I woke up to find one of our three foam pumpkin decorations had wandered off from the steps of our porch. Looking around I didn’t see any obvious place it could’ve rolled. It was just gone!
I stood there scratching my head, fuming that some neighborhood miscreant would walk off with my fake, two-dollar pumpkin. Then my neighbor walked by with her dog.
“Looks like somebody swiped my pumpkin!” I said to her.
“Hey, I saw a pumpkin in the yard across the street from my house,” she answered. “I was wondering how it got there.”
Together we walked over to the scene of the crime. From the street we could see it was beat up pretty bad.
“Looks like it might’ve gotten dented when it hit the house,” I suggested as we came closer. Who would bust an obviously fake pumpkin?
We soon stood over the pumpkin and I discovered why it looked so beat up. There were chunks of it scattered around the yard. Fist-sized holes were torn out of the front and teeth marks and fur covered the outside.
A critter! Some hapless beast saw the foam pumpkin sitting unguarded and helped itself to a midnight snack. The poor bastard must’ve felt cheated biting into a fake pumpkin after having dragged it halfway across the neighborhood!
The family and I had a good time sorting this out this morning. We’re still trying to figure if it was a raccoon or one of the foxes we’ve seen in the area. The hollow pumpkin was soccer-ball sized so I’m thinking a fox, but I suppose we’ll never really know. If we see any animals with an obvious stomachache I guess we’ll know. Or maybe in the morning we’ll find fox-graffiti on the steps that says “thanks for nothing, jerk!”
When we lived in Hurley, NY, the local corn farmer had trouble with deer. His problem wasn’t with them eating the corn. It was with secondary crops that he grew between some of the rows. He would plant pumpkins and watermelon. The deer would come down and knock holes in the tops of the developing fruit, then just leave it. He never had a good explanation for why they did it. I can’t imagine what a fox would see in a pumpkin unless it being non-vegetable made them think it might be a food container.