Packrat                                                                                                          

(There was one street in North Fork, Idaho, one saloon. A hardrock miner named Rollie wove this tale between double shots of Jim Beam. His daughter drank with us. She said her mother made Rollie remove the hardhat once a week, so she could wash it when it started leaving stains on the pillows.)

     "I once was the smartest fellow in these mountains, then I went to mining. I been hit on the head so many times there ain't nothing left in my noggin but tailings and pus. Blew off these two fingers by squeezing a shotgun shell in a vice in a big experiment. Don't know why. And I've been limping half my life on account of a pesky packrat.
     "Thirty years ago, me and Mary McDermitt were working a claim up around Gibbonsville. Mary was built close to the ground, went to geologist's school out in West Virginia. I ran into her at a tavern down in Challis while my original partner, Homer, was laying in the hospital in Missoula suffering from a whiskey stroke. About all that was left of Homer was slobber and twitch. So I took Mary on as a full partner, after she made damn sure I wasn't just looking at her as winter meat.
     "Mary brought her share of West Virginia with her in a 1938 Chevrolet sedan, including a couple of cords of books, a big leather footstool with eagle claw legs, a few pairs of canvas pants, and her grandmother's salt and pepper shaker collection. She was the sort of person who thinks everything in a house has its own special place. She toted Homer's stuff out under a yellow pine and tarped it, hung shelves all over her half of our little cabin, and arranged her knicknacks in nice little rows and clusters.
     "She was tremendous help in the mine. Me and Homer had worked a couple hundred feet into a hillside, where we hit a good, wide seam of flecked quartz. Mary was smart, showed me better ways to set the charges in the stopes so's the good rock would drop right into the tunnel where we would load it easy into wheelbarrows and ferry it out to the dump to be hauled to the mill. She even taught me how if you chew on a little wad of DuPont before you go back into the mine after a blast, the smell of the dust and the dynamite won't give you quite as much of a headache.
     "One morning over pancakes, Mary asked me what I'd done with her geology magnifying glass, you know, one of those little folding deals about the size of  a stack of quarters. Hell, I hadn't touched it, but I’d been living in that cabin for ten years so I figured it was the packrat again.
    "Hardrock miners and packrats are made for each other. A miner works in a hole all day, drinks supper, and sleeps hard. A packrat sleeps in a hole all day, and rummages all night, about like any mousy critter, but it is a natural born thief with an urge to steal, or borrow, or decorate its nest or something. Anyway, it'll carry off little bits of tinfoil and beads and buttons and build them into its home. Mary's trinket collection was a packrat supermarket.
     "Packrats are too smart to walk into a normal rat trap. About the only way to get rid of one is to stay awake until the rat comes out to play, and then try to shoot it. Normally that ain’t tough because when a packrat gets to fooling with something shiny, it'll go to patting it's furry tail kinda like a person'll shake their leg while they're reading. You just listen for the sound, then blow it away.
    "One night Mary and me arranged a cafeteria for packrats on the footlocker against the wall at 

the bottom of my bed. I drank a whole pot of cowboy coffee and crawled into my bedroll with a flashlight and Homer's old Colt revolver. We even shelled a few peanuts for the little critter.
     "Lights out. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later I heard this panting sound, like a squirrel with a chest cold, then the "tap, tap, tap," of a packrat's greedy little trance. I sat up in bed, switched on the flashlight, cocked the pistol, and with the packrat looking right at me, I proceeded to blow the varmint to Kingdom come, right along with the big toe on my right foot.
     "I spent a month up there in the hospital getting patched up with Homer just down the hall. Meanwhile, Mary had the ore processed, took her share of the proceeds, and since winter was coming on, packed up the Chevrolet and headed back east. That Christmas I got a Currier and Ives from her saying she had found her missing magnifier. The rat had tucked it up into the straw stuffing of her fancy footstool."