At war with one of Mother Nature’s mistakes

I recently returned from a three-night getaway to find that my backyard had been ravaged by something — perhaps a passel of hogs, an asteroid or a plane crash. No, wait, this was something far more evil and sinister. This was clearly the work of one of Mother Nature’s greatest mistakes — the armadillo.

Armadillos are ugly, sneak around at night, destroy yards, and are very hard to kill as they are protected by armor produced exclusively by Lockheed-Martin, which armadillos have under contract until 2035. Their only natural enemy is a Buick.

You can’t just shoot an armadillo, either. You’ve got to get a clean headshot. It’s really more of an armadillo assassination. Even if you’re lucky enough to kill the sucker, you can’t touch it with your hands because they carry diseases like leprosy, hypochondria and syphilis. Yes, I know that syphilis is sexually transmitted disease, so I hope they give it to humans in a less direct way. As for how they contracted syphilis in the first place, Charles Darwin theorized that it was from hooker squirrels, but that theory is still evolving.

For more than a week now, I’ve been at war with this armadillo. If this conflict persists much longer, I’m gonna name him Afghanistan. At least, I assume it’s a he. I’d check closely to find out, but, you know, syphilis.

I hope it’s a he, too, because a female armadillo can produce up to 56 babies in her lifetime. If I can’t kill a female armadillo, my only joy will be knowing that buying Christmas for her armadillo brood will cost her a fortune.

I mistakenly thought armadillos were slow creatures until I found one at 3 a.m. while sleepily going outside with my unloaded shotgun to look around. He took off like a sprinter in the 100-meter dash. Forget Afghanistan; I’m gonna name him Usain Bolt.

The next day, though, I thought I’d made serious headway when I found an armadillo burrow behind a wooded lot next door. At that point, I may or (for legal reasons) may not have fired nine rounds into the burrow just to introduce myself properly. I didn’t expect to kill it at that point, knowing that those burrows can go 7 feet deep and up to 25 feet long with several different rooms including sleeping quarters, a nursery, a study and a bar. Still I just wanted to say hey.

Not knowing an armadillo may have a dozen burrows in its territory, I decided to buy a trap and set it right outside this particular burrow. I set concrete blocks on each side to direct the notoriously stupid critter into the cage. At 3 a.m. The next morning, I went down to check the cage while toting a high-powered pellet gun that would do the trick with a headshot — unless it’s illegal to shoot armadillos in Georgia, in which case I just went down to talk.

The cage was empty, but I saw Usain A. Bolt running from behind my house as I returned. Outsmarted by a notoriously stupid critter again! So I moved the trap to my yard near where he’s been tearing up the grass.

Sure enough, the next morning, my wife came running in to the bedroom announcing, “We got him!” Well, if we got him, he was wearing a mask like the lone ranger. We got a raccoon — very disappointed for a guy who just went down the hill singing George Strait: “Armadillo in mourning/gonna get shot in the head/like most of my grass/you’re about to be dead.”

I did not shoot the raccoon, mainly because he was extremely upset by my singing. I mean really, really angry about it. He sounded like a more demonic version of the girl from “The Exorcist.” So, I let him go. “Go kill an armadillo or something!” I yelled.

Now, I’m just sitting on the back porch with my shotgun like Brian Kemp waiting for teen boys. Meanwhile, somewhere behind my house, a bunch of armadillos are at a burrow bar on karaoke night singing “The Fool on the Hill.”

I hope they all hook up with the wrong squirrel hooker and die of syphilis.

Chris Johnson’s books and more available at KudzuKid.com.

This story was originally published October 1, 2018 at 10:51 AM.