After I posted about the groundhog that dug a big burrow right under our dining room window, next to our foundation, I called the company that keeps the neighborhood mice at bay for us. To my surprise, they called me back on a Saturday night. To my gasping still-unresolved astonishment, they said it would cost me $1200 (twelve! hundred! American! dollars!) to trap and remove one (1) groundhog.
"Excuse me, did you say $1200?" I asked her, certain I must have misunderstood.
"Yep," she answered, "let me send you a proposal and you can sign it and send it back."
"Well," I said, in the exaggeratedly calm voice that means I am deeply annoyed, "I'll need to discuss that estimate with my husband." By this I obviously meant, "You'd better be planning to gold-plate that groundhog and send him back to me in a trophy case, lady, if you are seriously planning to charge me $1200."
Phone tag ensued. I called a local guy with the same last name as the farmer who sells us bulk beef. He couldn't take on a new client right now but he referred me to a guy named Dave. Dave called me back pretty promptly after my initial message, but his mother-in-law was entering hospice care in another part of the state and he couldn't tell me how soon he'd be able to get over to my house. Dave gave me Nate's number, and so I called Nate. Nate sounded sensible and reasonably priced, so I arranged to meet him at my house on Wednesday morning.
AND YOU GUYS it was the SAME NATE, only self-employed now. "You know," he said, when I walked out to greet him, "I remember you."
"Yeah," I said to myself, reflecting with a wince on that regrettable conversation full of Edna Mode and celibate mice and anti-rat perimeters erected by the POWER of my MIND, "yeah, I bet you do."
So I did my very best impersonation of a normal non-Edna-Mode-channeling person while Nate placed his trap and his camera and talked about what would happen next, but for a few days the only thing that happened next was a stray possum strolling by and ignoring the trap. I was beginning to think that my massive weeding effort coupled with Nate's construction zone (that trap was FIXED in place -- no getting around it) had spurred our groundhog to find himself a new home with more cover and fewer clankety elements.
Today, though, five days after Nate set his trap, he sent me a 7am text. "We caught something!" he said. "I can't see what it is on my camera, though."
It was a groundhog, who seemed to have thought better of his wanderings. "There's no place like home," he said to himself, at least until Nate's trap clanged shut around him. The groundhog is gone, his oversized burrow is filled in, and it cost me <30% of that initial estimate.
I won't be getting a gold-plated groundhog in a trophy case, though.
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