I woke up this morning to the wonderfully squishy feeling of stepping in something.

There’s a minute when this happens where you stare straight ahead, eyes fixed on the middle distance, and know that in a second, you’re going to have to look down. Until you look down, it could be anything. Cat puke, cat poo, disembowled small mammal–the options are many. It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat Leavings. Until you actually, with infinite dread, lift your foot and turn on the light and gaze upon whatever is wedged between your toes, it could be anything. Quantum theory* would probably indicate that until you do so, it’s actually EVERYTHING, as God plays something much more disgusting than dice with the universe, and until the act of observation collapses reality back into a single state, you’re actually standing in a disturbing organic gumbo which might include everything from bits of platypus to Nessie.

I finally looked down, and it was the back half of a moose.

This was almost a relief. We’ve had moose in the walls for days, and you would not believe the amounts of crap a bull moose can leave in the silverware drawer at night. Normally they stay outside, of course, but it’s been cold enough lately that they’re coming in for anything they can find, and if you accidentally leave a cookie on the counter, or a 50lb bag of oats on coffee table, you’ll get up in the morning to find nibble marks and occasionally hoofprints around it. And sometimes at night you can hear them in the walls. The clip-clop of little moosey hooves is bad enough, but you get a couple of ’em bugling, and you might as well go stay at a motel.

We tried traps. But the cat is too stupid for standard moosetraps–I’m afraid she’d get caught–and the glue traps were just tragic. There’s nothing like pulling out the fridge and seeing a dejected ton of moose huddled in the corner, looking at you with enormous brown eyes, each hoof glued solidly down to the floor. You peel the poor thing off and everybody cries and…well, it’s too hard on the emotional state. Which leaves the live traps, and now, evidentally, the cat.

“Good cat!” I told her, tipping the moose butt into the trash. “What a good little hunter you are!”

The cat, presumably still digesting the front half of the moose, laid on her back and made a noise vaugely like “Mehhhhrrf….”

She’s a good cat. Not a smart cat, but it’s not every nine pound Siamese that can take down an adult moose, when you think about it.

*Which I don’t understand, which is why I’m mangling it. I’m an artist, Jim, not a quantum theoretician.

(For those wondering what friggin’ planet I’m on, an explanation of the Rabbit Hole thing is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/crisper/26562.html )