Wild Again. David S. Jachowski

ferrets in and predators out, and measured the voltage and cleared grass away from the electric fence wires strung to keep raccoons, skunks, badgers, and any other ground predators from climbing into our compound. Within each pen, we blew smoke from smoke bombs down into burrow systems with a leaf blower to check for escape burrows and filled in any breaches with gravel or concrete. We trimmed the grass down to the ground to resemble the closely cropped vegetation of a wild prairie dog town in the dry, clear days of midsummer. Last, we scrubbed out underground nest boxes that we hoped ferrets would use to spend the daylight hours and thus allow us to easily trap them for checkups. The nest boxes also made it easier for us to clean out their feces to prevent bacteria buildup and infections and to remove the accumulation of prairie dog fragments that attracted blow flies. These small flies were the bane of animal caretakers because on any scratch or wound they would lay eggs that would turn into flesh-eating maggots that burrowed just under the skin of our little brood of multi-thousand-dollar animals.

      Once the prairie dogs passed quarantine, we selected a lucky few to pretend again to be wild and free. We released two or three into each cleaned-out pen to excavate the old burrow systems, performing prison labor outdoors after two weeks in a suspended square metal cage. Previously, the only boundaries for these animals were social divides between families on flat prairie. A lifetime of only imagined boundaries was replaced by real boundaries and confinement with strangers. I watched the selected few prairie dogs quickly readjust to the view of the sky, taste of fresh grass, and feel of dirt between teeth and toes. I silently urged them to enjoy their time in this semi-captive state, perhaps even escape, wishing I could relate to them that they had only a few days before they were to be recaptured and soon after butchered and put to use as ferret food along with the rest of their captive cohort.

      While the captive prairie dogs were declining toward a feeble state on a diet of dried grain and alfalfa pellets, the ferret kits were getting feisty and outgrowing their indoor plywood boxes. Despite their size, which nearly equaled their mothers’ so that the nest box was crammed with writhing bodies, we stuck with Paul’s strategy of keeping families intact and indoors until fifty or sixty days after birth. We defrosted prairie dogs from our line of large chest freezers, quartered their bodies, and fed the torsos to the females and kits that devoured the tender, marble-sized dark red organs inside. I left the tougher hind legs for adult males that sat alone in their pens, useless until the next breeding season.