Critters 1 (Fred)

As long as I'm waiting for good things to happen in the garden, I'll tell some gardening stories, starting with Fred.

Some years ago, just as the tomato plants were really starting to bear fruit, something would come in the garden at night. Whatever it was, it pretty much destroyed anything that was ripening. In particular, I found ripe tomatoes on the ground and melons ruined because something had bitten into them. Naturally I was a little upset. Not to mention annoyed that whatever was doing this was purely destructive, since it didn't seem to actually want to eat the tomatoes.

One evening, I happened to turn the corner into the garden just in time to see a large groundhog duck under the deck. Armed with the knowledge, I returned to the house and announced that I now knew the species of the culprit. That's when I discovered that this particular animal wasn't unknown to others in the family.

"That's Fred," I was told. "Fred lives under the deck. We see him all the time."

"Fred!" I said. "I'm going to take a shotgun to Fred!" (There's a convenient gun store on Rockville Pike, after all.)

This idea wasn't very popular, and I had to admit that it wasn't practical. For one thing, discharging firearms in the City of Rockville is probably illegal. For another thing, my experience with guns has been limited to a couple of times on the target range at Boy Scout camp and Israeli Civil Guard training in 1980. This seemed unlikely to qualify me to actually use a shotgun to any effect.

As it happens, Fred went away the next year, and so I didn't have to worry about critters for a couple of years. Until the rabbits came...but I'll tell that story another time.