Zeke, The Fearless Mouser

I hooked up with a friend, from my university “daze” of learning about forestry, where he was living in B.C. He was renting a barn on a 15-acre spread in a beautiful valley. The Slocan River ran around two sides and a creek cut through the centre. Apple and pear trees aplenty surrounded a huge garden.

Buddy had a cat named Zeke, as a nod to our enjoyment of bluegrass music. Buddy had cordoned off a section of the garden to grow some catnip. When I showed up for my visit (it was to be only a week – I ended up living there for three years. Yup, several other stories from this) he had a nice crop of three foot high plants in a four foot square plot.

Living in a barn, we were rather run over by mice. We’d be sitting at the “dining room” table and the critters would peek their faces at us between the salt and peppershakers. I would reprimand buddy as to why we had so many meeces when he had a cat living there.

Well, I quickly learned that Zeke’s activities revolved around the catnip patch. Upon wakening, he would stroll out to the patch and make love to the plants for about half an hour. Then, he would morph into SpeedKitty – zipping around the place like a loose pinball. Dashing along the fence rails, running up trees, spinning around the yard like he had St. Vitus Dance.

An hour later, we’d find this flaccid feline hanging his exhausted body somewhere around the estate. He was coming down from his buzz.

Back to the mice – we had trap lines set up all over the barn. We’d hear them snap during the night, with the scraping sounds of the death throes. And where was the great mouser?

One day, I was entertaining some friends visiting from Ontario, when Zeke paraded through the door, very proudly holding his head up high as he was carrying a mouse.

The mouse was already dead in a mousetrap!

See what hallucinogenics will do to you!