I knew she’d been upset with the amount of grit tracked into the front hall during the day, and I knew that my promise to vacuum it up in the morning after breakfast was not a satisfactory response. So I’d half-expected it when she got out the noisiest vacuum cleaner in her arsenal and went at it about ten last evening, just a few yards from my desk.

But all of a sudden she screamed – terror mingled with revulsion – dropped the vacuum, and ran into her office, still screaming. Relieved by her tone that it wasn’t a serious injury, I hobbled out into the hall to see what was up. “What’s up?” I asked, in my most reassuring tone.

“There’s something alive in the hall! I tried to pick it up, and it moved! Yeeaagh!”

This was getting interesting. I hobbled back into the office, changed spectacles from “Computer” to “General Use,” picked up a flashlight, and went back out to search.

There was a little brown bat crouching on the floor just inside the front door, huddled fearfully and looking up at the flashlight with beady little black eyes. The attic door had been left open that afternoon, and it no doubt had flown down the attic stairs and lighted, unable to get out, on the hall floor. Mother had thought it was just a piece of something tracked in, and was just a bit startled when it wriggled between her fingers. I picked up a stiff-paper photograph off the hall sideboard, slipped it under the little critter (they’ve been known to carry rabies, so no sense taking chances), and picked him up. I opened the front door, carried him across the porch, said, “Good bye, little buddy. Try to stay warm till morning,” and launched him high into the darkness.

He must have taken the hint, because there was no tiny thump in the driveway. Just to make sure, I canvassed the area with the light. Nothing. How much luckier he’d been, I reflected, than the bats of my childhood, whom my father hunted through the house with a broom till they succumbed. How much luckier than all the little creatures – ants, termites, mice, moles, and red squirrels – naturally evolved cogs in the wheel of existence until we came along, took over their territory, and named them pests. I resolved to start building some bat houses in my spare time. Mother and I routinely sit on the front porch for a pre-prandial on summer evenings, and the click of bats’ jaws on flying mosquitoes is a wonderful accompaniment to the click of ice in our glasses.

We’ve had skirmishes with wild animals for half a century now. We haven’t won them all, but even those we’ve won have left a mildly guilty feeling. The creatures, after all, have arguably a better right to our territory than we. The skunk that moved in under our first house in 1960 and raided our garbage can nightly died instantly from a .22 bullet between the eyes late one night – but not instantly enough to prevent his crawling back under the house and letting fly with his ultimate weapon. We had to leave the windows open for days, and the neighbors shunned us.

There was the mother raccoon who brought her kids to visit as we barbecued in the back yard. They lined up in a row at the edge of the woods to watch. Later, when w’d gone to bed, we could hear them growling at each other as they dragged it clanging toward the swamp. Next day I always retrieved it. They were a major, if cute, nuisance, but one night, when I heard coon hounds approaching the house, I found myself at the foot of their den tree with a stick and a flashlight, holding the hounds at bay till their owner arrived. I suggested to him a different venue, and Mother and I continued to live in cautious friendship with the little masked bandits.

A bear got my bird feeder two years in a row. I didn’t mind; it was time to take it down, anyway, and bears are extra-hungry in the springtime. But when he crushed the feeder on his second visit, I removed the temptation forever. If he returned, we never knew it.

An old customer of mine complained of a groundhog in her garden, so I trapped it with a Havahart and tried to turn it loose along a short section of the Appalachian Trail that I used to maintain. It turned out to be fractious, and wouldn’t leave the trap. When I finally shook it loose, hissing and gnashing its teeth, I found it was also homicidal, and got out of there fast. Hikers on the trail that summer recorded “a woodchuck that attacked us as we passed its hole.” It was an exciting stretch of trail: A goshawk also dive-bombed hikers as they hurried past its nest overhead.

A field mouse named Ralph entered our house in 1979 just after a big snowstorm had piled drifts against the siding. Attracted by the kitchen trash bin, Ralph foraged in there at night. This was not a problem, but then he began leaving little mouse turds in the silverware drawer. My subsequent battle with Ralph was epic, and slowly escalated, until one night he inadvertently trapped himself. In an effort to reward his imagination, I stored him in a closed ash bucket for a trip to the dump. But the ashes were still generating carbon dioxide, and Ralph went to a different reward.

Pests – they’ll be with us as long as we pests keep moving into their habitat. But they’re relatively harmless. They don’t pave over open land, they don’t generate trash or carbon dioxide, they don’t complain about us to the cops. They’ll be here long after we’re gone.