Stories —Fiction

by Major Furry

Several heartbeats before Pack Leader realised it, I knew Computer had quit.

My big furry semaphore ears, damaged as they are by a life spent with humanity, had detected the loss of one thread of sound, one tiny voice, well before Pack Leader exploded.

“Huh?Son-of-a-Gottverkaltes-eine-kleine-SCHEIZE-geschicten-POTverdomma-maldita-seas!”

Credit where credit is due: humans curse more colorfully than any animals I know, except ravens.

Your mouse is dead, I yawned at Pack Leader. It has stopped squeaking. You need batteries.

In wolfish terms, it’s all rather amusing, isn’t it? Humans thinking a piece of plastic with chemical batteries in its tummy is anywhere near as interesting as a real, live rodent?

Pack Leader shook the mouse in my face. “Hear that?” she snarled in her best imitation of Alpha Wolf. “See that? Blue light! I may have lousy ears compared to yours but I assure you, Mr. Big Bad Wolf, this mouse squeaketh just fine!”

I shrugged. Okay, the keyboard, then. Somewhere, the batteries stopped singing.

Pack Leader stopped yelling at cantankerous old Computer and returned to her Chair of Pain and Pleasure. She picked up the keyboard, turned it upside down and shook it, while yelling at it: “You lousy piece of….” You get the idea.

The keyboard must have been scared enough to loosen its sphincter muscles, because it dropped the equivalent of 59 gourmet mouse meals on the desk.

“Holy—!” said Pack Leader.

Nope. I moved close to inspect. Not holy—just nasty. Let the mice have it, because if there’s one talent real mice have, it’s turning nasty old bits of cuisine into fast food on four feet.

by Major Furry

The whole neighbourhood, street or forest, knows Garbage Day has switched to the second morning after the Weekend. Every Fur Person, whether in the Woods or in Town, knows when the Weekend is over, because that’s when the little apes toddle off to their school again.

We had just come off a huge Weekend, when the baby apes stayed in their dens and played with their parents and one another for more sunsets than I have paws to count with. If memory serves, they do this after every winter solstice. I’ve noticed that after any longish Weekend, Garbage Day changes—a habit that hasn’t escaped the notice of our Woods neighbors, either.
My den’s Garbage Gift is pitiably small—just one bag. But this particular bag was special. Pack Leader had packed some turkey bits in there, along with only slightly moldy cheese rinds and some sweets she said were Bad for Dogs and People, whatever that means. It seemed a shame, but Pack Leader feeds me so gloriously twice a day that I don’t ever quarrel with the offerings she sets on the curb on Garbage Day.

I guess she was still in a festive, generous mood from the big solstice Weekend, because she set our bag out on the curb just before we went to bed, offering our woodsy neighbors a chance to paw it over, as it were, before the Truck arrived in the morning to end the feast. She set it down; I blessed it with a bit of peemail as we ended the Evening Walk, and we went to bed.
Our snooze didn’t last long. Caterwauling, screeching, and a series of annoyed grunts woke us up in a hurry. Pack Leader hustled herself into some semblance of proper pelts and threw open the bedroom window, as I clambered stiffly onto the window seat. What a sight!

My furry friend Cranberry, who weighs about four of me, was grunting and weaving like a drunk, waving at our Garbage Gift with paws the size of my dinner dish. “I can’t sleep!” he complained. “All this noise! All this light! I need a midnight snack!”

by Major Furry

I nearly thirsted to death in Nanaimo. That gave me paws. Panting, I considered humans’ strange relationship with water.

Imagine wearing a thick black fur coat like mine in the summer sun, with nothing but your long, sweaty tongue to cool down sixty kilos of wolf body! That was me at the end of a long, sticky afternoon on the pavement outside the Nanaimo library, waiting with my Pack Leader for the third member of our mini-pack to emerge from that deliciously cool building—I could smell the coolth every time the door opened.. We hung around hot, dry downtown on such a day, instead of swimming and socialising with more sensible humans and canines.

“You can’t go in there,” said Pack Leader, pointing to a picture stuck to the glass doors. “See? No dogs allowed.”

I’m not going to take out a book, I explained. I’ll just visit the water closet for a long, clean, cold drink.

Pack Leader was absorbed in reading poems stuck to the windows. I decided to handle my own problems.

You could smell the harbour from the library plaza. I could just toddle down to the water’s edge and be satisfied with a sweet-and-sour drink. Harbour water tastes weird from all the pee and gasoline from the humans’  floating dens. Ten minutes later, I’d probably be thirsty again, but some moisture’s better than nothing. I took matters into my own paws and trotted away.

Around the corner a powerful aroma appeared like a vision of dinner, overpowering all thoughts of water. Hot meat! Eggs! Soup! Somebody in that building was cooking up a feast!. On impulse I slipped through the doorway.