I am warning you now: the stuff below is not for the squeamish.
Chris and I were cooking dinner in the kitchen, and the girls were all playing outside with the neighbor kids. Suddenly, Beth came shrieking up the hill from the playset, and barreled into the kitchen yelling, "Groundhog! Groundhog!"
"Where?" Chris asked, looking out the window. Beth explained that they had been playing on the slide, when somebody noticed a large, furry animal sitting at the bottom.
"What did it do when you saw it?" Chris asked.
"Uh, not really anything," said Beth. "It just sort of sat there and looked at us, like this." With that, she did a pretty spot-on groundhog imitation, with her paws held up to her face.
So Chris got his shotgun (a.k.a. the child-sized critter-killin' machine from WalMart) and sped off down the hill where the kids were all gathered together, watching the groundhog who was indeed crouched beside the slide.
Chris could tell immediately that something was wrong with the animal, so he did what needed to be done. When it was over, we all crowded around the dead groundhog. One of the neighbor kids asked if Chris could turn it over, because she thought that it might have only one arm, so Chris turned it over and...
Oh, wow. Are you ready for this?
It was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life. Half of the groundhog's belly was covered in maggots. Maggots. You can see them in the picture above. The groundhog was literally being eaten alive before Chris put an end to it.So we buried the dead, and we were all relieved to have it out of sight.
Out of mind is another matter, though.
The fake country can be a pretty brutal place.
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