Of Mice and Bears

Forgive me Sweet Buttermilk Friends.... I had set on a journey which lasted much longer than i had imagined it would. Amongst other things i had to visit my best friend who now lives in the country. We have been best friends for since babyhood and we were bunk mates in Pirate College. Anyways he has had a sort of "plague-ing" or whatever you might call it. Obsession seems too week a word. Bedeviled might be appropriate. He has this inner need to see a Bear in the woods. He's not content to see one in a zoo or anything like that. He insists on seeing it in it's natural habitat. I set about to visit him in an effort to minister him back to here and now but my work was in vain.
He began going on long hikes in areas that are known Black Bear haunts. He almost uses himself as some kind of bait. After these hikes he reports back to me about them; how much bear doo-doo he saw along the trails, how fresh it was and it's consistency... it is becoming a little freakish. The other day he calls and tells me he has finally encountered a bear on a trail. He says he got pictures of it but when he sent them to me via email i saw no bear in the picture, just forest. TO be fair i am awaiting his explanation but he is out of town for a while so we are not in touch.
I know it can be hard wanting to see something so bad. I used to have a mouse. He was a three legged mouse named Jody. He was with a carnival originally as a fire eater. Billed as "Jody Abash-Bash the Flame Licking Fire Mouse" he ended up drinking himself nearly to death after years of road life. One night in drunken rage he climbed up to the top of a huge glass cage housing a Tokay Gecko and shaking his angry fist at this mean old world he cursed God for ever making him in the first place. Bottoms up from his tiny flask of Southern Comfort and he lost his balance and fell into the lizard's lair.
The reptile hissed and charged the inebriated rodent and with a snap of his jaws he tried to swallow Jody whole. Well the Gecko spat him out because the dirty drunken mouse had stopped caring for his own hygiene so long before that his dirty poopy smell along with his jagged uncared for nails choked the hungry lizard. Alas minus one leg Jody lived on for thirteen years longer as a valued friend and cheese loving companion to me. At his demise i wept bitterly before putting his remains in the blender and chopping him to tiny bits. Then after a Reading a stirring passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes (King James Version) I saluted sharply as I flushed those mousey bits down the toilet... away into that Eternal Septic System not made with human hands.