I am sorry to report that I am harbouring both a serial killer and a zombie. His name is Dennis. I am not trying to blame the victims here, but I do not know how a fifteen pound, eleven-year-old cat can catch so many chipmunks. Clearly either the message about a feline Jack the Ripper in the neighbourhood is not getting out in the greater chipmunk community or they are too busy running up and down trees on some essential and endless chipmunk errand to notice the lethal ball of orange fur lurking in the underbrush. Anyhow, the tastiest part of the chipmunk is apparently the head, because that’s where Dennis stops eating and loses interest. Who knew chipmunk brains are the new sushi? And they are organic, free range and local.
In other news, this year I have a bumper crop of (probably poisonous) small red berries on bushes that grow about eight feet tall. They are squishy, not solid (the berries that is), and grow in big bunches that look quite nice. But birds do not eat them. Nor does anything else. Even chipmunks. Hence the assumption they aren’t edible. Which begs the question of why they exist in the first place. Or maybe they are only a food source for zombies, in which case I should make sure to keep that in mind for the zombie apocalypse.
I don’t know what the owl is eating these days either. He doesn’t seem to like leftover cat-kill and so far he hasn’t snagged Henry so maybe he doesn’t like cat either. But at about four in the morning, he is out and about on his island rounds, literally hooting and hollering like guys around a campfire with vast quantities of beer. Or maybe sometimes it is guys up way past a sensible bed time at a cottage keg party but I have not been tempted to leave the comfort of my pre-dawn bed to confirm this or not. My bad.
And one thing I am not eating these days is chives. I don’t know how this is possible, but I have had a complete chive crop failure at the lake. I’ll admit I was counting on a resurgence of last year’s reasonably robust patch of chiveness, which has been a thing for the past few years and looked like it might be happening on schedule until it wasn’t. Of course, now that it is practically July, the Garden Centres have packed up the equivalent of their bathing suits (good luck finding any petunias) and are on to the winter jackets (all the tulip bulbs that will break your heart when the squirrels bite their heads off next spring). So no hope of trying to rehab a bedraggled, gone-to-seed pot of replacement chive plants on deep discount. You will now be served lemon balm, mint, basil, rosemary and/or parsley for all of your herb embellishment needs. But thank goodness for small mercies: there will be no chipmunk tails on the menu.