Contents

1. Pumpkins

2. The Legend of Lewis and Clark

3. Winter Story

4. The Legend of Friar Tuck

5. APE COAT

6. The Legend of Jesus of Nazareth

7. Ankylosaur

8. The Legend of Hamid Karzai

9. Joel Amos Obadiah

Pumpkins

I planted some pumpkins and when they get big enough I'm gonna crash em through your window.

When I get mad I don't feel like King Kong or a grizzly bear or Wolverine or a werewolf or whatever other people feel like when they get mad, I feel like a pumpkin crashing through someone's living room window. This is what I have felt like ever since I saw Mookie throw a trashcan through a window in Do The Right Thing. I cried every time he did it, but I wanted to do it too. For a while I wanted to throw the trashcan, and sometimes I wanted to be inside the trashcan and have someone else throw me through a window while I was in there. But there aren't trashcans like that anymore. Can you imagine Mookie throwing one of those plastic things we have now? It'd bounce right off! So I've switched to pumpkins. Sometimes I think about the big pumpkin that God threw at the dinosaurs to kill them. Why'd he have to do that? What'd they ever do to him?

Let's be honest, I'm not mad at anyone but I'm jealous of everyone. If you get a pumpkin through your window it's because I'm fond of you and vaguely jealous of some aspect of your life so what else is there to do but a throw a pumpkin through your window.

NINE YEARS IN THE FUTURE

I've moved to a town with fewer car alarms and I've planted a pumpkin patch back behind my house. This year I rolled two of the biggest ones into the corner of my living room. One is the size of a washing machine and the other is the size of a smaller washing machine. I'm alone more than ever but less lonely than ever, although when I do get lonely it's very bad and I fantasize about gnawing a hole in one of the pumpkins and crawling in there like a worm and rolling myself into a ball and dying in the dark and slimey seeds. Or I imagine a giant pumpkin falling from the sky and crushing my house while I sleep, but the problem is I'm hardly ever asleep.

Someone from the church I've been to a few times came to my house to talk to me and pray for me and I let him. When he was done he asked if there was anything else I wanted to talk about and I asked him why God threw that pumpkin at the dinosaurs. He was startled and said that he didn't think it mattered very much whether evolution was real or not and I said I didn't think so either but that that wasn't what I was talking about. He tried to change the subject by complimenting my pumpkins in the corner, but I could tell they were making him uncomfortable. I think he thought they were political. I tried to think how the pumpkins could be political, but I've stopped paying attention to what's going on. I know myself and there's a few other people I try to know and that's it.

Last week I went and stayed with a friend who still lives in the town I used to live in. His kids thought I was so funny. We were all very pleased with how funny they thought I was. After they went to bed I sat on a couch and he sat on a different couch and we both drank four beers. We said what bars we used to go to and what porches we used to sit on and who we used to be friends with. We said what we used to say and we said things about technology. I said some owls lived in the woods near my house. It wasn't what I wanted to say and I felt like a baby or someone's grampa although I'm acutely aware that I am neither of those things. After a while my friend brought me a pillow and a blanket and asked if I needed anything. I said I didn't and he went upstairs to his wife and I spread out on the couch and imagined my body turning into a pile of pumpkin seeds.

NINETY-NINE YEARS IN THE FUTURE

The earth has been destroyed. There is one planet with a lot of people on it, and another planet with fewer people. The residents of the two planets are confused about the situation and have very limited contact with each other. They disagree strongly about what the two planets should be called. I live on an enormous pumpkin whose lemniscate orbital path causes it to act as a moon for both planets.

The Legend of Lewis and Clark

When Lewis and Clark were flying over the Great Plains for the first time, they looked out the window of their airplane and saw all the buffalo herds looking very very tiny way down below them and Meriwether Lewis woke up Sacagawea to ask what all those things down there were and she said "fleas" as a joke, but he didn't think it was funny, he just believed her.

Winter Story

After I finished my supper I put on my coat and hat and gloves and went outside. The sleet that was falling was too small to see but I could feel it on my face and hear it hissing everywhere. I walked to a neighborhood where the power was out. Everything was dark except for a gas station that must have had its own generator. Inside I could see people crowding around buying coffee and telling each other how bad the storm was. I started walking back towards my house but I slipped in someone's driveway, biting my lip as I fell. My hat came off and my lip was bleeding but it felt good to be on the ground. I watched a Steak-Out car slide by, then a careful minivan, and then a snowplow. My lip was still bleeding and I sucked on it and noticed that it had dripped blood on the ice in the shape of the letter R. I got up, brushed some snow off my jeans, and started walking again. The houses around me had lights and TVs on, I was back in my own neighborhood. I was colder than when I had started walking, and I wished I had not laid on the ice for so long. A few blocks from my house I was startled to see a centaur lying in the street, his head against a curb. He was wearing a green plaid coat and a gray stocking cap and as I got closer I could tell he was dead, but I got down and put my hand on his shoulder and gave him a shake. There wasn't much snow on his face or beard, he must not have been out there long. I wondered what had happened to him. If he had been hit by a car there would have been blood. A heart attack maybe, but he didn't look old enough. I put my hand into one of his coat pockets and pulled out his keys. When I found his phone I took off my gloves so I could dial 911. I told them someone was hurt and they asked where I was and I told them, and then hung up and threw his phone towards a bush. Before I took his wallet out of the other pocket I looked at his hand laying on his chest and squeezed it reassuringly, apologetically. There was no driver's license but I found an insurance card that said his name was Joseph Pelion, and a picture of two young boys aiming bows and arrows. Their faces looked like his face but the picture only showed them from the waist up, and I wondered if they were humans or if they were like him. Snow was beginning to pile on his face and I brushed it off and put my gloves back on. I heard sirens across town and I went and stood in the shadows of some trees. When the ambulance came I watched the paramedics jump out with a stretcher, look at his body, and then put the stretcher away. They knelt beside him with little lights and instruments and they took off his coat and hat. They tried to lift him into the ambulance but he was too heavy and they started to drag him. I couldn't watch, I looked at the address on his insurance card and started walking. His house was one I had noticed before, near the railroad tracks and with an empty lot beside it. I went and knocked on the door and after a minute I unlocked it with his keys. The house was warm inside. I turned on a light and shut the door behind me. There was no furniture in the room except for some crowded bookshelves and a high table with a TV on it. On one wall hung pictures of the boys from the wallet, here they were posing in baseball uniforms and crouching on diving boards and I could see that they had human legs. In the kitchen several unopened bottles of wine stood on the counter next to a box of oatmeal and a sticky bowl and spoon. There was a room with a large telescope in the corner and a desk covered in newspapers and notebooks and in the closet were heavy jackets, expensive looking shirts, and two rifles leaning against the wall. I found another room with two tidy twin beds and I crawled into one of them and slept. In the morning I remade the bed and locked the house as I left. When I got home I took the picture of the boys with their bows and arrows out of my pocket and taped it to the wall right next to wear I hang my coat.

The Legend of Friar Tuck

One afternoon Little John was mad about something that he wouldn't tell anyone about. He insisted on being in front and kept hacking up trees and vines that weren't in anybody's way. When they stopped to set up camp he stabbed his sword into the ground and stomped off somewhere to pee. Friar Tuck noticed something black sliming up out of the dirt where the sword was sticking and he got a gross and doomy feeling in his head and stomach. When he pulled the sword out of the ground the black stuff started splooging out even more. Disgusted and strangely terrified, Tuck knelt on the black bubbles, hoping to keep them underground before anyone else noticed. He closed his eyes so they would think he was praying, and maybe he was, if just repeating weird phrases over and over in your brain counts. Some of the hesychasts say that's the best way to do it. Anyway, he stayed there all night quietly groaning and mumbling and cussing and puking a few times, and in the morning his robes had all turned black, and underneath so had his knees and legs. In this way, Friar Tuck, who was originally expelled from the brown-clothed Franciscan order for drinking too much, inadvertantly founded the black-robed Dominican order.

APE COAT

When I didn't have a job I used to go walk around at the beach a lot. I knew a part where people didn't really like to go because lots of trash always washed up. One time I was sitting on a log breaking sticks into smaller sticks and thinking about myself and other people. A girl walked by and I heard her tell her phone "you're like sand and I'm like water" and I decided I was more like sand. A little ways down from me she stopped walking but kept saying things to her phone, but I didn't care about any of it. I got up and walked the opposite direction. I saw a lump, a pile on the beach, and went to find out what it was. It was a lot of soggy clothes, arranged in a ring. I imagined piling driftwood and starting a fire in the middle of the ring but I didn't know why I would do that. I looked up the beach and the girl was still there, talking to her phone. No one else was around. I crouched down and picked up a dark green thing. I unwadded it and it was a t-shirt. I held it by its shoulders and it wiggled in the wind a little. It said the name of an insurance company in yellow letters. I grabbed more of the clothes and walked up the hill and dumped them in the back of my truck. It took five armfuls to get them all. When I was getting the last ones the girl walked up, looking angry. She said "are those yours?" and I said yeah and she said "no they're not" and I shrugged and got in my truck.

I washed the clothes at a laundromat and took them home and tried some on. There was a Stanford hoodie that fit good and I started wearing it all the time. I mailed a yellow scarf and a t-shirt that said GUPPIES to my sister. I folded everything else into paper bags and left them on the loading dock behind a thrift store. I dug through the stuff that other people had left back there and I found a cheap red telescope and I took it. When it got dark I stood in my driveway and tried to look at stars. I tried it with both eyes but it didn't work. It was worse than without the telescope. The next night I took the telescope to the beach but it didn't work there either. I was mad and wanted to throw it in the ocean but I would have felt bad so I buried it.

A few weeks later I got a package from my sister. There was a long letter and a picture of her dog wearing sunglasses and the scarf I had sent and three baby teeth. The letter said that one was hers and one was mine and one was our brother's. She had found three jars of teeth on a shelf in our mom's closet and she had sent one from each jar to me and to our brother and also kept three for herself. It was a good idea. I looked at them and rolled them between my fingers and wondered whose was whose. I put them in my mouth and clanked them around in there. Little hard things that twenty years ago were in someone else's mouth, and now they were in mine.

The next time I went to the beach I wore the Stanford hoodie and took the teeth with me. I found a chunk of wood and set it in the wet sand, just barely above where the waves were reaching. I got down on my stomach and put one tooth on the wood and then tried to stack the other two on top of the first one. It took a long time. I got out my phone and positioned myself on my elbows to take a picture of the pillar of teeth but suddenly an unprecedented wave splashed all over me. I tried to grab at the teeth but they were gone. I sat up and sifted through the runny sand for a few minutes but couldn't find them. My tooth and my brother's tooth and my sister's tooth were all on the bottom of the ocean. The shallow, stupid part of the bottom of the ocean. My phone was ruined too. I threw it and it didn't splash. Someone behind me said "why'd you do that." I looked over and it was the same girl from a few weeks ago. I said it got wet and I was mad and my teeth were gone. She asked what I did with all those wet clothes and I said "I'm wearing them. Who cares." and she asked if they were just teeth or if they were someone's teeth, because she could probably find more teeth for me, and I said they were someone's.

The Legend of Jesus of Nazareth

More people came than they expected and they had to open up some of the pastures to use for parking lots. I knew all the cars meant there was no way I'd actually ever meet him and I shoulda turned around instead of staying in line and letting everyone's bumper stickers get me angry and hopeless. Someone waved me into a parking spot and I nodded. When I got out of my truck and saw all the hordes of people and their jeans and the way they talked I had to try hard not to hate them. But why can't they just wear normal jeans. If these're the people that wanna know him then I guess I don't. I squatted down and pulled up a clump of grass and lobbed it up in the air towards a car that looked like it wouldn't have a car alarm. It made a slow arc and landed on the roof and some chunks of dirt rolled down the windshield. I was right, there wasn't an alarm. In the little hollow of where the grass used to be I spat and spat until there was no more spit. My mouth was dry, it wasn't much. I mixed it into mud and smeared it across my eyes, rolled two little balls and poked them into my ears. I climbed into the bed of my truck and layed down in there on my back to let the mud dry and crack and crumble in the sun. I imagined I was wearing a t-shirt that said I CAN HEAL THIS SHIT MYSELF.

Ankylosaur

When I was asleep I went to the marina. The water was excited, jumping and crashing like it was getting ready for something. I hopped and slipped around on the docks and fell in a few times. There were little alligators - caymans, I think - playing on the docks too and I was a little scared of them but not very. We were doing the same things but since they were better at it they ignored me. When it started to lightning I went into a building to dry off and look around. The building had pictures of people from the past standing around at the marina before it was a marina. They had fake caymans and fake cranes standing next to fake plants. While I was looking at the fake things a park ranger came up to me and asked if I wanted to see something. I did. He lead me to the basement and introduced me to a scientist. The scientist said "We're bringing back the ankylosaurs." He showed me a slide show about how ankylosaurs used to live there, and then in his arms he was holding a rolled up ankylosaur the size of a beach ball. It was brown and dead and a little hairy but not fake. "In Montana they're working on mammoths, but here we're working on ankylosaurs," he said. He told how the beach ball one he was holding was the first real ankylosaur they had brought back, before that one they had been smaller and hairier and not really ankylosaurs. "But now," he said, "we're getting them right." Right as he said it an ankylosaur the size of a pretty big desk trotted down the hall. Scientists were shuffling all around, trying to measure it, but the ankylosaur ignored them. I was thrilled and confused and wanted to follow the ankylosaur wherever it was going or at least talk to the scientist some more, but he was directing me back upstairs. "Time for the potluck!" he said as he closed the door behind me. I went up the stairs in the dark. I hadn't brought anything for the potluck because I didn't know about it but no one cared. The lady in front of me had scratched her back with the big plastic fork you were supposed to use to scoop out spaghetti and there were noodles and tomato sauce smeared across her shoulder. I wanted to see another ankylosaur. Did everyone in here know what was going on? Was I allowed to tell? Where should I sit? I sat at a table by myself, not eating, just thinking and looking around. A woman forty years older than me sat down at my table. She had a piece of bread and an ugly pile of salad on her plate and an ugly hat on her head. "Do you like this place?" I asked. "Did you know that they're resurrecting the ankylosaurs? Do you know why they chose ankylosaurs? They've been finding all kinds of dinosaur bones for so long so how come just ankylosaurs?" "Don't call it resurrecting," she said, "Cuz it's not. And don't talk about those other dinosaur bones either. What they never tell you is that when they dig em up they find em all arranged in the shape of pentagrams or lined up with Orion and those other constellations. Don't even talk about it. I HATE this place." Baffled and suddenly lonely, I found my way to a boiler room, closed myself inside, and wept.

The Legend of Hamid Karzai

Two sixteen foot high chainlink fences have been built thirty-six feet apart from each other along the northern border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are a number of gates in the fences, and people are free to go back and forth across the border until the 8 pm curfew, when computers and machines slowly slide the gates shut, creating a long and narrow no man's land between them. The purpose, the effectiveness, and the symbolic intent of these fences are a source of confusion and frustration to almost everyone who encounters them, but they are the first tangible accomplishment of the Afghan government in many months, and Hamid Karzai is feeling a weary sense of satisfaction and can be seen riding his bicycle towards one of the gates in the fence after spending the day visiting his nephews and making a small speech in Pakistan. He glances at his watch and realizes the gates will be closing in only a few minutes - he needs to get back on the Afghanistan side. He pedals faster, excited by the idea of slipping through the gates just before they close. But he is older than he once was, and to his great annoyance he sees that the gates are already starting to groan shut. He pedals even faster, barely managing to get through the first gate, then jumps off his bicycle, expertly shoving it with his foot so that it rolls right into the second gate, jamming it as it tries to close. He had hoped the bicycle would prevent the gate from closing completely and that he could squeeze out through the gap and walk the rest of the way home; instead he has ruined his bicycle and he's still stuck between the gates. He looks at the fence, considers climbing it, decides against it. He thinks of the reporters and photographers that are likely already finding their way towards him, and the endless interviews and explanations that he will have to give, and he sits on the ground and writes the name of his wife in the dirt with his finger.

Joel Amos Obadiah

Everyone was impatient and aware of the size of the world. I helped move all their tables and couches and beds into my living room and bedroom and kitchen and onto my back porch. After carrying everything in we would lay in the yard, breaking sticks into smaller sticks and trying to remember what we used to talk about. People came over one or two at a time, bringing beer and cigarettes and chicken sandwiches and telling me their plans. I smoked with them, ate with them, fell asleep in the backyard with them, could not think of much to say to them. I would wake up by myself a few hours later, brush the grass and leaves off my back, and not hear from anyone for weeks, until I started to get boring postcards from Boston, Belize, Thailand, whatever.

I spent a lot of time in the backyard. I liked to sit on the steps eating tacos and watching birds splash against the tiny pond, and I liked laying in the grass and trying to throw pinecones onto the roof. One afternoon I was out there lining up peat pots in the driveway. I'd been sprouting seeds in a windowsill and thought they might be ready to live outside in the real dirt. The sun was hot and I was barefoot and could barely stand to be on the sidewalk. It had been raining a lot though, and everything was green. After digging some holes I went inside to get the seedlings, and when I came back out there was a lion standing in the middle of the yard. He was looking right at me and I stared at him for a while before deciding not to be scared. We both stood in the sun, staring at each other without moving, and I started to sweat. Every once in a while a breeze would blow and his mane would sort of float around his face and then fall back down.

After a long time of standing and staring and sweating, I realized my hands were shaking and I backed into the house to get something to drink. I drank a few glasses of water and washed my face off and then went back to the yard. The lion was lapping water out of the pond, and he wasn't the only lion anymore. Some were drinking out of the pond with him and some were just standing in the yard, looking at me. I counted nine females and four new males. There were no cubs. For the rest of that afternoon and into the evening I sat on the steps just watching them. The males layed in the sun with their eyes closed or almost closed while the females paced the yard, never coming very close to me, but often stopping to stare. Sometimes one of them would get a drink from the pond or let out a yawn that made me excited and terrified of what a roar would be like, but mostly they just paced and napped.

When the sun started to go down and their eyes started to glow I was no longer brave enough to be out there with them. The streetlight in the alley had stopped working a few weeks ago, so it was dark except for the moon and the lions' eyes and the fireflies. I tried to think of a reason to spend the night at someone else's house, but no one who would have let me was in town anymore, so I slept on a couch in my living room, where there was no window looking into the backyard.

The next morning I went to the back porch and looked out the window. The lions were laying around lazily, except for one female that was pacing the edge of the yard in slow circles. I made a cup of coffee and went to sit on the steps. As I opened the door and went outside, a few rolled their heads to look at me, but they seemed less interested in staring at me than they had been the night before. One lioness climbed the tree next to the fence and stretched out on the lowest limb, with her tail and two of her legs dangling. While I drank my coffee I got a text message from a friend saying that she was going to be in town for the afternoon, and asking if she could come get some books I had borrowed. I told her to come to my house when she got to town, and I stayed on the steps watching the lions and sometimes smashing ants that crawled too close to me.

I loved to look at all the lions' colors. I couldn't understand what color their manes were: in the shade they were brown and even black, but in the sun they were gold and orange and seemed like they could have come from the ocean, where things are allowed to be any color at all. Most of them had white beards and white muzzles, and their black lips against that white made them look like they were smirking, like they were smarter than me and they knew it.

About an hour later I heard a car door slam in the front driveway and a few of the lions turned their heads toward the sound but one of them looked right at me. I went inside to let my friend in. When I opened the door she hugged me apologetically and started to explain that she was on her way to Portland and that she was sorry for coming over, but I made her come inside. She looked around at all the couches like she wasn't sure if she was allowed to sit on any of them, and I said we should go sit out in the yard. When I opened the door she sort of gasped and grabbed at my arm, but she sat down on the step next to me. The lions were all staring at her and I could tell she was nervous but I knew they would get used to her before long.

After a while they all went back to pacing or sleeping and she quietly asked if I had touched them yet. This was the first time anyone had said anything in the backyard since the lions had come, but they didn't seem to mind our voices. I told her they hadn't gotten close enough, and she said she really wanted to touch one. I didn't know if it was a good idea, but I wanted to touch them too. Whenever one of the lionesses would get close to us in her pacing, we would glance at each other excitedly and after a few minutes, we started giggling in anticipation every time she approached.

Finally, when her path had taken her to the opposite side of the yard, I looked at my friend and we stood up together and took a few steps into the yard. Several of the lions that were sleeping lifted their heads to look at us. The lioness continued following her route and my friend grabbed my hand. As the lioness padded towards us we squeezed our hands tighter and I clenched my teeth and dug my toes into the dirt. She was coming right at us and she was looking at us and I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes a second later and she had turned the corner right in front of us, following her path. We reached out our hands to touch her flank and as she brushed against our fingers she was fast and strong and sleek, but coarser and warmer than I would've guessed. My friend and I looked at each other amazed and ecstatic and I laughed and all the lions looked at us. When the lioness made her way back to us we touched her for longer this time, and she flicked her tail at us.

This went on for quite a while - the lion walking in circles, us reaching out to touch her, stroking her almost reverently. Eventually my friend said she had probably better leave. We went inside and she looked sort of sad but still excited. She said she would call me when she got to Portland, but that I should call her before then if anything happened with the lions. She hugged me and left without remembering the books she had come to get.

I started spending most of my time in the backyard and I eventually approached and touched each of the lions. I waited until last to touch the big male who had been the first to show up. After a while they didn't mind at all when I was out there with them, either ignored me or nuzzled their giant heads against my back and swatted their tails at me. Eventually I was scratching between their ears and resting my head on their warm bellies when I took naps. Another of my friends stopped by one afternoon and was surprised when he wandered into the backyard, but after the initial period of everyone staring at each other, he was able to come lay down against the same lion as me and he talked about what he'd been doing in Budapest until the sun went down and the lion's breathing made us fall asleep.

Sometimes I wondered why the neighbors weren't more upset about the lions. When I would be laying back there with them, and someone would walk down the alley with their dogs, the dogs would get nervous and their owner would pretend to be so busy with the dogs that he couldn't talk to me, or the kids next door would yell at me to throw their lost balls back instead of climbing over the fence like they used to, but other than that no one seemed to be very interested in the lions. Just a few months before, when people had been in the backyard dancing and yelling and jumping on and off the roof, the neighbors were always getting upset and making me talk to the police. This never happened with the lions though, even when there would be a lot of growling and snarling when they wrestled each other. No one even said anything when the lions started a bonfire in the middle of the yard one night and sat in a circle around it, the males occasionally letting a low roar go up with the smoke, and the females bobbing their heads and twitching their tails approvingly.

One weekend someone told me he had run out of money in Chicago and wanted to stay at my house for a few days. I said that was fine although I didn't know what we would do while he was here. He came the next day and brought his girlfriend. She refused to go in the backyard with the lions there, but he loved them. We stood in the shade admiring the lions, and we spent a few hours sitting on the branches of a tree with one of the lionesses.

On the morning they were going to leave, we had climbed the tree and he was telling me his idea for an elaborate retaurant he wanted to open when his girlfriend came outside for the first time all week, with a matte board and a brush and some paint. The lions were watching her suspiciously and I wondered whether that was my paint or hers. Looking intently at one of the lions, she unscrewed some paint caps and started smearing colors. The lion she was looking at stood up and growled at her. Her face changed but she kept painting. Now several lions were snarling, and we jumped out of the tree and ran over to her, grabbing the paints and hurrying her inside. The lions were still growling and even roaring a little as we piled their things into the car and went to eat a tense lunch before they drove back to Chicago.

It was quiet back there for a few days, until I noticed that the lions were building something. In one corner of the yard they had created a statue of a man made of gold, silver, and brass, with feet of iron and clay. I recognized it as the statue from Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Old Testament. I wanted to look at it, but when I started to get close there was a lot of growling so I went back inside. When I came out again the next morning, they had torn the statue down and broken it, and pieces of it were scattered across the yard. The seemed very proud. That night I was sitting in the yard with them when one of them licked my face, which had never happened before. It was the first lion, my favorite one, and his tongue was unbelievably rough, scratched me almost to bleeding, but I knew it had been affectionate.

A few nights later when I looked into the backyard I realized the lions were acting out the events of the book of Revelation. I sat down to watch as one lion descended from heaven, carrying seven seals. The seals were broken and the lions created earthquakes and sent great plagues and locusts across the earth. Seven lions sang seven woes and seven more lions sang seven glories. A lion rose out of the sea, and another one - a lioness - rode on his back. As the blood of martyred lions seeped into the alley, the lions assembled into two armies and prepared to make war on each other until a pit opened up in the middle of the yard and sealed itself again after half the lions fell in, allowing the remaining lions to put on white robes and ascend into the night.

For a while I waited for them to come back from the sky or dig themselves up out of the ground. I wanted to tell them what a good job they had done, how real it had all seemed. I slept on the couch on the back porch so I would hear them when they got back. The next day I sat in the yard waiting for them, but it was too hot, I couldn't stand to be in the sun all afternoon. When it cooled off a little in the evening, I went out and looked at the claw marks they had left on the trees, I felt where heavy feet had left paw prints all over the yard, and I found clumps of mane that had torn off in the bushes. I sat down on the steps and stared into the yard and ran the strings of mane through my fingers until it was too dark for me to feel comfortable out there by myself.