Rats, Mice, and Snakes: Killing Rats

The front-end loader parked at "Jasper Blvd."

            A miner needs his sleep. If a rat is going to repeatedly disturb that sleep it needs to be stopped.  In the eleven years I worked mining Morrisonite I never thought to take a rat trap out to the mine. Perhaps there are just too many other things to worry about in preparing to move to the mine to remember a few rat traps. On the other hand, what good would that be anyway? The problem is not the rats but the noise they make. A rat in a cage would make almost as much noise as one inspecting your kitchen. Eliminating a few rats creates a reprieve from some of those sleep depriving night interruptions.

 

            It is only a reprieve because there is an abundance of rats living in the rocks containing the Morrisonite Jasper. If a rat moves on to a better place, that just means there is more territory for another one. It takes only 2 or 3 days to replace a missing rat in your cabin. The new ones seem to be especially excited about running through your stuff looking for something to add to their collection.

Gene's D4 Dozer with the missing release valve pipe in the rear.

                       The weapons I have chosen in my nighttime skirmishes with rats consist of a five foot piece of ¾ inch pipe and a flashlight. The pipe I have used for years, and I believe came off my D-4 Dozer during a repair session and never was reinstalled. It is painted yellow like all mining machines. The idea is to hit the rat with the pipe using it like a spear after you find it with a flashlight. If you shine a flashlight on a rat in the dark it will freeze in its tracks like a clay statue. It will just stay that way until the light moves. You can actually get very close as long as you do not move the light. This is very important because my aim with the yellow D-4 spear is not very good. What actually happens during one of these executions is something like this: when the signal goes from your sleep-groggy brain to your right hand which is holding the rat-killing D-4 spear instructing it to thrust at the rat, your left arm involuntarily moves the flashlight allowing the rat to move just enough to avoid the descending projectile. This process usually repeats itself a number of times before luck or perseverance sends the rat to a better place.

            I have often bemused myself wondering how this might look to an independent observer: a groggy man standing in his cabin in the middle of the night holding a flashlight in one hand and stabbing the ground with a yellow pipe in the other. 

Gene mining at the Cliff Area on the Christine Marie Claim.