We had one. Around 4:30 am Cleo starts randomly barking. I tell her to be quiet because I haven't slept in over 23 years. But Erik tells me to be quiet because he hears something. He jumps up, turns on the lights. I say Oh please shut the light off and let me go to sleep. Then I hear a screech. I'm not sure why he's dragging his fingernails down the chalkboard but then I realize we have no chalkboard. There's something in the house, he says. And then, I hear a swoosh and a "goddamn, it's a bat."
Both Erik and I are afraid of bats. When he was 8 and lived in Denver, a bat flew in his and his sister's bedroom and, the funny though I'm sure apocryphal story goes that his mom rushed in, saw the bat, and pressed her kids to the floor to make a mad dash out of the room. I'm sure the story is not true, but if it is, I don't blame her.
And, when my sisters were camping with my grandpa, he got bit by a bat. He swatted it down and killed it and it DID have rabies. He had shots in the stomach for years.
So we're fucking afraid. Even Cleo, who unearthed the beast, was afraid. Only Box the cat was fearless--jumping up in the air to catch the thing as Erik made me walk behind him, holding up a blanket, as we shoed him toward the outdoors. Actually, I only know what Box was doing from Erik's rendition because I held the blanket up in front of my head the whole time. I didn't see this bat. But I heard it. It was big, as Erik said. As an eagle (later, it was downgraded to falcon-sized). Finally, we (by we I mean Erik and my walking blanket) got the bat to the backroom. I stood holding the blanket against the entrance of the kitchen while Erik went outside to open the backdoors. But they were locked. So he came in and crawled Army-style to the door and opened it. We turned on the fan and the light and out he went. So we think. We spent the next hour making sure there was no more bat.
We'll spend the next six weeks making sure he doesn't get back in. We dan't find a whole in a screen or a gap in the wall anywhere. He may have been here for a long time.
My neighbor Beth was sanguine--well, at least you won't have any mosquitoes for awhile. Indeed.
4 comments:
Yes, no mosquitoes! Maybe we should get a bat and put it on a leash by the backdoor. Better than tiki torches.
I am afraid of bats, but I have no better reason than those scary late night movies showing bats sucking blood from cows.
When I lived in NorCal, near Mt. Lassen, which is an "active" volcano, we always saw bats. A ton of them. My mom, in her own neurotic way, had me convinced that they all carried rabies. So I would have been like you, behind a blanket.
And, also, I don't think I can complain about my raccoons who live under the house anymore.
at least it wasn't a possum... how do you spell oppossum?
We have bats, apparently, up at our cabin in Idaho. My dad keeps assuring me that we'll run into bat poop when we go up there this weekend. I am not a fan of bats, even though I hear they're great nature-citizens, whatever. I am not a multiculturalist. I believe that bats, spiders, and all other critters, should stay in nature, where they belong.
Post a Comment