Bandit and the Rodent

I'm going to try and stay on the lighter side today after a rather stressful last few days for Keith and some hard decisions he had to make about his new job and living out of motel rooms for the next few years and his mom being so very sick. Short story - the new job is not going to work out and his mom will not be in this world much longer. He and his daughter Katie left for Las Vegas last night to go say their goodbyes and will be back in a few days.

Anyway, Friday night Keith was sitting out in the front yard in the early dark of the evening and here comes neighbor kitty Bandit, the cute little siamese that is so friendly and thinks that our yard is his. He is playing with some little creature that is running along, stops, Bandit bats it around, the creature rears up on his hind legs and bares its teeth at Bandit, startled Bandit leaps off the ground on all four paws, then the creature starts running along again and the process starts all over. Run, stop, bat, snarl, jump. While he's watching this and trying to figure out what the little running creature is, it veers off and runs straight toward Keith, startling the heck out of him and what does Keith do but stomp on it with his big heavy steel toed boots. Agh.

So, the little rodent creature is laying there stomped on and before Keith can even tell what it is, Bandit is right there, picks it up, and runs off into our backyard with it. Keith is going eww eww eww I can't believe I stomped on a rodent creature and was it a rat and eww eww eww I don't want the cat carrying a dead stomped on rat into my back yard. He is telling me about this and calling the creature a mouse and I'm saying that mice are really tiny and how big was this creature and he's telling me BIG and he didn't mean to stomp on it and kill it but it ran right at him!

We turn on the backyard lights and here is Bandit having the time of his life flinging this dead rodent around the yard, leaping and catching and flinging and we are going eww eww eww. And it sure looks like a big fat rat he's playing with so Keith goes out to see exactly what Bandit's new toy is, and it doesn't have a big long tail so it must be a gopher. A very well fed gopher but that's better than knowing we have rats running around the neighborhood. So, we let him play with the dead gopher and then Keith checked the yard the next morning for gopher carcasses but we never did find it.

And Keith has felt bad ever since for stomping on the poor little gopher.