Gopher Boy

It was late. I spent the day at AT&T Park for the opening day of the Giant’s. We had a great time, the Giant’s won and the rain cleared for the game. I came home and unfortunately had to work on my taxes, the appointment to get them done is on Thursday. I’m cutting it a little short this year. By about midnight I crawled into bed and tried to go to sleep. I was just drifting off when Darryl the cat appeared at the open slider. There’s no screen so he bounded in and as always announced himself. There was a fair amount of commotion when he came in. I thought his sister had followed him in and they were tussling on the floor.

She can be a real hisser sometimes. Literally, she hisses at everyone when she is trying to make her point, especially her brother. Apparently she has some Abyssinian in her that makes her very vocal. She doesn’t bite, just hisses.

Well the tussling stopped for a bit and I drifted off to sleep.

About fifteen minutes later Darryl was chasing something through the room. I woke up to him half under our bed with his paw on top of something. I was sure he had another lizard. I shined a flashlight under the bed and couldn’t see anything and Darryl wasn’t moving and I wasn’t putting my feet on the floor. My husband, who was sound asleep and didn’t respond to my comment of, “Honey the cat has another animal in the room and is chasing it around” was finally awakened by my insistence that the cat had something other than a lizard under the bed and he better wake up and remove it immediately. Begrudgingly he got up and looked under the bed. He stated rather too calmly, I thought, that the cat had a live gopher under the bed. At about that time the cat let the gopher go and it darted across the room. I may have screamed, the cat bolted and my husband said he didn’t see where it went. Great, so much for sleep.

The cat ran towards my boots that were lined up on the floor under my shoetree, hot on the trail of the rogue gopher. My husband flung all the shoes out of the way as the two of them hunted for the rodent. Darryl, we'll call him gopher boy now, sniffed it out with his tail twitching. My husband had it cornered. I asked him if he wanted a glass or something to put it in. But to my horror he just picked up the live gopher with the cat clawing at him and threw it off the balcony and shut the door. The cat continued looking through the room for another fifteen minutes trying to find his prey. My husband proceeded to get back in bed. I said, “Not before you wash you’re hands.” Grumble, grumble, sigh. Needless to say I didn’t get a very good night’s sleep last night.