Nuclear Family Warhead

It has been quite the week in our neighborhood.  Our male Beagle puppy; Buddy, thinks that our lawnmower is prey that needs to be hunted and killed, and our neighbor; the Assistant Principal was attacked by a squirrel.  I kid you not.  Attacked is maybe too strong a term; almost maimed is probably more appropriate.  Both of these incidents beg the question: what in tarnation is going on with the animals in our neighborhood?  Could it be that we are about to experience an earthquake?  They say that animals will get spooked and wig out right before an earthquake.  Or is it maybe that the earth is completing it’s Milankovitch cycle, or earth wobble as it is more commonly referred to?  Who knows?  I say it’s an election year and all kinds of crazy unexplainable stuff can happen during one of those.  Take George McGovern for example.

Psychotic animals (or people, for that matter) are great subjects in the hands of a Master like Stephen King; but they tend to disrupt the fabric of normalcy in an otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood.  That fabric was shredded in our neighborhood yesterday.  Buddy, all 8 months and 21 pounds of him, decided that he was going to hunt, track, kill and field dress our Craftsman lawnmower.  This is surprising due to the fact that Buddy can usually be seen dashing, tail between the legs, underneath the deck when he hears a butterfly burp.  Now, all of the sudden he’s Conan the Destroyer?  His sister; Penny, watched from the shaded Utopia that is our deck with mild amusement.  I could tell she was getting a kick out of it.  Buddy can’t beat up his sister (she whips up on him daily), so he’ll just take on the whirly-bladed metal thing instead.  I can’t afford doggie therapy.  We may just have to let him “catch” the lawnmower once, just so he can get a taste of the kill.  If we do that, though, what’s next?  Will he stalk the oven?  Pounce on the computer?  Jump the fence and join a wild pack of Ice Cream Truck hunters?  Maybe we should have gone with hamsters instead.

Our neighbor, the Assistant Principal (heretofore referred to as “AP”), is lucky to be alive.  Truly.  AP was minding his own business when a ruckus erupted in his back yard.  His daughter; APgirl we’ll call her, was yelling frantically at their rat terrier mix Annie to “Let Go! Let Go!”  Seems Annie had been patiently waiting for the right moment to decimate a trio of squirrels who had been taunting her for weeks.  Well, one of them paid the piper yesterday.  The three were casually dining on acorns in the back yard when Annie got within striking range.  Two of them; Smart and Smarter, we’ll call them, made for the fence.  Alvin, the smart-alecky one, had his back turned and never had a chance.  “Hey!  Where you guys goin’?”  Fade to Black. 

I imagine the last seconds looked something like this:  His chipmunk cousin pretty much nailing the facial expression, I think.  By the time AP got to the scene, Annie had already thrashed the squirrel into submission.   He yelled for her to drop it, and she did.  Then she pounced on it again.  He told her to drop it again, and as he was trying to push the “dead” squirrel out of the way with one hand while holding on to Annie with his other hand, the squirrel struck.  Seems it had been taking some cues from the possums in the neighborhood.  It got him on the tip of the finger, so AP did what any normal human would do in that instance: he yelled and snapped his hand away from his body, sending poor Alvin nose over tail all the way to the fence.  Alvin executed a perfect 4 point landing on the fence and held on for dear life.  Little did he know that that would end right about…..now.   He fell from the fence and was dead before he hit the ground.  Annie had been wrangled and put back in the house, and AP had a chance to look at his hand for the first time.  The bite was superficial, but the skin had been broken.  It was bleeding in two locations and the closest clinic was already closed.  He would have to go to the hospital.  Can you say Holiday Weekend Traffic? 

Four hours and 3 doses of anti-biotic later AP was sent home.  Alvin is on his way to the autopsy room and results should be back within 4 or 5 days.  We’re all 99.9% sure that what Alvin suffered from wasn’t rabies; it was cockiness.   Annie is walking with quite the strut today, the ER nurses got a good laugh, and we got a story to tell.  Boy, did we ever.

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