"I'm not a mean person..."

As I’m sure you all know by now, it doesn’t take much to get me laughing. A cheesy pun? Keep ‘em coming. A B-grade comedy from the ‘80s? That’s what I’m talking about. Watching someone trip? Knee-slapping hilarious. This is probably why I laughed for a good 20 minutes yesterday after a chance encounter in the Massachusetts woods. I was taking a Sunday afternoon walk through the brambles alongside a little pond in western MA with my friends Ethan and Eugene (see pictures below) when an adorable fancy lap dog bounded into our path. Ethan, who was immediately charmed, picked up the pooch, pet it, snuggled it, and scratched behind its ears before reluctantly setting it down. Two seconds later a burly man (who could’ve passed for a 1950s lumberjack in a heartbeat) burst through the bushes, picked up the lap dog by the skin on it’s back and literally threw it into the pond.

Stunned (though admittedly not as stunned as the puppy himself), our eyes followed the clean arc of the blurred furball against the beautiful blue sky. I really think it had a good 6 feet of air.

“I’m not a mean person”, interjected the lumberjack whose threatening look made me wonder if I were about to be thrown into the pond as well. “It’s just that my dog rolled in dead muskrat.” Oooh, a dead muskrat, you say? That’s a perfectly good reason to chase your dog through the woods, pick it up by its fur, and hurl it into a drinking reservoir. That’s right, the pond was surrounded by very orange, very numerous and very visible “No trespassing—drinking water” signs.

So, why am I still laughing? 1) Ethan snuggled with a dead muskrat. 2) I watched a lap dog fly through the air. 3) For the next month I’m going to have to check each glass of water for muskrat-y dog hair.