The Saga Of Thor Squirreldog The Inconvenient

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I regarded the squirrel with interest.

 

I guess you could credit Fern, our depressive neurotic cat,* with finding it. She was there first, meowing in a rather frazzled fashion as we exited the car and stepped onto the driveway. However, she was on the lawn, and the squirrel was about four inches away from the passenger side wheel of our car, so despite her warnings I was ill-prepared for the sight of this squirrel.

 

At least, I thought it was a squirrel. It was about the size and color of one, and had the same amount of legs and eyes and things. But there was no bushy tail, and the pose was wrong, and the nose was very nonsquirrelly.

 

And then, as the cognitive dissonance cleared away, I realized that the squirrel I was looking at was, in fact, a dog.

 

A pretty squirrelly little guy he was, though. I am not a dog person, but I have done some study in the field of dog identification in the form of P.D. Eastman’s Go, Dog, Go!. I immediately put my hard-won skills to work and identified this particular sample as a Small Dog. My mother added to this that it might well be a Yorkshire Terrier, or something. It was kinda cute, though.

 

But that was beside the point. The point was twofold:

1. There was some sort of domesticated and possibly suicidal animal on our driveway, and

2. This animal had no visible means of tracking its origins.

 

“Mroww!” Fern protested.

 

“Hi,” Mom said to the dog. “Where did you come from? Come here.”

 

The dog trotted over and trustingly allowed itself to be lifted into her arms. I revised my opinion that it seemed squirrelly. A squirrel would have eaten this thing for breakfast.

 

“Mroww!” Fern opined.

 

“Well, he’s got to belong to somebody,” I said. “Let’s go look around.”

 

We set off, Mom, squirreldog, me, and—trailing along at a safe distance—Fern, who was easily three times this thing’s size.

 

And we found nobody.

 

I went home while Mom was still talking to a neighbor. I entered to find Dad and his technician pulling apart our giant computer.

 

“Do we know anyone around here who owns a Yorkshire Terrier?” I asked, pointlessly. Dad barely knows who our next-door neighbors are.

 

“No,” he said.

 

“Because,” I said, “I think it might be us.”

 

Sure enough, Squirreldog came home to our place. At first he seemed pretty content, until Mom put him down. He looked around, interested in his new surroundings, and beheld: our parakeet, Alpine.

 

Entranced, he began to move toward her.

 

And Charlie, our other cat, struck. Unleashing a hiss like a popped tire, she flailed at him with her paw, striking several blows before Squirreldog fled under the table. But this move was for naught; Squirreldog was intercepted quickly by Fern, who was still less than thrilled by her discovery. She delivered a hefty whack to him, and he scuttled back to Mom’s ankles in terror as I kicked the cats away.**

 

“At least they have united against a common enemy,” I said as I threw them out the door. “Usually they’re after each other.”

 

Mom shrugged and went into the laundry room where we keep the cat food, and Squirreldog was hot on her heels. He cowered near her as she scrutinized our cat food for signs of being dog-friendly—and our rabbit, who lives in the laundry room, came out to investigate. As did I.

 

The dog stared at our rabbit for a moment, uncertain. Our rabbit stared back.

 

Then, in one decisive, fateful moment, the rabbit lunged forward and proceeded, before my astonished eyes, to beat the everloving shit out of that dog.

 

My god, it was like the first sign of the Apocalypse. If you have never seen something that is, at least in a loose sense, a predator getting its ass kicked by what is basically a wad of flop-eared food, you cannot begin to imagine the horror intrinsic to the situation. The dog retreated to the safety of Mom’s arms, and Mom whisked it away unharmed. The rabbit lunged after them like hay-eating death, giving a look that was the equivalent of “Yeah, you better run, bitch!” in rabbit, and then calmly went back to sitting around looking like a tribble with ears.

 

“Damn,” I said in admiration. I didn’t give her treats, but I considered it.

 

“So,” I said. “What are we going to do now?”

 

“I am going to have a margarita,” Mom said. “And then I am going to have another margarita. Then I will take him up to the next street and see if anybody there is missing a small dog. If they are not, we will keep him until Monday and then take him in to see if he’s microchipped.”

 

We both regarded Squirreldog again. He had returned to Alpine’s cage, and was now industriously trying to reach it. He circled it, reared up on his hind legs, circled again, and then, to our horror, began executing those bizarre flealike jumps small dogs do so well. This raised him to the very bottom of the cage before he would collapse to the ground, which meant that what Alpine saw was a pair of batty little ears periodically bouncing over the edge of her cage. For the first time, Squirreldog began to make noise—although it seems his vocal cords have been severed, so instead of the high-pitched yap one would associate with such things, all that came out was a rather pathetic wheeze like the final stages of emphysema. And in keeping with Newton’s Laws of Physics, every time he barked, he would lurch backward to compensate for the force.

 

Alpine, for her part, had an initial reaction of alarm and scuttled about for a moment with a clear thought bubble that read, “Man the cannons! We are under siege!” Then, as the attack continued with the same effect that would be expected by a dive-bombing moth, she paused, rolled her eyes, and proceeded to ignore the disturbance.

 

Squirreldog, who had dislodged some of Alpine’s shed feathers, began to sneeze between barks.

 

“We cannot keep this dog any longer than a weekend,” I said. “He would depress me too much.”

 

“I suggest,” said the Dude, who had emerged from the basement and met Squirreldog a little while before, “that we let the parakeet out. She could finish the job the rabbit started, and that would end our problems.”

 

I eyed keet and dog. “I give the bird a 50-50 chance,” I agreed.

 

The poor dog spent the rest of the evening trying to prove himself by tackling a budgie. Getting your ass handed to you by a mini-lop can give you a festering inferiority complex, and perhaps I am anthropomorphizing, but I think that little dogs have enough of one without that. There is something so immeasurably pathetic about them. Big dogs (or, as I unfortunately think of them, real dogs) have the dignity of still being somewhat tough and wolfy, and looking a little less like babies. Domesticated cats, even the small ones, at least have grace (except when they fall off bookshelves) and pose legitimate threats to prey animals—the only reason they haven’t eaten our rabbit is because they grew up with her and think she’s a cat. Rabbits and like animals are supposed to be prey, and there is no shame for them in following their nature that way.

 

But small dogs … there is no excuse for them. They are supposed to be predators, but they are too damn comical to be regarded as anything but babies. Sometimes, just to add to their pain, they will be given names like Thor the Mighty, and they will realize that it is ironic and it will shame them. Other times they get named Tinker Bell, and there is NO honor in a name like that if you are, in fact, an unironic Tinker Bell.***

 

Finally, after an hour of unending attempts to get at our exasperated bird, Squirreldog was swept up by my slightly tipsy mother, who staggered off with him in a basket to the neighbors. She didn’t find an owner, but she did manage to hand him off to a neighbor who likes dogs like that and has one and promised to look after him till Monday, when we would test him for a chip. And as far as we were included, the Saga of Thor Squirreldog the Inconvenient was set aside.

 

I will update as our neighbor keeps us informed, but so far I’m just glad we didn’t have to hang onto that thing. And I’ll bet he feels the same way. If he had stayed, there is an excellent chance that our rabbit would have eaten the little bugger.

 

And that, my friends, is why I’m not a dog person.

 

 

*People ask me how you can tell if a cat’s depressive. These people don’t know Fern very well.

 

**Note to PETA: I do not actually kick my animals. I will gently shoo them around with my foot, or nudge them, but that is the extent of Animal Soccer at our house.

 

***Now naming a St. Bernard Tinker Bell might work …

Comments

[annotated_em]

Oh. Oh my sweet lord. *can't stop laughing* Poor little ratdog.

[enigmania.livejournal.com]

Oh. MAN. Hilarious.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Alas, my dog is small (although thankfully, not squirrel-sized) but he thinks that he is rather large. Small Dog Complex, I believe. I doubt he would get trounced by a rabbit, though, as he can take foot-long rats down without damage and has fangs as big as dog twice his size.

You know, a dog isn't really a dog unless it's a little scary.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

To make a long story short, I will simply say this: I am not a dog person either. u_u