontinued because the active ingredient, (rotenone) was no longer available, was in fact illegal for use as a rodenticide.

      The cynics in my circle declared that any time something was effective, it was automatically outlawed.  Granules of Torodon, used to kill bindweed effectively suffered the same fate, they pointed out.  I countered that it was probably nepotism:  the local rodent population probably was related to the dirty rats that run the EPA.       

     There followed another more interesting attempt to control the pocket gophers.  The idea came from the Farm News magazine.  A fellow was advertising this mole-killer.  It consisted of a three-foot wand with a hose that connected to a propane tank.  The wand had two triggers.  One trigger released a jet of propane gas. 

      As in baiting the gophers, you had to find a tunnel in the vicinity of their telltale dirt mound.  You inserted the end of the wand into the hole and pulled the propane trigger.  After twenty or thirty seconds of propane, you released that trigger and pulled a second one which activated a battery-powered igniter similar to the one on your modern gas stove or furnace.  Boom!

      The propane exploded.  If inhaling the gas didn’t do them in, any gophers in the tunnel system when the spark hit would suffer fatal injuries from the resultant explosion.  The price for the wand and hose seemed a bit overboard, so I never ordered one. 

     In those days, the propane tank you used for your gas grill had female left-handed threads used to connect to the regulator on the grill.  It occurred to me that the acetylene hose on my torch was also left-handed.  In an idle moment, I removed the acetylene hose from the tank and tried it in the propane tank from the gas grill.  It fit perfectly.  With the largest welding tip on the torch handle, I could inject propane into a gopher tunnel.

     I had mixed results at first.  The problem was igniting the propane in the tunnel.  I didn’t have the electric sparker of the commercial wand.  When one plans destruction, ideas appear magically.  Something in my head told me I could drip a few drops of gasoline down the same hole I had used to inject the propane, drop a few more drops two or three feet away from the hole in a flammable trail, and light the gasoline.

     Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn’t.  The last time I used the propane method, there appeared a sizable collection of dirt mounds beneath an elm tree in the north farmyard.  I determined to rid that area of gophers.  The first two attempts, the ignited gasoline trail failed to fire the propane.  After both failures, I freshened the propane with a new 30-second charge.  The third attempt was successful.

     Kawhoom! It went.  A continuous puff of dust arose along a crooked trail for about twenty feet from my intrusion into the tunnel, to near the elm tree.  The concussion of the explosion thumped the bottoms of my feet.  Fire flew out of the injection hole.  Air from the explosion brushed past my face and rattled the leaves in the tree branches above.  For a second or two, I could hear small pebbles and clods falling back into the grass and leaves around me.  A jagged crack in the earth appeared along the same line that the dust puff had taken seconds before.

     That put an end to the gophers in that colony, as no more mounds rose up.  It also ended my experiment with propaning gophers.

      Sometime after that, I discovered I could buy strychnine treated grain with a pesticide applicator’s license, which I had so that I could purchase and use Torodon, necessary for controlling bindweed and Canada thistle.  I bought a hundred pounds of treated milo.

     It was problematic, too.  It came in a paper and plastic bag like a big bag of dog food.  I stored it in the shop to keep it dry.  The mice enjoyed chewing a hole in it and sampling some of the goodies therein.  Those adventurous mice found their life expectancy reduced to hours.

     I must admit I might have helped the mice enjoy their cuisine by spreading a little of the product around in places more convenient for them, even though such practices were strictly forbidden by the product label.  It was to be used in the tunnels of burrowing rodents, only, no use on the land surface.  Any dead rodents should be buried or cremated so that preying animals such as coyotes, cats, birds,--or, dogs--wouldn’t be poisoned by consuming the rodent who had died from the bait.

      Here was poor old Licorice displaying classic strychnine poisoning symptoms.  I put Lik in the blue pickup, ran to the house to tell Granny I had to take him to the vet and off we went.

     Normally, when riding in the pickup, which he hated, Lik would nose in between the right door and the seat.  He could work himself about half a body length into that niche, leaving his tail end exposed on the floorboard.  This trip, he was on the floorboard beside the transmission hump.  He had relaxed into a limp fur ball.

     I grabbed Lik and entered the vet’s office.  Melanie was on duty.  The vet was north of town working cattle, wouldn’t be back for two or three hours.  She took a look at Lik who had turned into a log again, complete with quivering eyeballs and directed me to another vet further down the road.

      In the second vet’s office, Lik had relaxed and lay limp on the examining table while I described his symptoms and the situation with the strychnine.  (I left out the part about facilitating the mice’s dining pleasure.)  The first thing the vet did was grab Lik by the short hair just back of his black plastic nose and started pouring hydrogen peroxide down his throat.  A lot of it dribbled down onto the examining table, but Lik was lapping and swallowing, probably to keep from choking.

     Soon, Lik started retching and coughing, and then he was barfing into the flat pan the vet sat before him.  The vet put on his rubber glove and started fishing through the foamy, mucousy contents in the flat pan.  Briefly, I thought I might have to use the pan.  There were no bones in the vomit, but the vet did produce some hair, rodent hair he said.  Diagnosis confirmed. 

     Lik was treated to another round of peroxide which he again barfed up.  This time, mucous and foaming peroxide was all that came up.  Satisfied that Lik’s stomach no longer contained anything that might be harboring strychnine, the vet told me he would hook him up to an IV and be sure he had plenty of liquid to flush the poison out of his system.  I should return at 6 o’clock to pick him up.

     I was there promptly at six.  Lik was in a little 2 X 2 cage with a tube running somewhere into his left foreleg and up to a bottle suspended above his cage.  He perked up when I came in, sat up.  The vet opened the cage door, removed the IV, and placed Lik on the floor.  He came over to me and I reached down to pat him.  His tail wagged.

     Only one thing worried the vet.  With all the liquid he had been giving him, Lik hadn’t peed all day.  If he hasn’t peed by eight or so, better call him, he said.  We made our way from the surgery to the front desk.  As he made out his bill and I wrote out a check, we exchanged pleasantries.  Neither of us paid any attention to old Licorice.

     I pocketed my checkbook and got ready to gather Lik up and head for the pickup.  No Lik.  Where did he go?  The waiting room was in one corner of the building separate from the front desk.  There were three or four wooden chairs and an old couch sitting on a linoleum floor.  I looked in and saw Lik in the act of anointing one of the wooden chair legs.  From the amount of liquid on the floor, it was obvious this was not the first anointing Lik had done.  The puddle covered the main floor and threatened to expand underneath the couch.

    The vet grabbed two big towels and spread them over the floor.  “ Boy, I’m glad I already paid the bill,” I said.  “You would probably tack on a pretty large cleanup fee.”

     The vet laughed and assured me Lik’s mess was not the first one he had cleaned up in the waiting room.  I said that explained it.  Lik would never break his manners inside the house, as he had demonstrated by his daylong restraint in the cage.  His sniffer told him other dogs had used the waiting room for a latrine.  If they could, he could, too.  No need to worry about calling the vet because Lik couldn’t pass his water.

     At home in the back yard, Lik frolicked in the attention of the family who made a fuss over him, thankful he was okay.  He sat and took his evening meal slowly and thoughtfully, as was his wont.

     The next morning, I had to capture him to get him into the pickup.  He sat in the seat until I got in and we began to move.  Down on the floor he went and tucked his head between seat and door where he would stay until we got within a mile of the farm.  Then up he would come, back onto the seat and watch, tail wagging, until we arrived at the mailbox.  I turned off the main road, stopped, opened my door.  Across my lap he skipped, down onto good old Mother Earth, and off he would take, trying his best to beat the pickup in a race a short half mile from mailbox to farmyard.  Licorice was back.