i’m natty fucking bumppo

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/2zWZYln

to follow up on yikes, when I went out to walk to work I picked up the rat corpse I had hurriedly thrown out the door, wrapped it nicely in paper towels, and consigned it to the bin, because I don’t really have anywhere else to put a dead rat with the ground frozen as it is.

It snowed last night/this morning, just a little, about a half-inch of fluffy snow, maybe an inch. And so there was a fresh canvas for tracks, and I noticed the little rat paw prints going  under the car, which is clearly where Chita apprehended it. (She likes to hang out there too, it’s her Spot, and thus a really terrible place for that rat to have chosen to go.) (And, I noted, she did not break its neck, but rather bit straight through its chest, so like. Yikes.) 

I looked around, and saw that the rat had approached across the yard, from next to our garbage can back by the garage. I took a photo of what the prints looked like, for my own reference. On the driveway, in shallow snow, the feet moved individually, but to get through the deeper snow in the yard, the rat had hopped, feet together, and its tail had made a distinct drag print.
[there are photos at tumblr but they didn't come thru and i guess i'm over my quota so i can't upload them. they're not exactly staggering works of heartbreaking genius so i'm not bothering to repost them.]

I walked down the street a little ways and noticed those same prints in the neighbor’s yard. The rat had come from the street, gone through her yard to the back, and then looped around my yard from the back, hiding by my garbage cans, and then hopped across my yard to the driveway, where Chita killed it. 

So the rat was just passing through. I didn’t see any further prints; it seems like the rat may have come from the school across the road?? Interesting how far it traveled. 

______

(i texted the title of this post to dude as i was wandering around the neighborhood looking for rat tracks, and he was like “who” so I decided to look Natty Bummpo up, and did u kno, according to Wikipedia, one of his aliases was Hawkeye, and yes for real, that’s where the Marvel character got his name, after having portrayed the Bummpo character in a carnival show in his youth. *~ the more you know ~*)

Comments

[toujours_nigel]

I did know that about Natty Bumppo, well. Except I was surprised that Hawkeye from The Last Mohicans wasn't actually called Hawkeye, so, uh, wrong way round I guess.

[dragonlady7]

I was really obsessed with the Leatherstocking tales when I was slightly too young to be reading them. I think I just got really absorbed, and at, I dunno, I think I was 12? the 19th-century style of novel-writing, all long sentences interpolated with commas, wasn't that much of an impediment. Anyway I devoured the entire series and was much taken with it but I haven't touched it since, so I don't really recollect. But, I mean-- they were local, for me, Fenimore Cooper lived like 75 miles west of where I grew up, and my mom attended grad school in the institution named for him, so. They're local folklore, for us, as close as we come to that sort of thing.

Anyhow, he *did* go by Hawkeye, but only briefly and among many other aliases. I think I liked him best as Deerstalker. but it's a long time since I read the books, as I said, and I most likely don't properly recollect.

It's just funny, that it was a character I cared about so much, and then a second character I came to care for, and I had never before wondered if there was a connection or why.

(Hawkeye/Deerstalker/Leatherstocking was not an archer, but a rifleman, back when rifled muskets were quite difficult things to operate.)

[toujours_nigel]

Only one I've read in Last of the Mohicans which I certainly read too young, considering the sexual violence... 11, maybe 12? In that he's either Hawkeye or La Longue Carabine, so yeah certainly a rifleman.