What is it?

It didn't take long for my cousin, Carol, to discover my penchant for cleaning and sorting and organizing (perhaps walking into her kitchen and finding me dusting and arranging her shelves of glasses gave her a hint), and yesterday she set me the task of sorting out her junk drawer.

We all have 'junk drawers' in our houses (even if it is a shoebox in the closet which your husband swears you don't need... not sure where he is going to look for string), but this was the most impressive one I've seen (and this is coming from ME, who found FIVE meat grinders one day when looking for an apple peeler). The drawer is about 12" x 12" x 30", so many, many years worth of terribly important stuff was stored in there. Carol swore that she had cleaned it out before moving across the county three years ago, but admitted upon seeing the treasures therein that maybe she hadn't. It had much of the stuff one would expect: picture hooks, electric cords, latches, light bulbs, a brass button polishing shield thing. But there was one thing that none of us could identify.

It was cast iron, stood about 2 feet tall, and obviously was meant to stick into the ground. It had a weight that would fall, a little cup with a lid, and a little arm that could go up and down. We were pretty baffled until Glenn (son-in-law, who obviously was up to no good many times in his youth) walked in an immediately identified it.

It is a booby trap to ward off poachers. You tie a string to the arm and when a poacher trips it, the weight slams down onto the cup, which, of course, has a cartridge in it. Zuky (Carol's husband) was planning on putting it out on the property today. You've got to love the English!