View from the North 40: For the most part, I had an awesome, Fluffy, childhood

I’m not saying my childhood was any more awesomer than anyone else’s — certainly it had its share of dark points and failures, many of these self-induced — but my childhood had its amazing highlights that others would be hard pressed to equal or exceed.

Specifically, I got to raise, care for and see up close a wide variety of wild animals. Did you get to raise black bear cubs and take them to second-grade show and tell? I think not.

Even though one of them peed on a classmate’s desk, I still had plenty of playground cred after that.

And while I can honestly say that some of the scars of my childhood are literally scars from being ravaged by wild beasts, sort of, I can also say that it was worth every minute and every blood-letting.

If someone said they could magically turn all of the bad childhood moments into good ones, but I had to give up all the moments connected to the wild creatures, I would refuse.

There isn’t a random happy moment I could cherish more than the moment I first set eyes on the yellow-eyed ball of white-gray fluff that would one day turn into a majestic great-horned owl. She was the first of many wild creatures I cared for as the child of a Montana game warden. I named the owl Fluffy.

I was 5, don’t judge me.

My older brother named his yellow-eyed charge, Gus. Brother was obviously an unimaginative dolt.

Fluffy and Gus were only days old and already they could hang upside down from my dad’s gloved fingers. We were enamored.

We had those owlets only until they had adult feathers and could hunt mice on their own in the garage, but those few months brought lessons and memories that remain clearer to me than most others in life.

Female owls, like Fluffy, are larger than male owls. They are also more aggressive. Just my luck. There is no tentative way to feed an aggressive owl, so armored in my dad’s giant leather gloves, I had to boldly sally forth to get raw meat to her beak with minimal damage and chaos.

By the by, the beak isn’t nearly as lethal of a weapon as the talons.

Should you ever be called upon to feed a bird of prey, I advise you remember this lesson: come at the bird high and swift and direct to the face and retreat as soon as then possible. Then once you get good at this, they get old enough to catch what you toss to them — there’s an early lesson in irony in that.

Also, you should know that when I say feed a bird of prey, I don’t mean serving it burger and steak. They can eat those things raw if you’re in a bind, but really, they need the whole meat sack experience — and if you’re squeamish, you might want to skip to the last paragraph.

Their digestive systems need the hair and bones and innards, too, and what those ravenous beauties need to stay healthy they, by-gawd, get.

That’s a great lesson to learn about animal welfare.

That’s also how I came upon the skill to distinguish the difference between gopher, squirrel and chipmunk guts on smell alone. Even after all these years.

Experts do say that the lessons learned in childhood stay with you best.

FYI, should you find yourself needing to make a proper meal for a bird of prey, and a well-intentioned person, or your dad, hands you a rodent and a hatchet and tells you to cut this carcass into a meal of bite-sized proportions, I advise this: Set the hatchet aside, and with a sharp knife delicately butcher a quick meal of leg of rodent, then throw the rest of the carcass into the freezer for a couple hours.

I cannot express to you the difference it makes to have a frozen block of carcass to whack at with a hatchet. No matter how delicately you wield it, there is no way to apply that crude blade to a fresh rodent abdomen that does not result in a gruesome, smelly mess.

Having gopher innards splattered on your face, teaches you, even 5-year-old you, to problem-solve and to think ahead and to win the argument with your mother about the virtues of storing hairy rodents in her household freezer.

That feeling of guts-free success, just adds another dimension of awesomeness.

(Children were expendable back in the day at [email protected].)