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Vanquished vegetable villain

I got to Randy's house that Saturday evening right after all the emergencies ended. It looked like a bomb had blasted every tool in his dad's garden shed right out the door, but I didn't notice because my dad's shed always looked like that.

Whenever Mom told Dad to organize his shed, he'd say, "Why hide my tools from myself in the middle of gardening season?" To my dad, the word "shed" referred to a little wooden building plus the 50-foot perimeter around it. It made sense to me. Mom finally stopped asking, so eventually it made sense to her, too.

I had gone over to Randy's house to brag about shooting a woodchuck at over 350 yards. Randy was breathing hard and covered in mud, but I didn't notice. "Yup, I know for sure it was more than 350 yards 'cause if I had a rangefinder I could have measured it. That's proof nobody can argue with!" I was known for flawless reasoning.

Randy didn't seem impressed. "Humph. That's a pretty safe distance, dontcha think? Why not go hand-to-hand combat with them, like I do. If you were even half a man, you wouldn't play sniper from 350 yards. You'd fight 'em with your bare hands!"

"Start at the beginning, Randy." his dad said. "Stevie is confused." But I wasn't confused. I was insulted. I turned 13 last Groundhog Day. I was way past the halfway mark and reckoned I'd be a man by the time I got my driver's license.

"The dogs ambushed that vegetarian varmint in the garden." He pointed at a wet, muddy woodchuck. It looked dead, too. Also, we had been learning about alliteration in school, and Randy sometimes tried school stuff in real life.

While Randy was pointing, his dad added, "Those dogs were screechier than a fat lady warming up before the opera." I could see he had never been to the opera, but before I could tell him fat ladies sing when it's over, Randy resumed the story like he always does, with the boring parts.

One of their wiener dogs had cornered the groundhog in a hole it had excavated under a railroad tie his dad used as a landscaping timber. The other dog got busy digging a new hole on the

backside. They flushed it from there into the tool shed where it hid behind the shovels, rakes, buckets, tomato cages, hoses and hoes.

Since Randy's dad wasn't as efficient as my dad, he had to remove everything from the shed. Once the critter's cover was gone, it ran toward the house. Randy's dad took a swing with a hoe. Fortunately he missed a dog, and the groundhog dove under the back porch.

"My 10-pound attack dogs were relentless, and they forced the bugger into a hole another groundhog started under the porch last year, so Dad turned on the hose to flush it out. It was either going to drown in that hole or fight two muddy wiener dogs in the open yard."

"It chose the open yard. Suddenly one dog began to shriek, just when Mom got home from the hospital, still wearing her scrubs after doing an emergency surgery. Mom was sure the vicious vegetable villain had sunk its teeth into her little dog's throat." I noticed when the dogs did something brave, they were Randy's dogs. When they needed sympathy, they were his mom's.

I also noticed Randy was stuck on the letter V. "Don't overdo the V-words, Randy." My opportunities to correct his grammar and usage are rare.

Randy shifted to D-words, but it wasn't seamless. "I dashed to the dying dog's defense, grabbed the vile, um, animal -- and discovered that its teeth were stuck in the dog's collar. It wasn't biting the dog at all, but now I was in the fight. I had him by the neck and started squeezing!" Ah, the switch from storytelling to hero bragging. I could always tell.

"Randy! Let it go! Let it go!" Randy's mom thinks even varmints should be given a fighting chance. Probably an idea doctors pick up in medical school.

"A dead woodchuck is better than a trip to the hospital for emergency surgery." I doubt Randy really said that part. "And then I pinched his little windpipe until the villain was vanquished."

Other than the fact that it was dead, the groundhog looked comfortable covered in mud. The dogs, too. Randy, not so much. He wiped the mud off his face and said, "Throw your sniper rifle away and try that!" Then he tracked all that mud into the house. It was time for his Saturday night bath.

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When "The Everyday Hunter" isn't hunting, he's thinking about hunting, talking about hunting, dreaming about hunting, writing about hunting, or wishing he were hunting. If you want to tell Steve exactly where your favorite hunting spot is, contact him through his website, www.EverydayHunter.com. He writes for top outdoor magazines, and won the 2015, 2018 and 2023 national "Pinnacle Award" for outdoor writing.