Pupsie Is Not A Dog At All

Pupsie is a goat. I don't mean that as in Greatest Of All Time, though she might eventually qualify for that in the troublemaking category. Nor do I mean it in the species context. Nope. Pupsie is a scapegoat. Farmer H blames her for everything that goes awry, whether she is the actual culprit or not.

When I left for town on Friday, something smelled. It smelled DEAD. I noticed it as I rounded the corner of the porch behind my Sweet, Sweet Juno's old doghouse. By where GassyG Jr is parked, just before I get to the steps. Whew! What a stink! 

I was a bit worried. Pupsie and Jack had not run to greet me. They were nowhere to be seen. I thought I heard Pupsie down in the woods, barking with Copper Jack. There was a motor revving, like maybe a 4-wheeler or motorcycle. I didn't hear Jack. You know how you can recognize your dogs' barks, just like your baby's cry in the hospital nursery.

Oh, no! What if something had happened to Jack? He's getting old. Around 9 now. Or he might have been bitten by a snake. Or eaten something poisonous, like when he bit a toad and started shaking and foaming at the mouth for a day.

When I got home, I was SO HAPPY to see my little Jack standing on the carport, looking over the edge at Copper Jack in the back yard. He came into the garage with me, and got sweet-talked and petted without the annoyance of Pupsie, who was romping about on the porch.

The stink was still there, yet neither Jack nor Pupsie smelled. So they hadn't been rolling on a corpse, perfuming themselves with the fragrance. I even looked in the two big crocks Farmer H has sitting on the porch, lest a mouse or something had crawled in and died. Nothing. Maybe it was a squirrel caught up in the self-feeder.

Farmer H was mowing over past the BARn field. When he finally came in, I told him.

"Something's dead under the porch. It really stinks."

You know, because that's a Farmer H job. I figured he would find the carcass and drag it out and dispose of it down the big sinkhole out by the road. Nature's Wastebasket.

"Naw. I smelled it. That Pupsie has chewed on the handle of the propane tank and loosened it. It was leaking. So I turned it tighter."

"I'm pretty sure that's not it! Why would a dog chew on a propane tank, when she's never done it before? And propane doesn't smell like a rotting animal! Maybe there's a squirrel in the feeder."

"That's not what it smelled like to me. There ain't no squirrel caught in the feeder."

I'm not buying that. For a guy who says he can smell mold before you can see it on bread, surely Farmer H's snoot is more refined than that!