It sucks to be stuck in muck

I've never been stuck in quicksand.  I understand it is an unpleasant experience.  Like falling into a vat of Cream of Wheat.  I've never been stuck in a vat of hot breakfast cereal either, but I've eaten it so I feel like I'm an authority.

I have been stuck in muck, though.  Up to my butt.  It reminded me of a a great children's story called, "Ducks in Muck".  It is a fun read for kids and parents alike.  It was the first thing I thought of when I got stuck.  "One schmuck, stuck in muck.  Oh yuck." 

I was hunting geese in Idaho last week.  It was cold and the wind was blowing about 20 m.p.h.  My hunting partner and I set up 95 goose decoys and spent the morning waiting for the birds to fly.  We could see an ocean of waterfowl off in the distance after the sun came up.  After a couple of hours we decided to walk towards them.  My hunting partner went off through the brush on the right, and I headed left.   I wanted to hide by a little dead tree in the stream out on the marsh.  I took off with my dog and we made our way into the marsh.  I was doing fine, only sinking in a few inches with each step.  My dog floated over the mud with endless enthusiasm and agility. 

As I approached my spot, the patches of grass in the mud thinned and disappeared.  I figured it was just where more water was running from the connecting stream.  My next step absorbed my leg to the knee.  I wasn't surprised to sink into mud that thick.  Knee level isn't unusual.  So I made the mistake of taking two more steps which sunk me into the mud just above my inseam.  I started struggling to get out.  Panic and a touch of claustrophobia set in as my lets cemented deeper into the muck.  That was when the words of "Stuck in muck"  came into my mind.  Only my mental version was picking more profane rhymes as I fought for my freedom. 

The problem with marsh muck is that it is thick.  It's like tar.  It's hydrated clay.  I could have made a ceramic bowl for Mother's day out of this stuff. 

As I struggled to pull my leg out, the other leg sank in further and the leg I was trying to pull out was coming out of my wader boot.  As perspiration covered my body from inside the waders to top of my head, I took a break and leaned back, literally sitting where I was standing as if a stool was behind and underneath me.  My dog walked up and laughed at me, the webbing between his toes acting like snowshoes keeping him from sinking at all.  The sun glistened over his chocolate coat and he posed like a canine body builder, every muscle in his legs popping out.  He looked at me as if to say, "Hey buddy, you could be this fit too if you only ate dog kibble.  No more Hostess for you!" 

My mind raced back to a trip my family took as a kid to the La Brea tar pits.  In L.A. county there is a place where tar bubbled up to the surface making a small lake.  Scientists speculated that when it rained, water would pool over the tar and animals would come to drink and get stuck.  There, on display are mammoths, saber tooth tigers, and human remains.  One display lets you pull on a handle that is stuck in tar.  It doesn't move. 

"Cache, I'm stuck.  Go tell Pa to bring the rescue chopper!"  I yelled in my best southern accent.

He kept laughing at me.

I unloaded my shotgun and pocketed the shells.  I tried using the stock of my gun as a shovel to push some of the muck from my boots as they came out.  It wasn't working.  More muck flowed like thick lava into the holes I shoveled.  I considered tossing my gun onto the grass, but decided against it.  I said a little prayer.  I'd been stuck over 20 minutes and I was getting tired and frustrated.  Then I got angry.   I fired my legs like pistons and fought for the edge.  If I could get several feet over, I would be free.  It took a few more minutes of fighting but I managed to get up to my knees again and then to where I only sank in a few inches.  I stood up tall and took large gasping breaths of air, celebrating my new found freedom. 

I met up with my hunting partner again.  He didn't even know I was in trouble.  He laughed at me too.  I was feelin' the love.  We hiked back to our decoys.  The wind had picked up to 45 m.p.h.  Many of our decoys were blowing away.  Some were in the stream floating out to sea.  We spent the next two hours chasing plastic geese all over the countryside.  My dog did a couple of dozen water retrieves to bring our decoys back to dry land. 

We packed up and went to Denny's.  The Lumberjack slam never tasted so good.  I said another prayer, grateful to not be stuck in muck any more. 

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.