Uninvited guest turns into one of life’s greatest adversaries

Human-wildlife confrontations are all too common, from the mountain goats on Scotchman Peak to the grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. Often these conflicts end poorly for both the people and the animals.

The risks to all parties involved increase dramatically when the conflict happens in an urban setting, as my wife Carol, our cat and I recently discovered.

Carol had glimpsed a striped creature streak out of the pantry, across her bare feet and into the kitchen the previous evening. The cat spent the next 45 minutes in ambush mode in front of the oven, but the intruder never appeared.

The next day, Carol heard tiny footsteps in the heat duct, so she took the grate off in case someone was trapped down there. The noise moved from room to room, with the cat eagerly following.

Eventually, the invader, a chipmunk (let’s call him “Chad”) decided to announce his presence by poking his head up from the open vent and initiating a stare down with the cat. Carol opened the front door, leaving a clear route of escape. After weighing his options, Chad ran and hid behind the piano, chirping sarcastically away.

Carol left the front door wide open for two hours. Certainly Chad had returned to the wild by now. I mean, why would he stay in the house with a deadly predator living there? Right? Wrong.

A few days later, I saw Chad race across living room and under the couch. I opened the front door and started removing the couch cushions. When I picked up the second cushion, Chad leapt out from under it and scampered past the front door back to his fortress of solitude behind the piano.

Okay, next plan: I piled up cushions and moved the furniture around to form a wall – a wall as impenetrable as The Wall that Mexico will be paying us to build. Surely now, with my wall on one side and the open door to Nature on the other, Chad would return to his family and the pine forest he called home.

I used a broom to poke around behind the piano. Chad scurried out, took one look at the open door, pivoted 180 degrees away from freedom, raced directly at me, jumped onto the piano bench, and without breaking his little chipmunk stride, vaulted over my wall and ran under a book case. I’m pretty sure I heard him yell “Cowabunga!” as he cleared the wall.

Okay, now it was time to play rough. I brought the cat in, opened the door to the garage, and slid the book case away from the wall. Chad was totally exposed now. He was huddled under the book case, but he was easily in reach of the cat’s deadly claws and her finely-honed predator instincts.

The cat looked at the bookcase with interest, sauntered over, pawed at Chad’s hiding place with all the enthusiasm of a 5-year-old boy eating Lima beans, slouched away, sat down, and looked up at me.

Are you kidding me? You wantonly kill birds, snakes, lizards and mice all the time! Here is a nice plump chipmunk, a chipmunk with a nerdy name who has brazenly invaded your territory (and as we shall find out, is stealing your food) and that is the best you can do?

I removed the pathetic cat and poked at Chad with the broom. Of course, Chad then ran out the nearby garage door and lived happily ever after, eating the sunflower seeds from my bird feeders and bragging to the ladies about his daring escape from The Man and that murderous cat. No, Chad did not do that. He ran under the laundry room door. I plugged the space under the door and went to work.

When I returned from work, I heard Chad scratching at the laundry room door, trying to get back to the piano. I knocked on the door and went inside. Chad was hiding, probably making obscene gestures at me. I opened the window, put some sunflower seeds on the sill, and went back out, locking Chad inside. He must be hungry by now, I thought, so certainly he’ll go out the window. I sat down to wait.

After a few minutes, I heard the unmistakable sound of splashing coming from Chad’s room. What now? Is he doing some laundry? I went outside and peeked in the window. There was Chad, furiously swimming circles in the toilet bowl! Every few seconds, he would stop his frenzied paddling and rest on the side of the bowl, but he clearly could not get out. At this point in the story, people usually ask me “Did you flush him?” No way! He might have plugged up the pipes!

I let Chad enjoy his swim until I was sure he was quite worn out. I grabbed salad tongs and gently lifted him out of the water. Resigned to his fate, Chad looked up at me forlornly and sighed, “Oh, Fudge.” Except he didn’t say “Fudge.”

I leaned out the open window and dropped him on the ground. His once beautiful stripes a matted mess, Chad limped pathetically into a crack in a nearby rock wall.

A few hours later I went outside to turn a sprinkler on. As I passed the rock wall, Chad, his fur clean and dry and the gleam back in his eyes, popped straight up, scrambled in midair for a second, looked right at me, and hit the ground sprinting, straight across the street to some thick bushes.

Just before he ducked out of sight, he turned back to me, puffed out his chest, and did the Usain Bolt victory pose. Or maybe he was “dabbing,” I’m not sure.

We spent the next week vacuuming up Chad pellets from under cushions and on window sills. We found a particularly healthy deposit along with a nice stash of cat food in a dresser drawer. No wonder Chad wouldn’t leave! He had an unlimited supply of free food, a cozy nest, and a feline playmate. We’re just lucky he didn’t invite a bunch of his “bros” to move in with him.

Pete O’Brien is a Chemistry teacher, a former Altar Boy, and kind of a “smart aleck.”