It's A People-Drive-Cars World Out There

The weekend has not been kind to the furry woodland creatures of Hillmomba. Nor to their scaly cousins.

Friday evening, The Pony and I saw a huge snake coiled on our blacktop road, just past our turnoff from the county road. You know. Where the stop sign is always shot full of holes, but is now missing. He looked like a black snake, but he was coiled flat, not like a cobra ready to strike. Like a pink cotton-candy-flavored all-day sucker on a big wooden stick that your daddy might buy you at a carnival. I swerved to avoid him, keeping one eye out for oncoming traffic. By Saturday morning, Snakey's carcass lay mangled on the other side of the road. Fie on the murderers! Karma will bite them in their butts one of these days. With venom!

Saturday afternoon brought the discovery of a deceased raccoon. My, he was a big 'un! Huge! Paul Bunyan could have made a cap from him. That Davy Crockett fellow would have been no match for Paul. Davy could have curled up in that cap like a field mouse in a teacup.

This morning the high bridge over the big river held the remains of what appeared to be a fox. He was pretty flat and torn up. But he definitely was no possum or armadillo. Or snake or raccoon. Or rabbit or squirrel.

Thank the Gummi Mary we still have species that don't play chicken with automobiles. Just this afternoon, we saw a dark. sparrow-looking bird, only bigger, with a white patch on its back. Like a tramp stamp. The size of a silver dollar. And the bird sitting next to Trampy on the fence wire took off and flashed us the YELLOW undersides of its wings. The rest of it was kind of a dark gray, only lighter than Trampy. I'm not a birder, so I don't know what they were. Not our everyday crows and pigeons and killdeer and red-winged blackbirds and hawks and hummingbirds, that's for sure.

The squirrels are still squirrelly enough to dodge tires.