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Furball from Hell....or was it?

I couldn't remember what I'd ordered but I knew it wasn't whatever I'd just unwrapped. Being a moderately adventurous eater, I've grazed my way through sandwiches and wraps stuffed with more sprouts than substance but never...
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I couldn't remember what I'd ordered but I knew it wasn't whatever I'd just unwrapped. Being a moderately adventurous eater, I've grazed my way through sandwiches and wraps stuffed with more sprouts than substance but never... grass? Lawn grass? WTF?

The people sitting, standing and milling around me should have been a tipoff. Weirdly archetypal, they seemed only marginally human, a gathering of extras from a B-grade sci-fi flick pausing half way through their makeup sessions, resplendent with scars, missing parts, exoskeletal protuberances, hair that would have pushed the envelop at a punk rock festival. And they were eating things only partially recognizable as food.

Despite this freakish panorama, I seemed normal enough... or at least as normal as usual. And when I opened what the normalish looking woman behind the pickup window handed me, it didn't look particularly unusual — simple white speckled flour tortilla wrapped around a too-perfectly formed omelette, très ordinary. But then there was the explosion of lawn grass stuffed inside the egg, and what looked like fat sautéed onions wiggled around, revealing themselves to be fat earth worms. And it was dripping on my arm... and it was cold... and wet... and whining. Whining?

I woke up with Zippy the Dog rubbing his cold, wet nose on my forearm. He was whisper whining, desperate to get my attention. It took a few moments to break through the dream haze and while I might usually have been pissed off at the interruption, I was relieved to abort my culinary nightmare before I discovered the half worm or whatever other surprise treats were tucked inside my breaky burrito.

"Zippy, go lie down. It's too early to...." Too early? Too freakin' early; the clock across the room glowed 3:18 a.m.

As a rule, Zippy does not wake me up in the middle of the night. In his dotage, Zippy sleeps soundly for, on average, 19 hours each day. The remaining five hours are spent eating, begging for food, going for walks, his personal toilette and helping make dinner, his role approximating that of a garbage disposal.

I was, therefore, concerned.

"Don't tell me you need to go out," I pleaded.

He didn't, choosing instead to lie on the pillow on the floor beside the bed. After five minutes, he left. I waited for the whine at the door. Nothing. He went downstairs, fell asleep and I followed his example, hoping for a new dream, not a return to the snack bar from Hell.

The night passed without incident and at the crack of whatever cracks when there's a cloud cover dense enough to obliterate the weak Whistler sun until sometime around noon, I shuffled downstairs to start the coffee dripping.

That's when I saw... I have no idea what. Now, to be fair, the light was dim, I didn't have a clue where any of my half dozen pair of reading glasses were but I really shouldn't have needed them to identify whatever was on the floor in front of me. But whatever it was, it did not process.

It took an inordinate amount of time for my brain to conjure the simple thought that it might aid recognition if I turned on a light. It took an even longer stretch of time after I turned on a light to realize more light wasn't going to solve the mystery of whatever that thing was plopped lifelessly in front of me.

Getting closer didn't help. Getting closer with reading glasses didn't help, although it did begin to register that whatever it was consisted largely of hair.

This would be a good time to insert the late, great, Vince the Cat. Normally I wouldn't introduce a cat to a dog story. Too cliché. But Ms. Ogilvie, editor of all things Pique, is a cat lady. Not to my knowledge a crazy cat lady but I can't personally vouch for that and, well, one never know what one may grow into given time. Regardless, she is crazy about cats and has suggested to me — in the way editors suggest things that may be more mandatory than optional — it's okay for me to do the occasional dog story... as long as there's a cat in it. 'Nuff said.

There were, however, two things about the Mystery on the Floor that reminded me of Vince. The first was his fondness of hunting and his even greater fondness of dragging whatever he'd killed — or merely wounded — into the house to either show me or offer as a token of his twisted affection. It crossed my mind that whatever was lying at my feet may once have been alive but since the dogs are locked in at night and it hadn't been there when I'd gone to bed, even in my disoriented state I promptly dismissed that possibility.

Vince was also fond of horking up furballs. He actually thought of it as a parlour trick to amuse guests and a great way of relieving me of the onerous duty of writing... the latter reason presumably explaining why one of his favourite targets seemed to be my keyboard. I was quickly concluding the thing on the floor was a furball.

Before you think unkind thoughts about how intelligent someone has to be to not recognize a furball when he sees one, let me amp up gross factor by saying this was a furball the size of a meatloaf — nearly 12 inches long and shaped like a gut.

"Bullpellets," I hear you say.

My thoughts exactly. "No one is going to believe this," I thought to myself when I finally realized what it was. Hell, I don't believe it. Which is why I went all CSI and took photos.

At that point, I assumed Zippy was dying. I could only wonder how long it would take to grow a furball that big from the little bit of self-licking Zippy does, having been relieved at a young age of that which male dogs are so fond of licking.

But Zippy hadn't shown any signs of gastric distress. Input and output were functioning normally. Which is when I began to suspect Samson. Samson is my step grand-dog, in twisted human terms. I inherited him with marriage. He is part Dane, parts unknown, wholly neurotic, and blessed with a digestion system better suited to a hummingbird than a dog. And he'd disappeared entirely for half an hour on our walk the day before. The most likely explanation for both his disappearance and the hairloaf on the floor was the remains of a dead deer.

Zippy, it turns out, was either trying to wake me to protect the innocent, him, or was anxious to show me something I wouldn't believe. I still don't.