“The effect of having other interests beyond those domestic works well. The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love and understanding companionship.” - Amelia Earhart
The folks at the Reuters news agency have come through again;
OSLO - A Terrified Norwegian woman shared her car with a rat for two weeks after failing to lure the animal into a trap.
The 6-inch long rat, which sneaked out of a garbage bag and built a nest under the dashboard with discarded Norwegian crown bills and old receipts, was not tempted by a mouse trap loaded with cheese, sausage or minced beef.
“I’m disgusted. Imagine, I drove around with that big, ugly thing right under my legs,” Solveig Kristiansen, a 35 year old consultant from southeast Norway, told Reuters.
The rat was finally killed when the woman laced the trap with liver pate.
“I’m laughing now that the beast is dead, but I was really scared when I found out it was a rat,” she said.
She said she was hoping her insurance would cover the $1,000 to $2,200 it will cost to repair the damage to cables and car seats inflicted by the big rat.
This little bit of international journalistic excellence brought to mind the mother of all rat shoots. For years afterwards, this glorious rat shooting spree was reverently referred to as the “THE GREAT SULLIVAN COUNTY DUMP RAT MASSACRE.”
Planning for any expedition around 1972 was at best, little more than a hit-or-miss affair but when it came to big rat shooing forays some amount of planning was not only necessary but it became downright essential, and this affair was no exception.
Over a long night of playing nine ball, losing large amounts of pocket change, and tossing back a few cold ones, the conversation somehow turned to the prodigious population of two and three pound rats that inhabited Sullivan County’s garbage dump. Three pound rats are a trophy in any died in the wool rat hunters book and as urban legends go, this liars fest got way out of hand. Many a tale was told for the truth including a few that included stories of behemoth rats actually running down and ravaging unwanted and unlucky house cats.
My buddies, the Bristol pool hustlers, in times of no money, which was quite often, often filled their idle hours by entertaining themselves, and their girlfriends, by roaming about the town of Bristol Tennessee, catching helpless stray cats and driving them up to the county dump to feed the multitudes of trophy rats that were so prolific there in the hollow where the good folks from Sullivan County planted their garbage. They all agreed, to a man, that a good cat/rat fight was far superior to any chicken fight they had every witnessed.
A good pool hustler’s sense of sport seems to seek a somewhat different plain.
This was in the unenlightened days before landfills. A good county dump was seen by county planners simply as just another recreational venue for bored county residents. A real perk for those that thought rat hunting was indeed as good a sport as squirrel hunting, or catching stray cats. Sports venues have surely changed for the worse since the early seventies.
This particular massacre took a lot more planning than usual because our head guide had to scrape up enough money to get his Ithaca pump 16 gauge out of Slick’s Gun & Pawn, where the guide housed it when he wasn’t financially able to hunt rats. Getting up the cash to liberate the pump prompted a marathon exhibition in the art and finesse of nine ball, and the general fleecing of most of the unwitting patrons of the local up-town billiards hall in metro Bristol. This was a classic case of planning with a purpose.
Being a pretty respectable rat hunter from way back I quietly scoffed at the need for a shotgun on a rat hunt, but I managed to keep my mouth shut as we laid in the necessary provisions for an all-niter rat slaughter. I was armed with a trusty single action six shot handgun and two boxes of 22-shorts while my partners were stocking up on hi-brass number 6’s.
More than once they mumbled aloud about me being woefully under-gunned, but I just blew this concern off as little more than being in the company of a couple of rat hunting local yokels, and besides, I imagined that their wild stories of cat eating packs of overly large rats had been borne somewhere in the general haze developed by our other basic provision.
The most important provision for this particular expedition was a case of cold Carling Black Label per man. The more beer we drank on the way to the dump, the bigger the rats were getting and the more they seemed to worry that we didn’t have nearly enough ammunition or beer to survive this expedition. I kept my doubts to myself.
As I look back on this trip, these were probably the same sort of thoughts that General George Armstrong Custer’s troop’s had come to mind, that day on the Little Big Horn, as he uttered that now famous phrase, “Boys, don’t worry about taking any prisoners.”
As the 62 Dodge snaked up the steep, dark hollows of East Tennessee’s Sullivan County we slowly began to see telltale signs that we were approaching our destination. Garbage and plastic lined the dirt roads and a foul acrid odor from spot fires lingered in the hills like steam from a dormant volcano until we eased through a narrow mountain pass and illuminated a stupendously huge, earthen bowl of waste.
It seemed that the county planners had devised an utterly fantastic and ingenious method for dumping trash all over the side of a 300 acre, bowl shaped hollow. The big trucks would labor up the steep slopes that had once been a pristine mountain hollow and dump their foul smelling contents down the precipitous sides of the canyon in what can surely be described as Sullivan Counties answer to Niagara Falls. Only instead of water flowing down in torrential cascades for the delight of the public, Sullivan County had decided to create one of the finest examples of a trash filled wasteland ever witnessed. It was a veritable panorama of garbage, a mini grand canyon of trash, the surreal super-dome of dumps, an unimaginable colossus of filth, complete with surround sound.
When the car crunched to a halt at the end of the tire strewn road we were engulfed in a wasteland of filth, an almost incomprehensible and unbelievable Mecca for rat hunters. In a moment of awe and silence we commented that this must surely have been how the Lewis and Clark expedition felt when they spied their first huge herds of buffalo on the verdant plains of the great Midwestern prairies.
The guide, an ex-drill instructor, sternly ordered us to lock and load before we doused the lights from the car and killed the Dodge’s slant six engine. We opened a fresh Carling and climbed to the hood of the car in the darkness and waited in silence, all a-tingle with the expectation of the first salvo.
We didn’t have long to wait
The mountain cove of garbage began to erupt in the sounds of frenzied activity, slowly building to a crescendo like a cheap symphony orchestra. When the noise grew dangerously closer I nervously thumbed the hammer on the six shooter like a wana-be kid gun slinger on the streets of old Dodge City. The guide hissed, “Turn on the head lights!” There was an uneasy sense of urgency in his command as the ever expanding, unseen wave of rats were frantically working their way to our feet. I nervously felt my pockets to find my spare cartridges, gauging how fast I could reload the old hand gun.
When the headlights of the rusty old dodge illuminated the mountain cavern of filth we were perilously close to being surrounded by some of the largest specimens of vermin that I had ever witnessed. There were trophy class rats in this dump that most people wouldn’t go after unless they were armed with belt fed, water cooled, crew served, tripod mounted 30 caliber machine guns.
The Ithaca roared to life in a flash of light and a big cloud of rat hair. The six shooter blazed away at the very closest three pounders and all hell broke loose as rats dove for cover, squealing in terror at the lights and the leaded mayhem we were laying down. To my back I could hear the headlight operator frantically rolling up windows and locking the doors as the din subsided. We surveyed the mayhem of the first quick volley and re-loaded quickly as miles and miles of rats scattered through the mountain of smoldering trash. With the general and uneasy quiet that followed we doused the lights, and waited for the next wave of terror.
And so it went, wave after wave, beer after beer, shot after shot, the massacre wore on and the ammunition dwindled and we slowly grew exhausted with this particular county’s form of recreation..
That was about the time the guide, apparently somewhat disabled on warm beer, and feeling somewhat invincible, decided to take the fight to the biggest, and hardest to hit rats. He decided that one particular spot about forty yards up the mountain was the lair of the trophy of the night. The guide had a big photo-op on his mind.
We had seen this especially large and evil looking big boy a couple of times during the night’s rather protracted fire fight, but neither of us had scored a kill on the monster, so the guide, in a show of massive bravado, announces that with is last six shots, he is going to go in and get this big rat if it’s the last thing he does.
We toasted his insanity with another warm Carling and wished him well. He checked the action on the 16 gauge as he wobbled through the knee deep garbage into killing range of the discarded mattress and box springs where the monster lived. When the guide announced that he was set, we doused the lights and waited for his command.
It didn’t take long.
The rats somehow sensed a suicide mission was at hand and from the sounds of the attack it appeared that rats from all over the mountain were rallying to the defense of the big king rat that lived under the trashed Serta Posture Perfect.
The guide screamed, “TURN ON THE LIGHTS!” as he ripped off the first round at the initial wave of huge man eating rats.
My buddy, the headlight operator, let out a subtle little maniacal giggle as he slowly rolled down the window and screamed back, “What’s that? You’ve had enough for one night?”
The next series of shots from the point man were ripped off as fast as even the best factory shooters in America could have fired their trick guns for exhibition purposes. The guide was now running backwards through the sea of rats in the dark as my buddy, the light operator, was rapidly counting down the number of remaining shots in the pump. I sensed that if the guide was not too prudent with his ability to count available shells then he could possibly end up back at the car with one shot left in the chamber. I reasoned that he would be covered in big, snarling, mad three and four pound rats but he may still be lucid enough to end both of our lives there in the front seat of the old push button Dodge.
I reached over and pulled the headlights on and jumped into the retreat with my last six rounds of 22 shells, covering the guide’s extraction from a dangerously hot LZ. The guide collapsed on the hood of the car, breathless from his hasty retreat, burning his forearm on the smoking barrel of the Ithaca, and thanking me for saving him from certain annihilation at the hands of the biggest rats known to man.
My other buddy slowly rolled down the window and sheepishly offered up the last two beers in at attempt to avoid an ass whipping there in the cavern of trash. He kept the doors locked for the time it took us to start laughing about the terrified look on the guide’s face as he back-peddled through the garbage, shooting from the hip and dancing wildly over some very mad and large East Tennessee bred Norway rats.
I was in Bristol back in October and the Stateline pool hall was shuttered. Slick’s Gun & Pawn is still there but the greaser at the counter said he didn’t have any 16 gauge Ithaca pump. I haven’t seen a rusty, push button, slant six, Dodge in years. I didn’t remember how to get to the dump, hopefully it’s gone too.
As for the big rats, they probably cross bred with possums, or ran out of stray cats and faded into the hills of southwest Virginia.