Justice for a theif in the mountains...

He'd been hanging around for weeks - maybe months - and everybody in the neighborhood knew that he was up to no good.

Nobody liked him. It wasn't that the neighborhood was particular unfriendly, or prejudice or something. But you could tell from looking at him the trouble he could cause.

"I've seen him snoopin' 'round my back yard at night," Ted told me. Ted was retired. He grew up in Amonate, on the West Virginia line. He's a tall, wiry man who smiled a lot and loved to talk about how he used to catch 'possums and groundhogs as a boy and sell them for people to eat. Now he owns 4 or 5 houses in the neighborhood and rents them out.

Ted is also something of a village historian: he knows where everyone's well is, when (and why) it was dug, who originally built each house in the area, and other things like that.

"He's up to somethin'," Ted said. "If you can catch 'im, you're welcome to it."

Ted's permission to take action was reassuring; whatever I did was not likely to cause ill will in neighborhood. I started asking questions.

One neighbor said they'd caught him going through their trash and ran him off. Smacked him once with a broom handle on his way out of the yard.

"Why didn't ya do nothin' else?" I asked.

"I ain't got much he could git," she said. "I don't guess he'll hurt me none anyway." The woman obviously didn't feel as strongly about the situation as I did.

Another person's accusations were more serious.

"Since he showed up, I've had a couple of chickens go missin'," he said. "Hard to find anything else to blame it on. I reckon it was him."

On down the road a ways, one local farmer had larger animals.

"I think he sleeps in my barn," the farmer said. "But I ain't caught him yet. He ain't messed with my sheep. But he craps in the barn and I'm scared he's gonna make my stock sick - spread somethin', ya know."

I'd heard enough. I thought I knew why he was hanging around, what he was waiting for. My suspicion was that he was going to do me a lot of damage over the next few months.

Call me prejudice if you want. Or heartless. But I hate his kind. I decided to get rid of him and to make sure that he didn't bother me - or anyone else - again.

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