Shootin' It Up With Ma and Pa Kettle Peter B. Steiger 04/05/04 My wife wants me to embarrass her. I don't know what she's thinking. She knows if I write about the weasel shooting day, it's only going to make her look like Granny Clampett from the historical TV documentary show, The Beverly Hillbillies. Yet for some reason she has been pestering me to write about her desire to stand half-dressed on the back porch shooting at varmints in our yard, so here it is. It started when I noticed a critter scampering around our vintage collection of dried cement. We bought about 20 bags of cement mix several years ago for some project I can't even remember, and planned to use them "real soon now" as we programmers say when promising delivery on an important computer project for customers. Well, "real soon now" turned into days, then weeks, then months... did you know that a $12 plastic tarp from Wal-Mart does not keep bags of cement mix dry during thunderstorms? Especially when Wyoming's trademark 800-mile-an-hour wind accompanies the rain. So now we have some wood pallets supporting about 90 tons of solid bag-shaped cement rocks, some of which still have tatters of the bags stuck to them along with a few remaining shreds of that tarp. I'm not sure what part this installation of cutting-edge art nouveau will play if we ever get around to building a house in the partially completed foundation which the cement currently occupies, but for now it makes a handy bench. The pallets also make a nice home for who knows what strange creatures lurk in the darkness below, including a weasel that popped (ha ha) out to look at his shadow or something last Sunday after we got home from church. Sylvia looked at the weasel, then looked at the email confirming delivery of 25 chicks on their way to us, then looked at the weasel again... and that's when things got scary. I should explain that we already qualify as redneck trailer trash on several points: we have more nonfunctional than functional vehicles in our yard; we shop almost exclusively at Wal-Mart; we live in a single-wide mobile home; we never throw anything out so our 8 acres, or at least the entire area within throwing distance of the house, is littered with unfinished project we'll complete one of these days, leftover lumber and plumbing supplies, and innumerable shell casings from our vast gun collection. The gun collection came about a few years back, before we even lived here, when we started noticing scary creatures snooping around our land. Sure, it's cute when a deer (or 12 or 64) wanders across the yard, but when coyotes and skunks want to share the love, the natural instinct of the homesteader is to kill everything nonhuman that crosses our property line. Sylvia bought herself a .22 Ruger semiautomatic pistol and went (along with the kidlings) to a gun safety course offered by the sheriff's department. By the end of that summer, the kids knew the history, purpose, and function of every type of firearm along with most of the hunting laws for this state. I started reminiscing about the days when I was a crack shot with a rifle and picked a hawk out of the sky with my trusty .22 back in high school on my family's place in Crockett, Texas. Sylvia took my reminiscing for an active desire and presented me with a new rifle on my next birthday; then she decided that one pistol wasn' t enough and armed herself with yet another, some tiny ladylike thing that you can hardly see it's so small. Our family is now armed to the teeth and ready to defend ourselves against any and all weasels that dare to interfere with our concrete blobs. The only problem is, none of us can hit the ground if we point straight down. My glory days are long gone; 25 years of staring at a computer screen doesn't do much for your long distance vision. Sylvia wears glasses with the same prescription as the Hubble telescope, and the kids have the steady hand you'd expect of wild teenagers who can't sit still for 19 seconds. So we have been practicing diligently ever since we got the guns, and we're just about to the point that Daniel and I can nail an AOL CD from 15 feet away every time. Sylvia, too, has decent "grouping" from 15-20 feet away from her targets. Of course, that AOL CD rarely scampers around like weasels do, and that brings me to the hijinks of last Sunday. I noticed the weasel and ran for the camera, saying I want to get a shot of the creature to show animal experts who can answer the question that has been haunting us since our first sighting of these little guys: Weasel or prairie dog? I guess Sylvia only heard the part about weasel and shooting, and went for the Ruger. Now, you have to get the whole picture here. We got home and it was hot and we have no air conditioning, so we had removed our church clothes and were much more... relaxed and cool, informal, call it what you will. Sylvia was in her old nightshirt... you can be really casual when your nearest neighbors are a quarter mile away. So here she is, standing in the back door of our trailer in her nightshirt, blasting away at a weasel that was doing little more than laughing at her efforts. I think once she got close enough that she actually did manage to kick up some dirt in his face, but he and his girlfriend just kept hopping around the concrete blobs and under the pallet, not showing any concern that a stray bullet might accidentally find its way through their flesh. I helpfully offered up relevant movie quotes; watching her blast away at those defenseless pieces of wood made me think of the can shooting scene in Steve Martin's sophisticated drama The Jerk and I yelled "It's the wood! She hates wood! Everybody stay away from the wood!" Honestly, all we needed to complete the Ma and Pa Kettle image (great movie, another real-life documentary starring Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride) was to black out a few teeth and fetch a jug o' moonshine to steady her nerves. I hope this story makes it perfectly clear: stay away from our pile of concrete blobs, and nobody gets hurt.