I’m Fixing to Get Desperate

I’m fixing to get desperate.

That armadillo is back! Well, not the last one because he’s gone to Armadillo Heaven, but one of his cousins.

After disposing of six of them in a row I figured the word had gotten around in the armadillo world that if you lingered long at my place you would end up as coyote bait.

But evidently this one hadn’t heard and he was ripping and tearing, spearing and slashing my prize lawn. He was scooping out big hunks of it while he sucked worms out of the ground.

I stayed up several nights in a row laying in wait for him, but so far he has out-smarted and out-lasted me. I had been giving up about two in the morning and I think he was coming out of his dark, dank den sometimes after that to do his mischief.

Between two of my friends and myself we had rid the world of around 16 of them, and you would think we had eliminated the scourge, but the unasked irrigation of my yard indicated that was not the case.
The only two ways you can get rid of them is by catching them red-handed when your are armed, or by discovering where their den is and laying a trap for them. If I could just figure out a way to poison them, I would make my fortune, but they won’t eat anything except what they dig up out of the ground.

With this thought in mind I mixed up some fire ant poison with some chicken broth and stuffed some macaroni I had boiled with the mixture. Then I buried them in the ground where I had seen signs of them, but I think the only thing I killed was a few more ants.

I even have nightmares about them. I recently went to sleep, not for the night, just fell asleep on the sofa as I was watching reruns of Sanford and Son while I was waiting until it got late enough for his dinner time. I dreamt that I walked out on my deck and in the light of a full moon there was a whole herd of them digging divets in my yard. Must have been a hundred of ’em.

You know how dreams are, when you just can’t seem to get anything done. Well, that’s what happened in this one, I couldn’t seem to get my rifle loaded and by the time I did they all ran down and jumped into the lake before I could get my sites on one of them. I woke up in a cold sweat and jammed the clip in my rifle and chambered a round.

They are about as blind as a bat, but they are cunning, cunning and ugly, a bad combination in my mind. I’ve caught them as early as ten at night and as late as two in the morning. This one evidently knew my hours.

Well, I’m cunning, too, and I’m going to use all my cunning to nail this latest interloper, this nasty varmint who hides underneath the ground during the day and comes out in the wee hours to wreak havoc.
I’m going to set a trap where I trapped the last one. It’s about as difficult to trap them as it is to shoot them, but I have accumulated some armadillo expertise since I declared war on them, and I know that newly arrived ones usually take up residence where the departed ones lived, so that’s where I set my trap, right where the last one met with a fatal accident.

I’ve got my motion lights all set up and I’m fixing to be ready for Mister Armadillo.