Sports in Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

animals, Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan, a woman playing the dulcimer, darp, and the psaltery, many swords, way too many bagpipes, and very large men in kilts heaving twenty-pound bales of hay with pitchforks over twenty-five-foot-high goalposts.
    On the other hand, there was the giant Guinness truck with ten—count ’em, ten!—taps. And axe throwing! You could stand about twenty feet from a wooden bull’s-eye and a wrinkled man with breakfast in his beard would teach you how to throw an axe, end over end, and make it stick. Five people would do it at once, only a few feet apart. Many of whom had just left the Guinness truck. And kids were welcome! Now,
that’s
a sport.
    I somehow made it past the Guinness taps over to
Young McDonald’s Farm
, where the ferrets waited, about thirty of them, in a playpen, squirming and burrowing under, above, and througheach other in a kind of massive king of the hill game. A gray-haired, very skinny woman wearing a fanny pack kept barking: “In the box, please! In the BOX!” It took me a minute before I realized she wasn’t talking to the visitors but instead to Peppy, one of the ferrets, about his commode habits. The scolding went ignored.
    On a table, there was a sign:
Did you know, ferrets catch human influenza and are used in scientific research? Without ferrets, we wouldn’t have a flu vaccine!
    There should’ve also been a sign:
Did you know that without ferrets, 13.7 percent of the world’s jokes wouldn’t have a punch line?
    The very skinny woman wore a T-shirt featuring a doe-eyed ferret princess riding a rainbow against a field of stars—maybe from the My Little Ferret collection. It turned out to be Rita Jackson, one of the three women in the Richmond Ferret Rescue League. And so I tried, “Where’s Peppy’s leash?”
    This, naturally, made me as welcome as a non-furry carnivore could be and got me instant introductions to the other League leader, Marlene Blackburn, an attractive brunette of about thirty-five. Turns out they have about a hundred ferrets in all in the rescue center, which is not a center at all but just three women who are willing to live with thirty to forty ferrets in their homes and, one would think, very few men. Rita alone had thirty-eight ferrets, two “free-roaming” ferrets, seven dogs, and three cats. Maybe not something you mention on Match.com.
    I soon learned more about ferrets than any human should. For instance, ferret owners must trim their toenails (the ferrets’, not their own) and—if you have any sense at all—sand down their teeth, which are a half inch long. Also, the center will take any ferret, even the hardship cases. They get all the survivors from the University of Virginia research projects, for instance. One time they got twenty-four. I’m assuming all of them had the flu.
    â€œWe’re a no-kill shelter,” said Marlene proudly. And it made me think, do the non-no-kill shelters advertise that? “Yes, we’re a kill shelter. Just bring Nibbles on down and we’ll box him up.”
    In all seriousness, it’s wonderful that caring, patient women likethese are willing to give these little furry creatures a home, because ferrets are just really, really unattractive. Two or three had absolutely no hair at all. They looked like Hebrew Nationals with feet. “Oh, those have adrenal cancer,” Rita said. “They’ll all get adrenal cancer eventually. Ninety-nine percent end up like Buster here.”
    Cool! How do I get one?
    This was their seventh year doing the ferret legging at the festival. “At first we got so many complaints,” Marlene said. “It made it into the paper and people started calling us and writing us and writing the district attorney’s office saying it was cruel to the ferrets. The DA called me and I had to explain to him, ‘Look, there’s absolutely no cruelty in this at all.