Being a good farmer takes a certain type of personality. I don’t have it. The cowboy and I have raised cattle and hay for the last thirty years, usually with seventy or more acres of hay.
Now, I tend to be rather laid back when it comes to farming. The water will eventually get to the bottom of the field. Most of the hay will grow. What’s so hard about this?
On the other hand, the cowboy has an elaborate set of farming rules. We argued about, uh, discussed our differing opinions for several years until I found a job in town, and he farmed to his heart’s content.
One of the scourges of growing that much alfalfa is a small rodent called a gopher. It moves into a perfectly nice field, has tons of babies and each digs holes at an unbelievable rate. As the irrigation water runs down the field and into a hole, it disappears. The area below the hole dries out, and the hay dies.
The cowboy has waged all-out war on these burrowing invaders for years, checking his traps daily, spring, summer and fall. During this time, he’s tried repeatedly to convince me that since my hands are smaller, it would be easier for me to set the traps. I’m proud to say I didn’t fall for this con.
The county pays two dollars a tail and with three hundred gophers a year, this is a nice little side line. He’s saved the tails and cashed them in and the bodies were…well, let’s just say our dog Cindy was a gopher gourmet. Three years ago, he checked his trap line and found a trap was stuck. When the cowboy finally worked it free, there he was, Humongo-Gopher. It was the biggest gopher he’d ever trapped, maybe the biggest gopher in the world.
He told his friends about Humongo, and they scoffed. Forced to take action, he took the body in for a viewing and was proven right. All agreed it was the biggest rodent they’d seen. It was a fact. We owned a trophy gopher. Now how many people can say that? Since it was a trophy, we couldn’t feed it to the dog, so it went into the freezer to be preserved for posterity.
The problem is I don’t have much of a memory. If it isn’t in front of my face, I tend to forget it exists. Because of that, I’ve spent the last three years calmly going to my big freezer to get meat for dinner only to be confronted each time I opened the door by long yellow teeth and curved claws. Humongo looked like he could leap off the shelf and attack. The only thing that kept me from jumping out of my skin was the fact he was enclosed in a Zip Lock bag. Still, it was a shock.
Humongo finally went to the big gopher heaven in the sky this fall, and I no longer have to fear my freezer. The cowboy suggested we have a taxidermist mount Humongo and put him in the trophy room with the Elk and Deer antlers. That’s where I put my foot down. I guess in the cowboy’s mind a trophy is a trophy but really, Humongo was just a super-sized rodent.
