Part 1 of a two-part 'Eww' series

I live out in the country with my dog, cat and horses, visited daily by deer, birds of all timidness and ferocity, and mysterious predators that slink through in the night, but this ain't a Disney movie out here. We have the creepy and disgusting creatures too, and thus far in October we've had encounters with two of them.

As you can see from the title, I'm going to call this column Part 1 of a two-part "Ewww" series, because the protagonist of this part 1 was our resident bat and he deserves his own column.

Humans aren't supposed to like bats. Creatures of evil. Flying rodents. Rabies on the wing. But we have had a resident summer-visiting bat for at least 20 years. Is it the same bat? Could be, because they can live 20 to 40 years according to Google, but we also have an indiscriminate killer of a cat with two confirmed bat kills, so who knows.

Still, we've had a bat again this summer above our front door, and in a cold spell earlier this month, with daytime temps in the 30s, the little bugger got into the house while we weren't looking.

We'd been home for almost three hours and it fluttered past my head while I was working at the computer, then circled back for a fly-by. I vacated the office to put a bit of distance between us - for the record, I'm not afraid of bats but I am bit leery of rabies, which some bats in our area have been diagnosed with.

Rabies did not work out so well for Old Yeller - even Disney got that one right.

Little bat followed me into the living room and it looked pretty healthy, so my husband, John, and I opened the front door to let it out. Nope, it was having none of that cold air.

So John stood in the doorway to the kitchen with his baseball cap in hand for a shoosher and I stood at the entrance to the hallway at the far end of the living room with our extra furnace filter for my shoosher. That put the open door between us. We each shooshed the bat back toward the door until, nope, it got past John into the kitchen where it clung to the cupboard door for a breather.

John used his hat to trap the bat, but that was a nope, too. Bat wiggled out from under the cloth and we went back to shooshing - which still resulted in more nope. Bat is, apparently, no dummy. It must've felt like it'd made its way to Arizona in our toasty house compared to outside.

The next time it landed in the kitchen, I grabbed a little metal mixing bowl and trapped it against the cupboard door. John grabbed a magazine and we slid that between the bowl and door to make a lid.

I went out on the front step and tossed bat into the air. Bat almost beat me back into the house, but we got the door shut in time.

Thus ends our part of the bat's tale and the first part of this miniseries.

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I have felt a bit guilty since then. The temps got colder that night, so I'm hoping bat found a warm place to snuggle into until it could do whatever needs doing to get properly hibernated at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .