That night I stayed in Salem, Missouri, with a host through Warmshowers, a network of people willing to share their homes with those traveling by bike. I used the website sparingly on my trip across the country but met some great people through it.
Sarah and Jordan were among my favorite hosts. After a recent move from Montana, they were fairly new to the area and still getting their bearings. Sarah was a full-time mother and did nursing on the side. Jordan was a mining engineer (probably the first and last time I will ever meet one of those—lots of good stories).
Most stays are pretty much the same: meet, shower, eat, chat, sleep, wake up, leave. That’s the routine we started in Salem, but somewhere around “eat” or “chat” we deviated a good bit.
“I’m sorry, maybe it’s none of my business, but is that a bucket of spring coil traps under the table?” I asked with a chuckle as I stuffed my face with another spoonful of dinner.
They both let out a sigh and looked at their little boys before they spoke.
“Yeah, but don’t think we’re weird, please,” Sarah started. “We had a bunch of chickens until a few nights ago. Something has been picking them off, so we were trying to catch it. Whatever it was, it got our last two last night.”
I looked out the sliding glass door and saw a mostly finished chicken coop with an angled roofline. It was perched about three feet off of the ground and, with a multi-runged ladder, it looked more like a small tree fort for the kids than a chicken coop.
“Have you been able to track where it’s coming from?”
“We have tried. We feel like we got it right but it slipped through our snares last night. We haven’t had a chance to remove the dead chickens today because of the boys, but we are thinking we may leave them in hopes that it comes back tonight. So we wanted to try a different style of trap—that’s why we bought those other onetraps.”
Jordan showed me around the backyard after dinner, which inevitably led us to the murder scene. As he swung the door open I felt my knees grow weak for a brief moment. Blood splatter covered the walls and ceiling, and two chicken carcasses shared the spotlight in the center of the coop.
“We were going to clean it out this morning but then thought maybe if we left them it would return.” He repeated Sarah’s words from dinner.
He pointed out the two snares he’d set the night before. One was where they thought it was entering their yard from the woods and the other just under the roofline where there was a small gap in the structure. Both were sprung as if something had skillfully passed through them.
“I’ve never set a snare before but it looks like I did it right, just not good enough. I ‘spose.” He let out a strained breath.
“What do y’all think it is?” I asked.
“The neighbors think it’s a fox because they’re pretty common around here.”
“It’s not a fox,” I cut in. “Foxes don’t kill like this.”
“They seem pretty certain.”
“These chickens still have their heads. Have all of them been that way?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a fox then. Foxes typically bite off the heads and, more importantly, foxes can’t climb. Whatever got into your coop had to climb up that corner beam to get in and out. Also, foxes don’t turn the coop into a blood bath like this. I don’t know what kind of animals y’all have here but this seems like a large cat of some sort.”
He looked across the yard at his oldest son, who was splashing in the backyard puddles in rain boots and mud-speckled tighty whities. The boy smiled at his dad and Jordan smiled back before turning to me. “Do you hunt?”
“No,” I said. “But I can.”
I walked to the woodline. “Have you found any prints out here? The ground is so soft from all this rain, surely there’s something.”
“That’s what we thought but we couldn’t find much. We’re fairly certain whatever it is, it comes out of the woods there in the tall grass.”
By the looks of the sprung snare, they were right. Jordan and I spent the next hour crawling around the woods, fighting briars and slick mud, looking for prints or anything else. I can confidently say, the woods in his backyard are a popular spot for animals to poop in. We found every kind of scat you could imagine.
It all seemed like a waste of time until he found a small pile of chicken carcasses that had been eaten down to the bones.
“These were all yours, huh?”
He let out a grunt and stood up. Together, we walked back to the coop, took one last look, and headed to the house.
“Once the boys are in bed I will reset the traps along with a few new ones. You really don’t think it’s fox?”
“Not a chance. But, I’ve been wrong before and I’ll probably be wrong again. Just maybe not today,” I winked.
After dinner, Sarah and he went out to the backyard in the dark to place their traps. By the time they came back I was showered up and getting into bed. I said good night and went back to my room.
Early the next morning, I slipped out of bed and started to get my bike ready to hit the road. The pitter-patter of two young boys circled around me and traced my steps. With an endless supply of questions about me and my bike, they definitely kept me occupied while I packed.
Over breakfast, Jordan told me he thought he heard a few of the traps go off early in the morning but wasn’t going to check it until later.
I was about to push off when Sarah came outside with a grim weather report.
“There’s another wall of thunderstorms heading your way today. You’re welcome to stay another night if you need to.”
“I appreciate the offer but I will push on and hope to make it to the next town before it hits. If I only pedal on the days that the weather is good, I will never make it anywhere.”
A wise man once told me, “Hope is not a plan,” and on that particular day in Missouri, he was absolutely right. Halfway into my ride, a dark gray wall was closing in on me from the west. I slid on my rain jacket and pedaled faster. Even though it overtook me, the rain was slow to start. The temperatures gradually began to drop and the winds started to push in from the west. Thunder roared and rumbled in the distance but the lightning didn’t crack. After an hour, the extra layer worked against me and I was sweating so much that I took it off, but I still thought that I was going to escape the worst of it.
As soon as I got my rhythm back a large crack of lightning stretched its tendrils across the sky. Then came the rain. There was no chance to get my jacket on, I was already soaked.
For the first few minutes I told myself that it wouldn’t last long, but after an hour of the onslaught I gave up on that and started to look for shelter. The homes I passed all looked empty or not a door to knock on.
Over the roar of the cars and the pelting rain, I could make out the yapping of a lap dog. Not a sound I would usually be too excited to hear, but I figured if that little booger was outside someone was probably with it. I slowed down trying to figure out where it was coming from but the heavy rain made it difficult to see much of anything. I thought I saw a shadow streak across a large front porch and back, so I waited until I saw it a second time. This time, the little ankle-biter yapped the whole way across the porch.
I didn’t hesitate. I turned off onto the driveway and started my way up to the porch. I heard a robust laugh and heard, “Come on up!”
When I first looked up, I couldn’t see who had called to me. But when I looked again, I saw a giant of a man walking down the steps into the rain with no jacket. He met me at the gate and opened it to let me pass through. His smile hid behind a gray beard with brown sprinkles.
“Let’s get you out of this mess!” He swept his arm through the air welcoming me to his home and placed it on my back as I pushed my bike through the gate.
By the time we were on the porch, we were both soaked.
“Looks like a terrible day for a ride!” He laughed. “Where are you coming from?”
I told him about where I’d been and where I was heading, and he seemed convinced I was loony.
“Well, I can’t let you go back out there in this, so you’re stuck with us until it passes.” He passed me a stack of towels that his wife, Cyrstal, must have fetched when they spotted me coming down the driveway. She sat back down in her chair and listened to me ramble on about the weather the last few days.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself,” I extended my hand to the big man. “I’m Mark.”
He snatched my hand up and gave it a hearty shake. “I’m Paul. Paul Birdsong.”
“That’s a great name!”
“That’s good because it’s the only one I got!” A hint of southern slipped into his voice for the first time. It was only slight, but it was the kind of southern warmth that can get away with saying things like “finer than a frog hair” and “fixin’.”
They invited me inside while the storm passed and, to my surprise, I saw a whole spread of chips and picnic snacks surrounding a dish of meatloaf. Maybe it was the weather or the serendipitous meeting, but that was the best damn meatloaf sandwich I didn’t even know I wanted.
I ate at the kitchen island and chatted with the two of them. No topic was left untouched: ex’s, guitars, how to mow the lawn while holding a dog. We covered it all.
In the lull of the conversation, I got a text from Sarah telling me that they caught a raccoon in the chicken coop.
“Hopefully, that’s the end of it,” I responded, but didn’t believe that for a second. If they got new chickens, the predator would be back, and it wouldn’t be a raccoon.
Fully fed and warmed up, Paul, Crystal, and I went back to the porch to watch the thunderstorm in silence.
And that’s exactly where I want to leave you. I wouldn’t mind being there myself: sitting on a porch with two kind people, watching a southern summer storm sweep through while eating another meatloaf sandwich.
