In the famous court scene in “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock demands justice against his enemy, who owes him three thousand gold ducats. Antonio is an importer/exporter who has had luck with neither importing nor exporting. Since the merchant is unable to pay, according to the terms of their bizarre contract he must forfeit a pound of his own flesh. The court begs Shylock to be merciful, but the loan shark insists he will stop at nothing to get what he wants. He brags of going after delinquent lendees as if they are household rodents: “If my house be troubled with a rat,” he says, I will “be pleased to give ten thousand ducats to have it killed.”
I understand where he’s coming from. In my ongoing war against the moles who treat my yard as their own personal London Underground, I would gladly spend 10 thousand ducats to send these hole-diggers packing. You see, when it comes to varmints, the quality of mercy doesn’t mean bupkis.
Unless you live in a neighborhood that used to be a golf course, you would not believe what these miserable vermin can do to the integrity of a landscape. I have less than one acre, but sonic imaging has revealed more than 60 miles of tunnels beneath the surface, with new ones forming every day. It’s like the “Shawshank Redemption” down there. The ground around my house is so spongy that when pinecones fall in the backyard, they sink about a half inch into the dirt. Things may eventually submerge to the point where my roof is less than two feet above the driveway.
Everyone has a suggestion about what to do. “Spread some grub killer,” said one friend. When the grubs dry up, he pointed out, the moles leave town. But these mammals aren’t so easily beaten. The old English term for the species was “moldywarp,” and I am fairly certain that the weasely blokes under my house can warp their moldy selves all across the country when food runs out on Live Oak Drive. I read on Wikipedia that moles have an extra thumb, which means that mine are probably hitchhiking to St. Louis for the weekend for fresh grubs.
“Put a stick of gum in the hole,” advised another expert. He said that moles can’t digest gum, and it plugs them up. So I tried that. Not knowing what brand worked best, I took a cue from George Costanza and placed a “chewing gum lineup” in the ground, with a selection ranging from Juicy Fruit to Hubba Bubba. The next time I went outside, though, I saw this little tough guy stick his head out of his mound and blow a bubble just to taunt me. I could have sworn he had tattoos and a pierced lip. Clearly the gum didn’t faze him.
That’s why I was fascinated to read in The Associated Press about the professional mole-catcher at Versailles. For 330 years, the palace of Louis XVI has employed a full-time exterminator. It seems that like Shylock, the French king spent so much on pest control that he plunged his country into debt. But someone has to keep all 2,000 acres of beautiful Versailles landscaping free of those pesky molehills. The current guardian is a man named Jerome Dormion. Armed with shovels, poisons and traps that resemble miniature guillotines, 36-year-old Dormion takes his job very seriously. Think Bill Murray, but with an accent and even less tolerance for groundhogs and their tunneling cousins.
Since Dormion has his own residence at Versailles, it may take a lot of gold ducats to convince him to move his mole-busting crusade to Searcy. In the meantime, I will have to keep looking for options, and a piece in last Sunday’s “New York Times” gives me hope. Who could resist the headline: “Sweet kitty can’t help but kill—a lot.” According to the article, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently released a study showing that outdoor cats annihilate up to 12.3 billion mammals per year. I guess Fancy Feast can’t stack up to live game.
So my plan is to do a full-scale blitz on all four corners of my lawn. With Garfield and the Frenchman on one side, and Dentyne Ice on the other, those blind-and-deaf rodents don’t stand a chance. I just hope the enemy doesn’t get wise and try to infiltrate my operation. I’m not sure I can take another mole.
