Trespassers!

That’s what I had to deal with the other day. I had spent the morning trying to make some headway in the kitchen (as usual). I took a break and a cup of coffee out to see my insufferable puppy and let him sit on my lap so that he’ll eventually be a 60 pound lap dog. Then a chicken cackled and since the flock’s egg production has gone down and since I think a huge cause of that is that we’re just not finding some of the nests, I went to investigate where this hen might be laying. I didn’t find anything but wandered that whole area looking in likely and not so likely spots for eggs.

Then, BAM! Very large loud gunshot, almost like a muzzleloader but it was probably a shotgun. Then a lighter, pow! -- a .22. My first thought was poachers delivering the coup de gras and that I was going to go down there and take their deer away from them. So I took off, without radio, without anyone knowing what was going on. Stupid, ok, yeah, I know, and I’ll probably do it again too. When I’m halfway to somewhere already I just can’t bring myself to go backward instead of forward to deal with it. Another halfway there and more BAMs and lots of pows (is that a pistol or a semi-automatic .22?) And some shot in between those too. They were making so much noise I was right up on them before they knew it. And they were on private land, trespassing, and doing what they were doing is illegal even if they’d been in the national forest (you can’t go armed except in hunting seasons there).

So here comes this little middle-aged, extremely mad, totally unarmed woman up to two big and heavily armed men in the middle of nowhere. Cussing like a sailor too. Called them everything but white. They started to take off into the forest but one thought better of it. One continued and I called him some more things, including chicken shit, afraid of a little GIRL! I’m laughing recalling because you wouldn’t really think it of me, would you? I wouldn’t really think it of me, but it is not polite in this culture to yell at someone unless they’ve really crossed the line, so these people KNEW they’d really crossed the line with me. They wouldn’t give me their names. Everything they did say just made me madder, like “we didn’t know there was a house there” (“You are shooting a gun, you have to know EXACTLY where you are and everything that is around you!”). Like “the shooting range costs $2 to get in to” (“It’s $2 on the HONOR system, you obviously have none of that, and you’ve blown way more than $2 in shells!”). Like, “I wouldn’t shoot your kids ma’am” (“You wouldn’t live to hurt my kids” cold).

It is my intuition that the one of them who chicken shit retreated to the woods either had a felony and illegally had a gun or he had an illegal gun (probably sawed off shotgun or automatic) to begin with and that’s why they didn’t go to the shooting range. We couldn’t find their car to get a tag to run. I had nothing to call the police with to file a report.

If the past is any predictor of the future, we won’t see them again, although we might hear tales at the local store about some crazy woman who lives out the holler who chases armed men down.