The Southwest Voice

Day One

I should have known we had a problem when our cats started spending more time in front of a window that overlooks our barren side yard than they did sleeping. They’d begun to behave more like their predatory feline ancestors than domesticated, overweight, listless house cats. 

They looked feral for the first time in their pampered lives, and I didn’t catch on.

“Look,” I cooed lovingly in their direction. “The cats are interested in something outside.”

I wasn’t curious enough to learn the object of their interest, but I lifted the blinds so they could get a better look. 

It would be two straight weeks of unconcern before my next door neighbor alerted me to suspicious activity on our block.

“We have rats,” she reported with disgust. “They’re living in the arbor and ivy on our fence. Have you seen any?”

Rats? I should have known. No, I hadn’t seen any, but I had a strong suspicion that my cats had.

Living in Bakersfield all my life, I’m accustomed to the occasional field mouse or garden snake. And, we certainly had our share of transients of order Rodentia when bull dozers cleared acres of pistachio trees to make room for new houses.  

Rats, in my mind, weren’t a problem for city dwellers, but were an issue for people who lived near open sewers and subways, or in England, where the infestation is legendary. When I heard that my neighbor had rats, I imagined myself bearing witness to the next Black Plague.

Ignorance does that to you.

Before I called Eyewitness News, I had to see them for myself. That night, I joined my cats at eye level and followed the path of their twitching gazes, hoping to find nothing more insidious than a family of crickets.

What I saw made me realize two things. The first was that in the two weeks my cats had been poised at the window each night, these rats must have procreated. Second, we now had a big rat problem.

There wasn’t one, but five rats perched on our iron gate. Others were running along the fence, and two had their tiny claws wrapped around dog kibbles, while balancing on the silver rim of my Labrador’s food bowl.  

It was practically a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Had they eaten my dog? Where was the Herculean guardian of our back yard? It then occurred to me that a dog that could bark ferociously at a harmless woman checking pool acidity could also run away in disgust by rats in his food dish.

Our back yard was under attack.

Rats were everywhere, and I felt myself beginning to react as if I’d found a human corpse in my back yard instead of a few rodents. I needed to calm down. This wasn’t a "CSI" case; these were rats — not burglars, terrorists or Martians. We would be OK until morning; there was nothing we could do until the light of day.

I was wrong. To my surprise, my husband and son reacted as if the North Koreans were holding missile tests in Rosedale, as if the fate of Bakersfield depended on us and the ancient BB guns we kept stowed in the family toy chest. With conspiratorial whispers, the two of them armed themselves and moved with stealth to the battlefield.     

I wanted to stop them, to persuade them to wait until morning, but as I watched them planning the covert operation wearing nothing but boxers and socks, I did what any supportive woman would do for her family: I savored the moment with digital photography and took mental notes for this story.

Without a thought to modesty or fear of the unknown, father and son had morphed into two deadly, BB toting, underwear-clad pistoleers, armed and ready to take back their yard from foreign invasion. 

After they fired the first shot, the rats, of course, scattered. Our heroes were mildly successful, but the rats seemed to be multiplying at an incalculable rate. It took only a few nights of clandestine operations to realize we needed reinforcements.

We couldn’t do it alone. We would have to call on the professionals.

We would have to call Mona.

To be continued—Day Two: Mona and the Kern County Mosquito and Vector Control District get involved.