TODAY'S ROBINOPTICON

I am growing to like FOO more and more. Today she put an extra strip of cheese on my Hot Chicken Sandwich, which will almost certainly get her in trouble later when the sandwich-to-cheese ratio is discovered to be skewed. I applaud her bravery. Then she asked me if I wanted barbecue, sesame or thigh sauce on my sandwich. I chose sesame.

THE STORY OF THE MOOSE AND THE HERMIT

Once upon a time a moose was caught in a terrible storm in the forest and took shelter in a nearby cave. Inside the cave he found a hermit asleep in a hammock. He had a long brown beard, knotty hair tied back with a piece of pink string, and a sweater and tattered jeans that looked like they had been worn continually for at least ten years. Normally the moose would have left to find shelter elsewhere, but the weather that night was so cruel that he curled up and fell asleep next to the man.

In the morning the man woke up to find a moose asleep in his cave. In a blind panic he ran out of the cave and smack into a grizzly bear, who had come to investigate the smell of the man's garbage. The angered bear was about to bat the man's head off with a swipe of his paw when the moose came charging out of the cave and butted the grizzly so hard it lost its balance and fell backward into some sharp, thorny bushes. The bear howled with pain and took off into the woods.

From that moment on the man and the moose were inseparable. They would take long walks together in the afternoons, the man with his walking stick, humming tunelessly, the moose nibbling at bark and moss. In the evenings the man would cook his meals and the moose would stand guard, alert for wolves and bears.

After a little while the man began to talk to the moose and tell it stories about the world he had left behind. It was hard to say what degree of comprehension the moose possessed, but he always bent his head low and watched the man intently as he talked. The man told him that cannibalism was rampant in the human world, and that the rich prowled the night time streets in black limousines, pointing out to their chauffeurs the young girls who would serve as the next night's supper. He told the moose that certain women were penned up and force-fed until they grew so fat that they were larger than a city block, and all the young boys would come out at certain phases of the moon and rub their bodies against these gigantic women. He said that it was a source of great shame, yet no man could call himself an adult until he had performed this ritual.

He told him many other things over the years that they spent together, with each story more fanciful and bitter than the last, until the man was amazed that a person as good and rational as himself, one deserving the friendship of a moose, could have sprung from something so foul. He told the moose that they were only good and pure things left in the stinking universe. He made the moose promise that it would never, no matter what happened, leave the forest and join the corrupt world of humans.

Their friendship went on like this for many years until one particularly bitter winter, when there was nothing to be eaten but frozen moss for the moose and snow for the man, the man killed the moose and lived the rest of the winter off its carcass. When Spring came he stuffed the hide. Every morning he set it outside the cave's entrance to scare off the wolves and bears. Then he would go off on his afternoon walks, humming tunelessly. At night he would bring the stuffed moose back into the cave, where he would tell it stories until he fell asleep. One day he forgot to put the moose outside and got his head swatted off by a hungry bear who had come to investigate the smell of the man's garbage.

The next autumn two hunters discovered a man's headless and partially eaten body and a nearby cave with a stuffed moose standing inside, surprisingly intact. The hunters poked around in the cave and found the man was named Varick Mordasiewicz, an insurance adjuster from Barrie, Ontario. He had disappeared years ago on a golfing trip with coworkers. The hunters left the body where it was and strapped the moose into the cab of their pickup.

On the way back they argued about who got to keep the moose, eventually settling on a coin toss. The winner took the moose home and installed it in his basement rec room over the objections of his wife. A few years later she left him. He died trying to cook a steak after coming home from a bar, succumbing to smoke inhalation when the kitchen caught fire. The lawyer who executed his will delivered the slightly singed moose to a one-room museum in the hunter's hometown in southern Alberta. The museum, which specialized in Meissen figurines bequested in the '50s by an eccentric resident, reluctantly accepted the moose. The curator covered it up with a plaid blanket and left it in a corner.

Five years after the moose landed in the museum a rich Jehovah's Witness with an interest in Meissen porcelain passed through town. He noticed the plaid-covered shape and asked the curator to show him the moose. The rich man offered five hundred dollars for the moose, which the curator gladly accepted. The man had the moose taken to the nearest airport and flown to his ranch in Montana, where the Jehovah's Witness was creating a stuffed version of the Garden of Paradise, with every imaginable kind of animal standing about in harmony with each other. They put the moose on a small rocky crag mocked up to look like a mountain side and left him there to look out over a valley where a small pride of lions nuzzled supine gazelles.

The moose was there only five months when a squad of Conservation Officers raided the place and arrested the rich Jehovah's Witness for poaching animals from all over the world and smuggling the hides back into the country. All the animals of Paradise were loaded into trucks and brought to a warehouse just outside of Lethbridge, where they languished in a warehouse filled with deer antlers, tables made from elephant's ears and painted rhino horns. The trial dragged on for years.

parode - exode