The Mound Beneath My Feet

It was a scene reminiscent of an Elmer J. Fudd hunting cartoon. My granddog Milton Barry and I were stalking wild game. I was wearing my plaid hunting cap and my wool coat. In my hands I carried a 12 gage 1897 Winchester pump shotgun. We were walking on tiptoes. I had never seen a dog do that before.

With every step we took, an upright string bass played a note. I stopped and looked around. Where was that string bass music coming from?

I turned to Milton. “Be verwy, verwy, qwiet,” I whispered. “They are reawwy, reawwy, sneaky.”

Just then Milt stopped and took point. I raised my shotgun and looked in the direction he was pointing. There, in the middle of my back yard, a mound of dirt was forming.

I let out a rattling giggle. “I’ve got you now you qwazy mole.” Raising my shotgun to my shoulder, I fired a round of birdshot into the mound which sent topsoil flying in all directions and put a rather large hole in my drain field pipe.

After a thorough search, the conclusion was made that I blew him to smithereens. The next morning there were ten new mounds in my yard.

“Scallops Aquatics,” the common mole. My archenemy. My Professor James Moriarty. Always there but never seen. Rarely caught, continually mocking, and driving me crazy! The bane of my existence. They have taken my otherwise nice-looking lawn and turned it into what looks like a pimply-faced boy going through puberty.

I have been quite successful at eliminating most pests from my property. Mice are easy, rats are a little harder.  Stray cats, skunks, opossums, raccoons, deer, starlings, woodpeckers, ants, and the occasional herd of cows are all doable, but moles are by far the most stubborn.

I have been up against these demons since I was a boy and I have tried every idea and product imaginable. These ideas include running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe on the family car into the tunnels, using various forms of poison worms and pellets, and multiple expensive commercial traps. There is no single one-way that works best. I even applied for a patent on the ingenious, “Mitchell Mole Moat”. This required me to think like a mole. It turns out that moles don’t think like me.

I still have not figured out if the damage in my yard and back field is caused by one rogue mole or a family. It is true that one mole eats nearly its body weight in worms each day. Therefore, he is constantly on the move in his tunnel and digging new tunnels to find more worms. As he digs, he must do something with the dirt and rocks from the tunnel, so he deposits them in a mound on the surface.

In a yard with over fifty mounds, it is difficult to know where they are working, so you must level the mounds and wait for them to be formed again. I do this by lowering my mower deck to ground level and driving over the mounds. It is like bulldozing. Then you wait and watch. I have literally sat for an hour with my nose stuck to the window in the kitchen watching for a mound to start forming. Cheryl thinks it is a waste of my time but then she has never spent all day in a deer stand or a duck blind either. I watch my back yard and Leo, the neighbor across the street, watches the front yard.

When Leo calls, he usually yells in code, “You’ve got a volcano forming!” I then run out the front door and grab the only weapon I have found to work, the garden hose. I sneak up to the mound so he can’t feel me coming. Then, when I see him pushing up dirt again, I shove the hose deep into his tunnel with water flowing wide open. Nine times out of ten, the water floods his tunnel faster than he can retreat and he surfaces to breathe. This is where I reach down and grab him by the nose and pull him out. Often, cars driving by will honk and Leo will come out on the front porch to congratulate me as I hold it upside-down by the tail. I have many photos on my wall of the trophy moles I have captured. So far, Field and Stream Magazine has not called me for an interview.

The common lawn mole. One of God’s little ugly creatures. It surprises me that he could even get a date, much less a wife. I could kill him with a shovel or drop him alive into the garbage can, but I feel sorry for the homely little brown furred rodent with big feet. The Geneva Convention also has rules concerning prisoners of war. I walk him over to the cow pasture fence line, warn him to stay out of my yard and toss him fifty feet out into the brush.

The next day there are ten new mounds in my yard and… we start all over again.

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