Packrat

(There's one street in North Fork, Idaho, and one saloon. This tale was woven between beers in that saloon by a hardrock miner named Rollie. His daughter drank with us. She said that Rollie only removed the hardhat once a week, to wash it when it started leaving stains on his 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. Big experiment. Don't know why I did it. And I've been limping half my life on account of a packrat.
"Thirty years ago, me and Mary McDermitt were working a claim up around Gibbonsville. Mary, she was built close to the ground, went to geologist's school out in West Virginia. When I ran into Mary at the tavern down in Challis, 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 half of West Virginia with her in a 1938 Chevrolet sedan, including a couple of cords of books, a big leather footstool with birdsfoot legs, and her grandmother's salt and pepper shaker collection. She was the kind of person that believes everything in a house has its own special place, so she toted Homer's stuff out under a yellow pine and tarped it, hung shelves all over her half of our little cabin, and put her knicknacks in nice little rows and clusters.
"She was tremendous help at 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 showed me better ways to set the charges, so's the good rock would drop right into the tunnel, where we could load it easy into wheelbarrows and carry it out to the dump to be hauled to the mill. She 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 make you quite as sick.
"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 five buck's worth of quarters. Hell, I hadn't touched it. We had a packrat.
"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 has 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 your 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 shoot it, which normally ain't that 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 when they're reading. You just listen for the sound, then blow it away.
"So, one night Mary and me arranged a cafeteria for packrats on the footlocker against the wall at the bottom of my bed, drank a whole pot of cowboy coffee, grounds and all. I crawled into my bedroll with a flashlight and Homer's old Colt revolver. We even shelled a few peanuts for bait.
"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, turned on the flashlight, cocked the pistol, and with the packrat looking right at me, I proceeded to blow the varmit to Kingdom come, right along with the big toe of my right foot.
"I spent a month up there in the hospital with Homer, getting my foot patched up. Meanwhile, Mary had the ore processed, took her share of the proceeds, and, since winter was coming on, packed up her Chevrolet and went back east.
"That Christmas I got a note from her saying she had found her missing magnifier. It was tucked up into the straw stuffing of her fancy footstool."