The last few nights I've been almost asleep when I hear a frantic clucking from behind my host mom's house. My eyes unwillingly open and yup...my window, which faces the ''big house'', is suddenly and completely illuminated as my host mom wakes up and is on her feet in seconds. ''Hoo-leh! Hoo-leh!'' She yells, dashing out the door and toward the chicken pen.
We have a problem with foxes.
I don't know how this was the settled upon scare tactic for foxes – why it's different than the noise that my host mom uses to round up chickens, get the pig to move along or caution the baby that something's hot. But I heard a lot of hoo-leh tonight especially. We're all awake because of my niece's baptism although the party ended awhile ago. We hear the telltale panicking of the hens and I hear the telltale call of a woman who wants to get rid of a fox. Tonight though, my host mom is fed up. She's had it. Sick of this shit. This normally very caring, nature conscious and animal loving individual (um, well into her 50s, btw) calls me out of my house and says, ''Matamos a ese bandido.'' Let's kill this bandit.
So, I asked her like...how? How do you catch a fox, isn't that notoriously difficult? I asked, ''Lo da golpes, como con palo?'' Do you hit it, like...with a stick? No such luck for the fox. My host mom replies that they'll kill it with machetazos, by striking it with a machete. Ok. So I stood for about ten seconds contemplating whether or not I wanted to see this, be a part of it. Run around at 10 o'clock at night with a machete where my greatest problem is probably not the fox, but the snakes and the ants. Ten seconds before I said out loud in English, ''When the hell am I ever going to be invited to this type of party again?''
Cut to me, after running around for fifteen minutes in the dark, machete in hand and listening to my host mom say, ''Be careful.'' I'm standing in the back of my aunt's yard, whistling and calling to all the dogs in our family to come help out. My cousin is up in the lemon tree with his flashlight and he has sights on the fox and finally manages to knock it down. Only one dog came (Doky as it turns out is a big loser and was chilling out watching TV – no joke – the whole time) but as soon as this fox hit the ground, the battle was won. I didn't even have to pretend like I was going to machetazo this animal. A few other family dogs showed up soon and then the show was really over.
Not before my host mom had her fun though. She picked up the fox (which really looks more like a large, agile opossum) and started carrying it for home. Earlier in the night, the food that she had set aside on a plate to eat was stolen by a neighbor's dog and she commented that now she'd get dinner.
Pause.
''¿Cómo? What? You...eat. It?'' She nodded seriously and said, ''Of course, what else would you do with a fox?'' And then she cracked up laughing as she carried it across the street and threw it over the fence into the monte, or tall weedy grass. The most disturbing thing is, before she threw it over the fence, I had mentally prepared myself to give it a good sport tasting. Maybe she seasons it really well. It can't be worse than gator or piranha or guinea pig. At least don't start freaking out right now.
I guess this could go into a journal of some sort about just how many completely normal/totally indescribably insane details there are in my life. And how those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
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