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So there I was one day at the end of summer. I was sitting on the porch of my house in Wyoming, trying to enjoy staring at the colors in the sky from the beautiful sunset. We get great sunsets up where I live. It’s up on a height - Wichita Heights, it’s known as locally - and you can see to the West and the South for miles and miles. It’s all plains - wide open as you like - right over until you get to Pradeline City. That’s a small place and the place where I was born. Ever since I left it at the age of 20, I kind of like the view of it from a distance, if you get my drift.

Anyhow, I was struggling to enjoy the setting sun on the plains, but the flies would not leave me alone. All around me they were buzzing, crawling and generally making such a nuisance of themselves. What did they want? I felt like shouting “Get a job!” at them.

Beside me, my dog Fidgets was laying and he weren’t no better than me. In fact, he had a load lot of flies crawling all over his snout and some of them were biting at his ears. Every now and then, he’d give a little yelp and try to swat them away with his paws. He’d look up at me as if to say “Please, man… you gotta do something!” But they were persistent if nothing else and they’d be all over him again just as soon as he’d get them off his head.

My wife Gabrielle (she’s French - met her in Normandy visiting my daddy’s grave) just stays inside. She’s used to mosquitoes where she comes from but she ain’t never seen anything like the thousands of flies that we get up here.

Enough was enough, I decided there and then.

I drove right over to a friend of mine who had told me all about how to get rid of flies the organic way. I didn’t pay much attention to him yapping on about it, but one thing I did know was that he had stopped complaining of the flies and for me, Gabrielle and Fidgets, it was getting worse every year.

Flies and dogs don’t mix and neither do flies and humans so it was about time one of us had to go. When I met Bill, he was all kind and all and, sure enough, there were almost no flies at all at his house. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for the balance of the environment and all, but I didn’t care - I just wanted those flies gone.

It was the green flies, he said, that were the most persistent and they often bit you too. He showed me a magazine called Fly Predators Review and he started talking about this thing he called a fly predator. It would attack and eat the flies and it would keep doing it until all the flies were eaten. There was nothing else like it for getting rid of flies, he told me. I said that all I wanted to do right that minute was to get rid of flies, so show me where this here fly predator is to be found and I’ll borrow him from you for good money.

He really laughed at that one. He showed me a homemade fly trap and said that I needed one of those to catch the flies that are buzzing around. Then, he said, the fly predator would take care of the pupae of the flies. It wasn’t a thing like a dog, he said. Instead, it was like a little fly itself, only it bothered neither dog nor man. I took his advice and now I have no flies anymore

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