Excavations

Moving into a house with a yard awoke the ground squirrel living in Bast's brain. He's been hard at work digging to China for the past month.

A lot of wolfdogs dig. And I mean, they dig. Not just a scratched-out wallow in the dirt or a half-hearted hole for hording treasure - all out, den-building, call-of-the-wild type of mining. 

Bast's digging started simple. He warmed up a bit when we had a major plumbing leakage the first month we moved in. A delightful mess of poopy sewage flooded out of the clean-out pipe on the side of the house, and of course Prince Charming here had to go claw through the stanky swamp of TP and dook that volcanoed out into the yard.

Now, as gross as that was, the sewage got fixed and I don't really mind him digging out back. I can always take a shovel and fill it in. What concerned me was him digging near the fence, so we took the time to install some dig guard to keep him from getting curious about World Beyond the Fence.

As you can see, he was less than thrilled.

Bast digging near a point of egress was deterred, but he moved his excavations elsewhere and just dug weird little trenches in the ground before settling on a spot for a depth charge.

Down the rabbit hole.

I wondered what was so great about that spot, until he dug a little bit deeper and uncovered some sort of thin PVC pipe.

You can't see it in these pics, but this hole is probably two and a half feet deep at this point.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

I don't know what the pipe does and frankly, I don't want to know. I tried everything I could read to get him to stop digging there. I filled in the hole over and over. I sprinkled crushed red pepper flakes into what I filled in. I poured cayenne into it. I buried his poop in it. I buried large rocks in it. Nothing. Every time, he would dig it back out. I finally gave up. He isn't bothering the pipe and has actually started to hollow out the den in the opposite direction, so I guess screw it. He can dig to China, then.

I was going to try to stuff myself down there to give you an idea of how deep it is, but I was on my hands and knees before remembering - "Oh yeah, I shoveled a whole bunch of dog turds in here..."

I am not smart.

So proud.