By Dale  

One morning I look out over the acre of grass to see a small hump of dirt.   “Hummmm, looks like we have a mole hill. We’ll need to get that little critter before it multiplies,” I say to Shirley.  

“What? Oh, no you won’t! No little mole ever hurt you and no little cute creatures are going to be hurt as long as I have something to say about it. I’m tired of people going around killing things just because they’re there. They have a right too, you know. They’re just trying to survive as nature intends them to and . . . . ”  

"OK, OK. Forget it. You want moles? We’ll have moles."

Soon there are more little humps, larger humps, then huge mounds, “The little critter must be growing into a larger little critter,” I mused.  

Mounds of dirt become a permanent part of the landscape, growing and multiplying, as nature would have it. I wondered what nature does when there are too many moles. What enemies do moles have or what diseases do they get. Was there something I could do to help nature along to keep the moles in check without looking like the bad guy in a Walt Disney movie? I thought about it, but came up with nothing.  

They really didn’t bother me except when it’s time to mow grass. The lawn mower doesn’t like hitting giant mounds of dirt.  

Years go by and nature blesses the moles. By now, our beautiful green acre of grass has turned into a sea of brown lumpy dirt. I still mow the grass, but use a lawn tractor with a bulldozer blade lowered to plow molehills. Neighbors from afar can tell I’m mowing by the large moving cloud of dust they see.  

One morning Shirley looses it completely and shouts, “I can’t stand it any longer! Moles! I HATE MOLES! Look out there, one sea of ugly molehills! They have completely ruined our yard and now they’re ruining my flowers. I hate them; I hate them, I HATE THEM! I wish there was something we could do.” Her shouting was changing into sobs and tears.  

“There is something we can do,” I say with loving kindness, “I can kill them.”  

“Oh, would you? You would do that for me?”  

“Yes.”  

“What happened to the ‘Loving Goddess Protector of Little Creatures’ I once knew,” I pondered. The license to kill seems to be directly proportional to numbers. That is, it’s OK to kill anything when there’s too many. I thought about hunting and birds. Everyone hates crows more than starlings, but there are too many starlings. So, the law says you can shoot starlings, but not crows. I wondered about the day when there are too many people and it’s OK to start shooting.  

So now I have a license to kill moles. I’ll get started and be Shirley’s hero, instead of the villain I would have become years before. But now I have thousands to get instead of just one. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.  

How do you kill a mole? I still had gopher traps from years ago when as a teenager; I got gophers for apple orchard owners in central Washington. I set the gopher traps for the moles, but got none.   I bought new traps, the kind that pinch like scissors and the kind that stab like spears. They were expensive. “They had to work. They wouldn’t sell them if they didn’t,” I reasoned. I carefully followed the directions, set the traps, but got none.  

I figured the traps might work for the people who invented them, but not for me maybe because they require some level of skill that can’t be conveyed in the instructions.  

I thought, “Shirley must think of me as ‘The Stupid Idiot’ instead of ‘The Hero’ I started out to be, because I can’t get even one of the thousand moles out there.”  

Feeling somewhat desperate, I went to the store and brought back mole smoke bombs. The smoke is supposed to be deadly poisonous, like arsenic, I thought. I wondered how they could market such a dangerous product with deadly gas. Anyone could accidentally breathe some smoke and fall dead. Then I realized it was all a trick. The smoke isn’t poisonous, no more than smoke from a road flare. You get sulfur dioxide or something. I suppose you can die if you inhale a great deal of it, especially if it displaces the oxygen you really need.  

I use all the mole smoke bombs; go back to the store for more, but this time I buy just road flares. They are three times the size; burn longer, and cost much less. I use them, but give up. If they work, how would you ever know it? Meanwhile there seemed to be more molehills.  

Someone said, “Just fill their hole with water when they come out - shoot’em.”  

I ran water in the holes, but the moles didn’t come out.   Then someone else said helpfully, “Carbon Monoxide. It really works. Use your car and a hose.”  

With renewed optimism, I drive the old rambler out on the back yard; rig up a funnel and a short piece of hose taped up to the exhaust pipe. Carefully I shove the other end of the hose down the unsuspecting mole’s hole, cover it back up with dirt and start the motor. But how long should it run? I decide to let it run for half an hour.  

I go back into the house only to be confronted by Shirley.   “What are you doing!” she demands.  

“Gassing a mole.”  

“With a car?”  

The signs of looking like an idiot were definitely there.  

“One of the neighbors called and wants to know what you’re doing. Do you think I can tell them you’re gassing a mole with a car?”  

“No. Don’t tell them anything. They think I’m crazy anyway.”  

It was true. I had come to be some form of entertainment for the neighbors. Sometimes I would see them just sitting on the back deck wondering what I was going to do next.  

They saw me sitting in a lawn chair for hours out in the middle of the acre with the shotgun. I was there waiting for some dirt to move. I actually shot two moles using that technique, but gave up after realizing the hopelessness of it all and the confirming affect it must have on the watching neighbors.  

Once more I went to the store and came back with a new trap. This one had a story printed on the box about how a college mole study group found this trap to get 87 percent of all moles caught by all the traps used in the study.  

It was better. I did get a few moles, but only after many attempts and after a few modifications to the trap. I was about to make a high volume purchase for more of the traps when I found the answer.  

It was the next day at work when someone said, “I made my own trap and here’s a sketch.” (Click to enlarge).

One more time, I go to the store, but this time buy a rat trap, five inches of 3/4 inch pipe, end cap for the pipe, and a box of 12 gauge shotgun shells.  

I mounted the rat trap on a strong 4 inch thick board 14 by 10 inches, drilled a hole and installed the pipe at a strategic place that would become the gun barrel, and attached steel stakes on the four corners of the board that could be pushed into the ground. A trigger mechanism consisting of a ring and pivot set off the rattrap. The trap wire loop, that normally whacks the rat, hits a roofing nail sitting in a hole I made in the pipe end cap. The roof nail becomes the firing pin for the 12-gauge shotgun shell, BOOM!  

It’s so easy. Just unscrew the pipe cap, drop in a shotgun shell, find the nearest mole hill, scrape away the dirt and dig out the same hole it used to shove it up, set the trap in position so that the barrel end is pointing in the hole, and wait for the mole to come up and take a look. The unsuspecting mole comes up, bumps into the ring, the ring triggers the rattrap hitting the nail, and BOOM! No more mole. And you always know when it goes off. First, Boom! Then there’s a cheer from Shirley.

“Isn’t it a bit dangerous?” you ask.  

“Sure, that’s what makes it even better - - built in adventure.”    

It’s years later, the moles are gone, and I’m still armed and dangerous waiting for my next heroic assignment.  

-End-