I like to go over to Akottor's place in Obenmase, where we watch his collection of Hong Kong martial-arts movies with Swedish subtitles and I drink beer while he drinks Coke. Wooden Man, Born Invincible, Tiger Over Wall, and strangely, Street Fighter the Movie and Bad Taste. Street Fighter's got some fantastic costumes. The 70's Honk Kong stuff has such outrageous hairstyles that I wish I was a girl in that era. Peter Jackson is a freak, I mean HE is, his art is freakish but he'd still be a freak if he'd never sat in a canvas folding chair.

Well, Nana said he found a rat hole on his farm so we decided to have a rat killin' Wednesday. All we took was a coupla machetes and a lighter, and Eugene's ratty little dogs Believe and Twentyfourth. They were runty versions of that tan African dog that seems to be the only domestic breed on the continent. Take a rat to catch a rat, and I was comforted by the fact that if they didn't do their job we could eat them.

The farm was about two miles past Obenmase in the bush, so we rode our bikes (Eugene rode the tallchopper, that psycho) up the rocky road past the Zion church a-preachin, past the closed-down mines with its hulking, overgrown machinery, past the gorge-ous pits that they dug so deep that water came up and filled them. Trails are impossible to follow in the bush because they split like capillaries, leading to this farm or that. This is a working jungle (in Twi, the word afuom is the same for farm and jungle). I followed Nana (everyone else knew the neighborhood) to his farm.

The first thing we did was shove a stick down the rat hole- it would wiggle when one was coming out. Then we chopped down a twelve-foot circle of jungle. On this slight grade, the rats had dug two holes, shoved all the dirt out the bottom one, then filled it in. The dogs were immediately interested in the rat hole, or at least Twentyfourth was- Believe was said to favor akranty3. Nana chopped down a few palm leaves, stacked them, tied the lower fronds in a knot around the stem, and then chopped out a nice little church fan. We dug out the bottom hole (there was a nest of plastic bags in there) and wadded up dried palm leaves and shoved them in. Those of us without machetes received whacking sticks cut from the circle of bush. Nana lit the palm leaves and fanned it with his fan. Smoke under the brush in our circle revealed two more holes and they were plugged with logs.

We stood in a wide circle- Kofi, Nana, Eugene, Asante, Emelia and I- the Rat Patrol, on rat patrol. Our mission: Catch some dinner. The smoke welled up from the other hole like my cheap volcano science project from fifth grade. The dogs backed off a bit but had the hole covered. Nobody made a sound because the dogs were listening, listening for the scritchy scritch down in the smoky hole. The flies bit the back of my neck, the only sound was the jungle hooting.

Now folks, you ain't never had no fun until you have stood, with a machete, waiting for those carbon-dioxided sick rats to come running out of that hole.