Note: This is the fifth in a series of super-short stories about animals. Except this one’s not so short. Sorry!

Let me set the mood for you: It’s the spring of 1983. The final episode of “M.A.S.H.” had just aired, Michael Jackson introduced the moonwalk to the world, and children across America were waiting for the final episode in the “Star Wars” trilogy to be released. On our boomboxes, we were rocking out to the Stray Cat strut, or passing the dutchie pon the left-hand side, or trying to figure out what a Vegemite sandwich was.

I was a sixth grader heading to a friend’s house on a sunny Saturday morning after watching the Smurfs and Scrappy Doo cartoons. No one was home at my house. I’m sure my parents had no idea what I was doing that day.

At my friend Jim’s house, we decided to play either Kick the Can or Whole-Block Tag or some game where we sneaked into backyards. Jim’s block was unusual for our neighborhood; it had an alley, making it easier to open neighbors’ gates.

I remember it was cold; I was wearing jeans and a winter coat. It might have been the end of spring break. Most of the 12 houses on the block were fair game, although everyone knew to avoid the house next door to Jim; that was the home of Macduff.

Macduff was some sort of terrier. Not too big, but he made a lot of noise (he had a Napoleon complex going on, and as a smaller-than-actual-sized human myself, I related). The rumor was that he had bitten multiple people. So stay away from Macduff’s yard.

At one point in the game, my friend Dave and I found ourselves about to be caught, and rather than giving up, we decided to do what no one would expect us to do: we’d cut through Macduff’s yard! Genius!

Dave went first. I was always the kid hanging in the back of our group of friends, saying, “Guys, I’m not sure this is a good idea.” We entered from the alley, and there was Macduff, sitting quietly on the patio, on a long leash. Dave cut straight past him to another gate, but  I hesitated near Macduff. He was wagging his little tail, looking at me curiously. I don’t know why, but I went to pet him.

That’s when he turned into the Tasmanian devil. He snarled and leaped into the air with his teeth baring. He clamped down on my right thigh and locked his jaw.

I let out a scream that was so high-pitched that neighborhood windows probably shattered. Flocks of geese lifted up off of nearby ponds and scattered. Other dogs started barking.

I came to my senses and smacked Macduff off of me. I turned to see Dave holding the gate open, and I went to run, but Macduff wasn’t done with me yet. He lunged back and latched himself onto my calf muscle, digging in. I shook my leg up and down with him still attached; for a split second, he released his grip, and I kicked him away from me.

If you are picturing the scene from “There’s Something About Mary” when Ben Stiller wrestles with Puffy the border terrier, you’re on the right track.

I ran out of the yard, and we all gathered back at Jim’s place. My jeans were ripped open in two places, and blood was oozing down my leg. What we probably should have done was gone into Jim’s house to tell his parents and seek medical attention. What we actually did was mumble, “Well, I guess we should get going,” and I said, “See ya tomorrow!” and limped the 4 blocks home by myself.

When I got home, no one was there, except our dog, Tiger. I took off my jeans, which was painful with the open wounds, and tossed them in the garbage. I grabbed a package of Band-Aids and (I remember this clearly) used 16 of them to cover the thigh wound. The blood soaked through almost immediately, so I used 16 more. I sat in our living room with my leg propped up and covered both wounds with Kleenexes. I kept thinking, “Oh man, Mom and Dad are going to kill me.” There may have been a little bit of shock involved. Tiger knew something was up and stuck close to me.

My dad was first to return home. He walked into the front door, saw all the blood, and went into emergency mode. “What happened? Are you alright? Where’s your mother?” This was in the age before cell phones, plus I was 12, so I have no idea how he contacted her and let her know he was taking me to the ER. There was never a moment where my parents got mad at me.

We spent the afternoon in the hospital. Turns out I had done a decent job stanching the bleeding with my 16-Band-Aid soak-and-replace routine.

I remember that for the next 2 weeks, I got permission to wear sweatpants to school because it was too painful to pull jeans or cords on over the bandages covering the wounds. (Was there a dress code at our public school in 1983 that wouldn’t have allowed me to wear sweatpants without the permission? Seems unlikely; I used to wear a T-shirt that said, “Where the Hell is Nashwauk, Minnesota?,” and no one said anything.) There was a lot of bruising, similar to when you have surgery, and afterwards the bruising and swelling is sometimes worse than the incision pain.

The Monday night after the bite, there was a knock on our door. A police officer wanted to talk to my parents and me. If ever there’s a moment in a 12-year-old’s life when he decides to dedicate himself to the straight and narrow, having a cop at the door would be that moment. Officer Friendly explained that since Macduff had already bitten people before, he was all caught up on his shots, so I wouldn’t have to get any shots myself. (How convenient that he was a repeat offender.)

Also, since I had gone into the yard uninvited, Macduff’s family wasn’t getting any citations. Put yourself in their shoes: your little dog has bitten someone, so you decide to erect a fence to your backyard, and for extra safety, you put the dog on a leash so he can’t go anywhere anyway. And somehow a neighborhood kid still manages to get himself bitten by your dog!

The scars faded. I can just barely make them out if I look closely. One bonus to the whole ordeal is that, as a general rule, I try to avoid doing things that lead to police officers knocking on the front door. (I was probably heading in that direction anyway, but Macduff gave me a good nudge.)

Note: This is the fourth in a series of super-short stories about animals.

I woke my lovely wife Jen early one morning. “Do you hear that?” There was this scratching sound outside our house. She heard it too. It sounded like someone or something was trying to dig its way into our house, from the roof. I ran outside to look for where the noise was coming from, but it stopped before I could find the source.

A week later, I was coming home from a walk, and I saw a gray squirrel, gnawing on the wooden gable vent over our garage, trying to break into our house!

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey!” It didn’t stop. I looked around; we have rocks in a landscaped area in our yard. Generally, I would not recommend throwing rocks at your house, but I grabbed a handful and started tossing them. The squirrel took off, ran along the roof’s edge, and climbed off the house.

The wood on the gable vent was partially destroyed, chewed away. I knew I’d have to fix it eventually. I put it on my to-do list.

A few months later, I heard a different noise. “Jen! Jenny! Do you hear that?” Of course she heard it. I said, “Maybe the squirrel’s back. Or the raccoon.”

Outside the house, I looked at the chewed gable vent; no squirrels were there. The noise was coming from the side of the garage. It sounded like something was running back and forth. I couldn’t pinpoint the noise. I knew what I needed to do.

“Randy!” I was pounding on my handy neighbor’s back door. Probably thinking Here we go again, he came over to my house.

He thought we should look in the crawlspace above the garage because that’s what the vent is there for. So we set up a ladder and both climbed up. The crawlspace is huge; we could convert it into an extra room, but there’s no access to it other than the cutout.

Randy spotted the problem: The squirrel had broken through the flimsy insulation sheet that was behind the vent, and animals had been coming and going freely into the crawlspace. The builder should have installed a screen behind the vent to keep animals out. (Again, should I just leave the doors wide open to let all the critters in the house?!?)

We then found the noise: A bird, who had been living in here (judging by the mess), had gotten trapped in the soffit along the crawlspace edge and was running frantically along the soffit vent. We couldn’t get to it because it squeezed into a tiny opening.

“We have two options,” Randy said. “We could let it die, or we could rip off your siding and try to take the end of the soffit off and see if it would fly out through that.”

“Well, I don’t want it to die,” I said. So we decided to tear apart my house to save the bird’s life. (And by “we,” I mean “he,” while I handed him tools. I had gotten adept at working on projects with Randy, and my home and auto repair skills improved. I was learning the names of tools, which was the most important thing. Randy would be fixing something at my house and say, “Do you have an Allen wrench?” I’d say yes, then run to the tools in my basement while Googling “what is an Allen wrench.” I’d then put back the crescent wrench I was holding and grab an Allen wrench.)

Project Freebird took about an hour. Randy got on a ladder, removed a portion of our siding covering the soffit end, and with some coaxing, this starving robin flew out the hole. Randy snapped the siding back and said that two things needed to happen: the end cap, and any openings all around our house, should be caulked or foam sealed; and the gable vent should be taken down and chicken wire should be attached to the back of it to keep squirrels and birds out.

So we took care of that. I Googled “how to caulk.” We climbed an extension ladder to remove the gable and install chicken wire to the back of it. And by “we,” I think you know who I mean.

Note: This is the third in a series of super-short stories about animals.

The first time I was attacked by a bird, I was running on country roads. I went onto the frontage road next to a highway. On the fenceposts, I noticed a few birds; they were black with red and yellow coloring on their wings. Cool, I thought.

The evil red-winged blackbird. He’s a jerk. (Photo by Bryan Pfeiffer, www.bryanpfeiffer.com.)

As I passed a small tree, I heard a bird making this noise: “Chit. Chit. Chit-chit-chit!” And then one of the birds swooped down and smacked me on the head! I was wearing a baseball cap, so I took it off and started swinging wildly at it while yelling, “Hey! Hey!” I looked up, and two of the birds were flying over my head, corkscrewing around in the air, and then divebombing me; there was something dizzying about the way they set me up for the attack. My long, slow jog turned into an all-out sprint as I swung my cap.

I’m picturing a family on a vacation in their minivan, driving down the highway. A child looks out her window and says, “Mommy, Daddy, there’s a man waving his hat at us, and birdies keep landing on his head.” And her mom says, “That’s nice, sweetie. Now go back to the movie on your iPad.”

When I got home, I said to my lovely wife Jen, “I was attacked by a vicious pack of birds!” She said, “What? Wow. How many were there?” I said, “At least two. Or maybe it was one, but the way it was spinning, it seemed like two.” Jen said, “Ohh-kayyy. Are you bleeding or anything?” I said, “No, I managed to fend them off with my hat.”

Needless to say, no one believed me. We have a friend who lives with us each summer, and she said, “I’ve been bicycling for years, and I know the birds you are talking about, but they don’t attack. You’re crazy.”

So I looked it up: the birds are red-winged blackbirds, specifically the males. And they do attack. (And I’m not crazy.)  From Wikipedia here: “Males have been known to swoop at humans who encroach upon their nesting territory during breeding season.”

We took a vacation out west, and all through Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, and Wyoming, I kept seeing these evil birds sitting atop fenceposts, taunting me, waiting for me. “They’re not evil,” Jen said. “They just defend their nests.” “Oh, they’re evil,” I muttered under my breath.

A few years later, our summer friend reported that a red-winged blackbird bopped her on the bicycle helmet when she rode past its nest. Who’s crazy now?

I see them all the time on the canal towpath where I run. From mid-May to early July, they are aggressive. If they start “chit-chitting” as I approach, I clap my hands or cough loudly to scare them off. I also swing my cap.

Last year, I was running in the opposite direction of where the blackbirds normally are (not because I was afraid), and as I was trotting along, I felt this massive claw grab the top of my head. “Hey! Hey!” I yelled and started sprinting. I took my cap off and swung it around. After about 50 yards, I turned around to see what it was:  a huge owl was sitting in a tall tree above me.

I ran home. “Jen! Jenny! I was attacked by an owl!” I had her examine my head; there was no bleeding, just a scratch. I gave her the blow-by-blow account. She suggested that I need to put on a little weight because the owl could probably carry a tiny human. Ha ha, so funny I forgot to laugh.

When I shared my story with friends, I heard back that an acquaintance was also attacked by this same owl, but she actually was bleeding from the talon scratches. I saw her on the towpath a week later. She showed me her injuries. We both avoided that stretch of the path for the rest of the year. And I put on a little weight over the winter. Just in case.

Note: This is the second in a series of super-short stories about animals.

I was mowing the lawn one day when a bee flew by me. Yikes, I thought. On my next pass by the same spot in our yard, a few bees swept past me. “Creepy,” I said. The third time around, several chased me, so I abandoned my lawn mower and ran. “Holy bleep!” I yelled.

I went inside and said to my lovely wife Jen: “There are bees swarming me in the backyard!”

“Oh,” she said. “And are you planning on leaving the lawn mower running out there all day then?”

I went back in the yard to see where the bees were coming from: Our air conditioner’s condenser had two coolant tubes that went into our house. There was a circular hole cut out in our siding so that the tubes could enter, and the bees were going in and out of the house freely.

I managed to mow the lawn like this: I approached the condenser slowly, and as the bees got annoyed with me, I ran backwards as fast as I could with the mower. I had a nice little dance going with the bees, but I knew that wasn’t sustainable. (Also a little embarrassing, if any neighbors were watching.) I had to get rid of them, and I knew just the person to take care of it.

“Randy!” I yelled as I banged on my handy neighbor’s back door. I’m sure he was thinking, Now what with this guy?!? after the raccoon incident, but he has the patience of Job, so he came over to help.

“First, those aren’t bees you got there; those are wasps,” Randy said.

“Right,” I said. “I knew that.” Later, I Googled “difference between bees and wasps.” Turns out bees are beneficial pollinators who rarely sting, and wasps are aggressive, mostly non-pollinators who like to sting.

Randy explained that as long as you stay out of the path of where the wasps (or yellow jackets) are going for their food source, they won’t harm you. He showed me: we noticed that they would exit the hole and turn to the left, so he eased his way next to the hole on the other side to peek in it.

“I see hundreds and hundreds of wasps in there. And I don’t know why the builder didn’t seal up this hole in the first place.”

I was starting to wonder that myself. How many other holes in the house were there for animals (raccoons, wasps, etc.) to enter? Why don’t I just leave the doors wide open to make it easier for them to stroll in?!?

Randy’s plan was, we wait until dark, when the wasps are at their least active and most of them have returned to the nest. Then we stand next to the nest and spray the crap out of them with wasp killer. (And by “we,” I mean “Randy,” while I stand a safe distance away, holding the flashlight.) Then, in the morning, I seal up the hole with foaming sealer.

That night, after dark, we went out there, and that’s exactly what we (“he”) did. And the next morning, I sealed it up with the foamy stuff.

Here’s the thing I didn’t count on: not all of the wasps died immediately, and they had to find another exit spot to get away from the spray. So over the next several months (!), we had wasps come out from behind the basement drywall and spend their last hours and days in our house. Fortunately, they had no food source, so the wasps would basically die on the concrete floor. I swept them up once a week and kept checking the sealed hole, and we’ve been wasp-free ever since.

A few years later, we had to get a new condenser, and we decided to move it to a different part of the yard. I made sure the installers sealed the new tube hole well. They thought it a little strange, but I take no chances.

Note: This is the first in a series of super-short stories about animals. 

When we first became homeowners, I was paranoid constantly about any little noises I heard in the house. “What was that?!?” I’d hiss when something creaked in the middle of the night. My lovely wife Jen would soothe my worries with her calm words: “The furnace kicked on,” or, “It’s the sump pump again,” or, “Stop waking me up with these dumb questions!” Etcetera.

One night, before bedtime, I heard a bump in the kitchen. “Don’t even say anything,” Jen said. The next night, same thing. Then I started hearing a similar sound early each morning. After about a week or 10 days, I would stand in the kitchen and try to locate the noise. I got up before sunrise and hovered near the door that opened up to our deck; the door is in a little bay with a window on either side of it, jutting out from our house’s foundation.

I heard the bump. It sounded like it was coming from inside our floor vent. I popped off the vent cover and didn’t see anything. Then I pushed against the metal sides of the duct and held my hand there. And something pushed back against my hand! I ran downstairs into the basement to see if I could find anything down there, but part of our basement is finished, with drywall blocking access to where the duct runs. I ran outside but couldn’t see anything.

That night, around bedtime, we heard the whatever it was rustling around again. It seemed as if it was coming into our house and then leaving in the morning. Or vice versa. So again I ran to the basement. About 10 feet across from where the vent is, the finished part ends, and I could get on a chair or ladder in the unfinished part and look between the kitchen floorboards and the basement ceiling. I set up a ladder and glanced: I saw something moving but forgot a flashlight, so I ran back upstairs to tell Jen: “I saw either a cat or a kitten, or maybe a tiny rodent. But it was dark.”

I sprinted downstairs with the flashlight, whipped through the finished part, through the doorway into the unfinished part, and around to the ladder. And there, coming out of the crawlspace, about to place one paw on the top of the ladder, was the biggest raccoon I had ever seen in my life.

I screamed at the top of my lungs. Not a manly scream, and not intelligible words either; one of those “is someone strangling a goose?” noises. I scared the bejesus out of the raccoon, who hightailed it back through the crawlspace, out whatever hole was in our house, and out from under our deck. I went outside and piled a bunch of stones over every conceivable opening into the base of the deck.

The next day, I called Randy, my handy neighbor. Randy came over, and we (and by “we,” I mean “he,” while I handed him tools) tore my deck apart and looked under the bay: the house builder had stuck some insulation under the bay but had never installed any sort of wood to secure it. So animals were free to enter our house, which obviously this raccoon had been doing. I got a large piece of  plywood, and we (“he”) cut it with a circular saw and hammered it in place. There have been no raccoons in the house since then.

Also, Jen listens a little more intently when I say, “I heard something!”