Rocko’s Visitor

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright 2011 Plot Roach.

Rocko’s Visitor

By Plot Roach

Finding a huge bear eating your dog's food is never a good thing…

Last night I put my malamute, Rocko, in the backyard. I chained him up as well because I hadn’t had the chance to fix the hole he dug up next to the fence. I woke at three in the morning with Rocko barking his head off and the chain rattling like a ghost with seizures. I stuck my head out of the window and saw Rocko backed up on the porch. Which is odd for him, because when there’s trouble, he’s always the first to be in the middle of it. I’ve had to break up more fights with this dog than I care to admit, most of the time with other dogs, a few times with raccoons and at least once with a porcupine. He got stuck from head to toe with quills from the last one, but still he refused to give up until he sent the prickly bastard running and damn near bald of its spikes.

So when Rocko is on the porch, backing away from the source of the disturbance, something is deadly wrong in his world. I threw on a jacket over my pajamas and headed for the back door, pausing long enough to grab the baseball bat out of the closet, just in case it was something bigger than an irate raccoon. As it turns out, I was right.

I saw the big brown form of something roughly larger than a man, stooping over my knocked over garbage cans. Most of the contents had been strewn across the yard, and I counted to ten before I let my breath out. If I started yelling now at the thing that made the mess I might get myself, and Rocko, into more trouble then I could easily get us out of. I knew that bears had come into this area before, but I hadn’t heard of any traveling down into my neighborhood within the last ten years. So it must have been a really hungry and brave bear to make it to my neck of the woods, what with every person on my block owning a dog or two. By this time, all the dogs were barking with full force, as if they could attack it with their breath if they couldn’t reach it with their teeth.

So with a hungry and brazen bear eating last week’s leftovers on my lawn, I slipped back inside the house, pulling the overzealous Rocko behind me. I called animal control and the police, just to be on the safe side. And proceeded to watch the animal through the sliding glass door of my living room.

It moved at a slow pace, lumbering through the yard from one pile to the next, pawing through the debris as if weighting the culinary compost with the palate of a food critic. A pinch of this, a mouthful of that, it experimented with the odd bits of food to find what it liked most before hunkering down and making a meal of it. He had even gobbled the kibble I keep in the bowl out front for Rocko when I chain him next to the tree. I heard sirens in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the police cars pull up. No one came out of the vehicles. They were probably waiting for animal control to assist them, I told myself. They watched the bear with some fascination. After about twenty minutes of sampling my garbage, the great beast began to move off to the bushes. If they don’t stop him now, he’ll be in someone else’s yard soon, I told myself as I waited anxiously to see what the police would do.

But then the bear stopped, pulled himself upright and began to water my bushes. And not with the sprinklers, if you know what I mean. I didn’t know that bears peed while standing up like a man. And that they had such good aim. Once finished, the bear scratched himself, belched loudly and began to walk away -still upright like a man.

One of the officers in the car rolled down a window and whistled to get the bear’s attention before throwing a candy bar at it. Maybe he was trying to keep it in the area so that they could keep an eye on it, maybe he just wanted to see the bear up close. But none of us expected what happened next.

The bear reached down to the ground, snagged the candy bar in one paw and turned to the vehicle. “You could have left the wrapper on to keep the dirt off of it.” it said. And then it brought the candy bar to its head. Only then did we see that the muzzle was not chewing, but frozen in place.

It was a man in a bear suit. Not one of those fuzzy fake fur suits you see school mascots wearing at sports events. But an actual bear hide turned into something he could wear.

“Eugene?” one of the officers asked from the front of the car. The bear-man nodded, still eating the candy bar. The police, now seeing that our intruder was human instead of the actual animal, exited the vehicle and placed the man under arrest. Rocko was still barking at him through the glass and I was glad when they carted him off in the back of their police cruiser.

A day later the whole story came out in the local newspaper. It seemed that ‘Eugene’ was a taxidermist two towns over and like to participate in Live Action Role Playing, otherwise known as “Larps”. A group of players had gotten together over the weekend for a meeting and Eugene had been running around in his bear suit being the enchanted prince of who-knows-where when the game ran a little long and they decided to quit for the night. Evidently the bear suit was a real… well, bear of a thing to get on and off, so he left it on. They began drinking, as most campers do in the woods, and Eugene kind of wandered off, still playing at being a bear.

As it turns out, Rocko may have saved his life by barking at him and alerting me. There are a lot of hunters in the area who would have loved to own a bear skin like that and would have shot Eugene in ‘self defense’ without knowing that it was really a human that they were taking aim at.

The whole thing wasn’t a total loss, however, as the Larping group asked Rocko and myself to join. It turns out that when Eugene was sampling my garbage he ran across the leftovers of my homemade lemon meringue pie and hasn’t stopped raving about it since. Though he also ate dog food from Rocko’s bowl, so I don’t really know how much of a compliment that is.