Saturday, March 8, 2014

Vandalize

vandalize
verb, transitive. To deliberately destroy or damage public or private property.

Even though it had happened several times since they had moved to the country and started raising chickens, Mike was still not prepared for it: entering the coop in the morning and finding all the chickens dead. Whatever had done it had also vandalized the little building, knocking one roost askew and leaving a pile of droppings.

He coldly proceeded with his response. He got the leghold traps out of the cupboard in the garage where they had been stored since the last chicken-coop-invasion. They were rusty, so he spent more than an hour wire-brushing the hinges and oiling them. He found one heavy steel bar with a hole and a few pieces of scrap lumber that he could attach to the traps' chains as drags, then he carried them to the coop and set them. Four traps, in various sizes, hidden beneath drifts of alfalfa hay on the floor. He left the chicken carcasses where they lay, as bait.

The following morning, he walked to the coop with his revolver loaded. As he approached, he could hear the sound of a struggle. Inside was a fat, boar raccoon, returned to the scene of his crime. One bullet to the head dispatched him. Only then did Mike allow himself to mourn his lost flock, and the life of the predator he had just taken.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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