Eyes Shining in the Night

We set the trap, hidden secretly and craftily under the hay bales and an old wooden barn door.

Front

Back

The bait was a juicy steak bone. I placed it in the back of the trap and then put some tempting morsels of fat…one at the entrance and one a little further in to entice the “critter” back to where he would set it off and it would close the metal door.

Late that night about 11 o’clock I heard a whining sound. With the cicadas chirping outside, and the air conditioner running inside, and the ringing that I have already in my ears all the time…I couldn’t really hear clearly what it was. My son has a whistle as his phone ring, and I thought maybe that was what I was hearing coming from his bedroom up stairs.

Then my daughter who had already gone to bed comes down the stairs, “Do you hear that strange sound?”  “Do you think it could be something in the trap?”  We both walked outside on the front porch, the cicada chirping very loud now, and we hear a whining coming from the barn.

My husband grabs a flash light and we head down to the barn in the pitch black dark night, and what do we see…

Eyes shining in the night…

Two pairs of eyes shining in the night… I whispered to my husband, “Those eyes are not near the trap, there are two critters down there.”

I ran back up to get the car so that not only  would we be protected, but so that the headlights would help us see better. By the time I got down there, my husband said the two black dogs that were there had both ran off into the woods before he could get to them.  One had been caught in the trap, and the other one was smart enough and strong enough to pry the metal door from the outside and get the other one out.

Unbelievable!!! If we had just gotten down there 5 minutes sooner…Crazy!!!

Now we know that there are two big black dogs…and that they are very cunning and strong and destructive.

I know too, that these are not the only predators around, because a yellow colored critter got the first rooster and hen. And our neighbor down the road said a white dog got 3 of his chickens…

But the way this one dog got the other one out of the trap makes me suspect that he is the one that dug under the coop.

I borrowed the eyes in the night photo from a very cool website…All Things Nature