A Drowned Weasel
Scott Mclean
When I was about 9 or 10 and Steve was 6 or 7 we had some new neighbors move in.
They came from Texas and were a new experience for us. I have relatives and friends in Texas and they are nothing like this family was.
They were going on vacation for two weeks and said they’d pay us to take care of their place. This included feeding and watering a bunch of animals, watering their lawn, and mowing twice. When they got back they gave us each 50 cents. We didn’t say anything but evidently they saw the looks on our face.
The Mom of the family laughed at us and told us we should have negotiated the price ahead of time and that it was a good lesson for us.
Wrong!!!
We had our own lessons to teach. We put a bullsnake in her mailbox one day and were disappointed not to hear anything about it.
We were changing sprinklers for the neighbors we normally worked for and saw a weasel. We picked up the pipe it ran into and kept both ends plugged. We then hooked the pipe up and turned on the water. The result was what we believed was one drowned weasel. We then deposited it in the aforementioned mailbox.
My parents got a call that night with the neighbor telling them she thought we were up to some mischief. We hadn’t thought about all the angles and the fact that the mailman would open the box before the neighbor. He was evidently startled by the snake but being a rural carrier in our area was used to country boy pranks.
The second gift had a slightly different outcome and had him complaining to the neighbor.
When he opened the mailbox, the weasel we thought to be dead was not only alive but highly pissed off. It ran up his arm and he let out a scream and almost jumped out the window of his car according to a neighbor girl.
Eventually the weasel was evicted and the mailman’s heart rate probably got a little nearer to normal.
I can imagine the weasel looking back with indignation and doing the weasel equivalent of giving him the finger. As I stated before, this was the last straw for the mailman and we were told by my parents, quite emphatically, to cease and desist. We stopped that particular campaign for the well being of our rear ends and also because the weasel would have been hard to top! There is a long history of McLeans using critters in their pranks and for revenge.
You’ll hear more of these in future stories.
Bye.