How to impress your female

It was spring. Reproduction was in the air. Males of every species fought heated battles for real-estate to impress their females. Yard-work commenced again, bigger mammals trying to impress their females. That was when we noticed the rat signs.

I found some droppings under the bird feeders. Our neighbors saw rats running on the decorative boulders on our property line. That was the first time in nine years we had rats invading our yard. It was an act of war.

We spread out in small reconnaissance parties and looked for enemy bases. My group looked through the wood pile on the side of the house but came up empty handed.

My wife's group stumbled upon a large cave in the fitzers by the patio. It was a big entrance for a large mammal. The cave was probably five or six inches across.

My boys and I armed ourselves with loppers and a bucket and went to work deforesting the hedges that overgrew the planter. The first bush and fitzer came out without incident. We pulled the branches in the boy's wagon to our fire pit where they were set on fire with a small flame thrower I got on sale at Harbor Freight. It's not a torch. It's literally a flame thrower with push button ignition. Disposing of yard waste has never been more fun.

We walked back to start on the second hedge that covered the cave. I stepped on the fitzers underneath to cut a main branch. My foot didn't stop right away as the rat nest collapsed under my weight. Out ran three mouse-sized grey baby rats. My boys belted out soprano screams and lept back with lightning reflexes. I stepped on the same squishy place a second time, and a brown sixteen-inch mutant-ninja rat bolted out of the cave. Instinctively, my hands came together, closing the lopper's beak-like jaws around the over-sized rodents head.

I lifted the twitching dead body of my first kill out of the branches and hustled to the fire pit. I threw the rodent's body into the coals to cremate any disease she carried. The fire was hot and consumed the body immediately.

As I walked back to the war zone, I saw my older son jumping on the squishy part of the bushes like a little trampoline. He was scaring more rats into the open, with my six-year-son in hot pursuit with the mini-loppers he was chopping branches with. Their voices dropped to the Alto key as they became more courageous chasing the younger rats around the patio.

My older son ran to the garage and released our hunting dog. He found the nest and used his front paws to dig madly into the ground to uproot any stragglers from the nest. Two more young rats tried to escape, but the dog ran them down and ended their lives.

"Dad, I don't mind seeing a dead rat, but I feel sick when I see its guts hanging out." My nine-year-old son said.

"I don't care about the guts. Guts don't scare me." My six-year-old said as he held up the loppers and opened and closed them.

By the end of the night we killed three fitzer plants, three overgrown hedges, a small yard light, and five rats. My female was impressed.