Stop! Thief!
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
“Don’t let Batsquatch get those chips,” I told them before chasing after Mom.
As we walked back down the mountain, we met more Oscar fans. They turned their faces away from Mom to shine big smiles at me, oohing and aahing at my trendy bandana and itching to pat my rippling muscles. Behind me, Mom pulled up her muzzle and did weird things with her neck to keep it from falling off her nose. Fashion is awkward sometimes.
Here in Forgotten California, everyone hiked with naked faces. “I don’t think you need to wear that here,” I told Mom. “You would need Friends to catch It from, and you never let anyone that close. Remember what the Witch told you about how the boogeyvirus blows away outdoors?”
“True,” Mom said. “But have you noticed that whenever I pull up the mask, people not wearing masks step off the trail for us?”
I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she pointed it out, Mom’s muzzle was sort of like a superhero mask that magically cleared people from the trail like cars making way for an ambulance. With Mom’s muzzle up, I didn’t have to up-up on a rock every time we saw someone coming, and Mom didn’t have to stand with her back to the trail stuffing me full of kibbles until they passed.
The Oscar fans stared agog, thinking Look! Is it a turd? Is it insane? At least it has a cute dog!
“Make way! Make way!” I trumpeted as I paraded down the center of the trail.
They cheered, “Awwwww!” and “What a cute dog!” and “Hey there, fella!” as I trotted by. But none of them reached out to pet me.
“Yield! Yield, I say! She’s got a muzzle and doesn’t know how to use it. It could drop at any moment, so nobody’s safe. Please, step off the trail and turn your back for safety… and Hey big fella, right back atcha, ma’am!”
Only one group carelessly stayed on the trail as Mom approached. A pair of stray turtles were wandering in circles in a little meadow, looking at the ground and not paying any attention to what masked bandidos were charging at them. Mom stopped. Her superhero muzzle fell from her nose. With her whole face showing, Mom stepped back off the trail and I stepped into the gap so the strangers would have someone to pat.
“Your car’s not gonna be all the way up here,” I told them. “You’ve got to go farther down the mountain. Go get your packpack and I’ll show you the way.”
“Lose something?” Mom asked.
The more flustered one raised her arm and our eyes followed it toward a flat rock in the shade of a tree. “We were having lunch on those rocks over there when a bear came along.” She raised her arm by a whisker. “We ran into those trees to hide, but it got into our packs.”
“Oh no!” I said. “Was your lunch okay? Need me to help you look for it?”
“Did you see which way he went?” Mom asked.
“He dragged my pack into those trees down there,” the hungrier one said, swiveling her arm toward a clump of bushes. The branches were too thick for even an ant to slip through, let alone a bear. I sniffed the air for signs of sammiches, but the trail went cold in the marshy water under the thicket.
“Next I saw him, he was running straight up that slope to the ridge,” the less hungry one added. We all followed her eyes to where the peak was crumbling one stone at a time into the valley.
“He ran up that?” Mom eeped like she didn’t believe it, yet didn’t think the ladies were lying either. “It seems too loose to hold a 500 pound bear.”
“Oh yeah,” the Hungry One said. “He was flying.”
“Another suspect!” I said. Both Batsquatch and a flying bear would have the motive, means, and opportunity to carry a family of deer into the sky and drop them on the rocks to get at the deliciousness inside.
“My car keys were in there,” the Less Hungry One added. Her eyes dropped from the far-off slope to search the grass around her shoes.
“Oh no! If he has your car keys, he could be anywhere in Nevada or Oregon by now,” I said. “This is very serious. We’ll have to ask the freeway-sign people to tell everyone to look out for a brown bear driving a Subaru Forester. Don’t cry, you’re about to be famous!”
