We lost another casualty in our predator wars here at the house.
I suppose the word wars is inaccurate since that somehow implies one side is fighting.
And aside from putting up motion sensor lights, we’re not striking back much at the critters who are taking and killing our animals.
This time it was our rooster.
Now this guy was a rooster of the first order – he looked after his hens and when our cocker spaniel started messing with his flock he flew at the dog with spurs bared.
It never really hurt the dog, but she rarely pays attention to us when she gets the chance to be outside without a leash, which is like hardly ever.
Anyway, he was lost to us late last week.
MaLinda figures he tried to intervene when something – I don’t know what – started bothering the hens and the whatever it is turned on him.
We cleared out some growth back of our property in hopes of removing a possible sanctuary, but apparently that wasn’t an issue.
Now that he’s gone, the hens aren’t venturing very far from our place.
He’s the second rooster we’ve lost this spring and summer.
I don’t know about y’all, but every 4th of July I tend to start remembering Independence Days of long ago.
Someone my age – I’ll be 39 again this August – has seen lots of 4th of July celebrations.
Mostly it’s family gatherings, fireworks and, more distantly, baseball games.
But there is one Fourth that has my abnormal personality written all over it.
I was eight and my mother had expressly told me we weren’t going to this rodeo on the Fourth.
My Dad was up in North Texas checking out a newspaper for sale in Electra.
Looking back I truly didn’t care about the rodeo, but I started messing around – again without any ulterior motivation – with the front-door lock.
And, of course, I locked the front door – no other doors were unlocked.
My mother didn’t take kindly to the act of sabotaging her expressly worded mandate about no rodeo.
I got a whipping – all the while wondering why I had messed with the door.
We still didn’t go to the rodeo, as if that mattered.
She told that story to relatives and friends over the years, always inserting her belief that it was my clever way of getting my way.
Yea, it was my clever tendency to mess with stuff without thinking.
Here’s hoping all of our readers have a fantastic Fourth!
