The great Bup Escape

The other day while I was at work, Loo hooked Bup up to his dog harness (for a chihuahua) and clipped a 30 foot leash to him and corkscrewed it into the lawn.  This is the way Bup spends a lot of his time outside so he doesn't run away and terrorize the local populace.  He waited until Loo walked around the corner for one minute and couldn't see him and than he shrugged out of the harness and escaped.  Loo was shocked and devastated, and convinced she would never see him again.  She searched for six hours, but to no avail.  Bup was gone.

I came home, put her back together and had her show me where he was last seen.  She showed me the empty harness in front of the garage.  I put my writing techniques to good use, remembering an exercise that Gayle Brandeis showed me to get into character, and to know them.  (during class we thought about what it would be like to sit in the desk if were were very old, how our aching bones would not like the hard plastic, and then to imagine we were six or seven, how our feet wouldn't touch the ground and we would be looking up to everybody, etc)  So I laid down to the ground and got to Bup's eye level and started to look around.

I said, "If I were a large predatory reptile, where would I hide?" could see great places to hide under the tool chests, and under the cars, behind the shelves and next to jacks and tools.  The tool chest was closest, so I crawled over there and examined it.  There was a hole torn through the cobwebs down there, as if a baby dinosaur crawled through it recently.  But one of the wheels of the tool chest blocked the way behind the shelves, so this was a dead end.  From here I looked around, eyes not one inch from the ground.

I saw under the Firebird and a path to the other side of the garage.  It looked like a good place to hide.  I asked Loo for a flashlight and crawled over to the other side of the garage.  Here, next to the washer, clothes bins and piles of clothes I could feel the warmth of the water heater from the other garage blowing toward me.  This would be a great place for a cold blooded predator to hide. 

With flashlight in hand I pulled back a clothes bin and shined a light down into the corner behind all of this.  Bup looked back, his pupil constricting in the light.  It reminded me of Jurassic Park when Lex shines her flashlight into the T-Rex's eye and his pupil constricted.  I called out to Loo while pointing the light on Bup's face.  He started to hiss.  He knew he had been found.  I slowly reached back with the light in his face so he couldn't see me and dropped my hand on his cobwebby back.  He tensed up and gave one violent shake, but than I hauled him out hissing and bleary-eyed.  I gave him to Loo and she hugged him in joy and relief.  I was a hero.  Bup stopped hissing and acted friendly to her.  He has always liked her more.  Rotten lizard.