Living as I do in a place remote from most human habitation, I might expect to have non-human visitors from the natural world. I never quite get enough familiarity with some of these visitors to not feel some shock compounded by delight at their presence. Coming to mind at once is the flying squirrel I found perched in my easy chair when I returned from a winter’s visit to Minnesota. I switched on the light in cold evening quarters – we were both equally surprised by the other, and for a few seconds regarded each other with intensity before he (or she) decided to skedaddle, and did so with a glide to the back of the stove and disappeared from my awareness forever.

On another occasion I heard a rummaging around in a kitchen cabinet which was sufficiently loud to give me some trepidation. I opened the cabinet door and about two feet of black snake poured out into the air. I was not about to let this creature invade my kitchen space, so I sought a large box to try and capture her in. But this was unnecessary – the snake was no more comfortable in my space that I was in having her here, so she very miraculously demonstrated her path of entrance into my cabinet with her exit. She squeezed herself into a kind of moving hourglass shape while retreating up through a hole for an electric cable considerably smaller than her diameter into the attic from whence she came. Subsequently, I’ve found that she makes her home in the attic, likely feeding on the bats that roost up there.

At one time workmen up on the roof making repairs remarked about the large snake they saw basking in the sunlight in a gutter. The snake, alarmed by the banging and lack of respect shown for her tranquillity, took a leap off the roof onto the ground, none the worse for wear, apparently. The next day the snake was back in her gutter – how she can negotiate the climb from ground to roof is something I’ve not as yet figured out. The snake has left her clothing about in the form of a shed skin – one I measured two years ago was over six feet long.

It is always a thrill to see bears – and with some awe mixed with a bit of fear at their large size and obvious strength. The first one I saw was in the road near my place – unaccustomed to think of bears outside of a zoo, I first thought it was a large, black, stocky dog. At another time one stayed for two days eating the wild apples from trees around my place. One quite large fellow gave me quite a fright. He ushered in his visit by turning over my trash barrel, which being right out my bedroom window, was a disconcerting alarm at 4 AM. I play bluff games with bears if I figure they might get into something to do damage. So I got out my flashlight and was determined to drive this fellow off. No such luck. He did not give an inch of ground and even reared up to a massive height. So I retreated this time. He followed me to my door and as I ducked inside and closed the door, he was right there poking his nose almost through the glass window. Shining the light from the flashlight in his eyes, I had hope to run him off my doorstep, but he gave no sign of being intimidated. So here our faces were only about a foot apart with a glass separating us. Yes, I was scared, and thought he might break down the door which for him would be a snap. Later, I was educated about black bears by a West Virginia Department of Natural Resources officer who told me that all the bear wanted was some food, and that he had probably been fed by others, hence his lack of fear. (The valuable lesson here is to NOT feed bears and keep food in such a manner that they can’t smell it. And definitely, don’t have a cookie in your pocket!).

Just within the past several weeks a very large bear tried to climb up on my porch apparently to see what kind of goodies might be there for his noon meal. As I had a bunch of plants I was growing on in pots reposing there, I was not too keen on his apparent designs, so I summoned up my courage, and with the most awful roar I could muster, burst out of the door at the bear. I was relieved to find that I won out this time in the battle of the bluff. He vamoosed and was gone.

Critters have presented a problem whenever I attempted to grow something, whether it be food in the garden, or trees and shrubs. On one very snowy winter, mice or rabbits were able to girdle fruit trees I had planted the year before using the depth of snow to reach above the hardware cloth that I had wrapped around the base of the trees to protect them. Live and learn!

After trying many of the common remedies for preventing my garden produce from being eaten to the ground, most of which didn’t seem to make any difference at all, I settled on a rather elaborate fence which was a lot of work and expense. It was a combination of chicken wire and three strands of electric fence hot wires. It worked after a fashion, and I was able to have a pretty good garden, but the fence required continual maintenance, and if it got grounded out, the animal hosts were on those crops like a swarm. Rabbits and deer are the biggest problems, but I’ve also found that ground hogs can and will dig under any kind of fence you choose to erect. They can be stopped by a low hot wire, although these low wires tend to short out easily.

I don’t mow my grass much, partly because box turtles climb out of my swamp and on to the adjacent hillside to lay their eggs. I once had the horror of hitting a box turtle with the big blade of my Gravely rotary mower, and it turned the poor critter instantly to quivering turtleburger.

Just the other day I had remarked to myself (when you live alone in the wilds, you do a lot of "remarking" to yourself!) that I hadn’t seen any box turtles for perhaps a year. So as you might suspect, it was suddenly raining turtles. For one thing, I found a snapping turtle mother-to-be who had decided to lay her eggs on the middle of my onion patch! Also at the same time, in that same onion patch, there was a sizeable box turtle. Then I found several more box turtles both in and out of the garden area.

This year for the first time I tried raised beds using cement blocks for the sides for the beds. Apparently on their way to the hillside, these turtles got blocked off by this cement block barrier. So then it was the adjacent onion bed which became a turtle laying-in hospital! I watch mother snapper going through her "contractions" if that is what they’re called, and speculated on the human kinship through this process of reproducing its kind with this other, quite different, vertebrate.

Even though I see myself here as living with respect and sympathy for those critters around me, here I was impacting what might have been a very enduring pattern of turtle reproduction. And just as humankind has dreadfully impacted the Pacific salmon, my garden, if you will, was the Hoover Dam of turtles, on a very much smaller scale of course.

So I have had to develop a philosophy about these share-the-land residents. If there is any justification at all for that absurd notion of "property rights," then surely these animal neighbors have as much right to be here as I do. In fact, they were here first, so maybe what they eat from my garden is only "rent" that comes due. But coming out in the morning to see a whole row of four inch high peas eaten to the ground is hard to take with equanimity.