Fat Dog and the Bear

Somewhere, deep in the woods of northwest Montana where there were outlaws and no laws, there lived a man named Ardis Staylee. In Ardis’ town a four-way stop meant that whoever got to the intersection second, stopped. Buying license tabs or getting permits was an inconvenience that no one bothered with and those who were chronic troublemakers one day disappeared deep in the woods and were very rarely found.

Ardis lived on 60 acres bordering the National Forest in a house he’d built himself and since it was so remote, every wild animal from moose, deer, elk, cougar, wolf and bear crossed his property one time or another. The only one he would let in his house was Fat Dog.

Fat Dog wasn’t called Fat Dog as a pup, but the older he got and the more he ate from Ardis’ dinner scraps, he just turned out that way.

Ardis had a large deck with an overhanging roof where he stacked his winter supply of firewood, since the deep snows made trekking to the woodshed difficult. In the door to the deck he installed a doggie door which is hinged at the top. This allowed Fat Dog to go outside when he needed. Most of the time his need was to eat from his dog bowl which was set next to the stacked wood.

You can imagine that when the dog door was first installed, Fat Dog wasn’t Fat Dog, and he would leave and enter the house with ease. But now the doggie door was getting exceedingly tight for Fat Dog, which required an extreme amount of squeezing to get outside. The design of a doggie door is such that the dog pushes up the hinged door from the bottom and walks underneath it with the door sliding across his back. This means that once the dog starts through the door he must go completely through. There is no backing up since the door is sliding on his back and will dig into him if he tries to move in the opposite direction.

One evening in April, Ardis was sitting in his living room with a nice fire crackling in the stove. Fat Dog was lying on his rug, ignoring the singers on American Idol when all of a sudden, the sound of his dog dish sliding on the porch brought him to attention. He jumped to his feet and headed to the doggie door to protect his kibbles from the pesky squirrels.

Fresh out of hibernation, a male black bear had wandered on to the back porch looking for anything to fill his empty belly. The large pan of kibble was just what he needed, and he began to gorge himself.

Fat Dog put his nose down, pushed up the dog door and without hesitation began to squeeze his fat body through the small frame. It was somewhere between his front shoulders and his mid section that Fat Dog turned his head to look for his dog dish only to see the butt end of a 160- pound hungry male black bear.

It was at this point, above the noise of the TV, that Ardis swears he heard Fat Dog yell, “Oh Sh*t,” which made Ardis wonder where he had learned a word like that.

Now Fat Dog was madly trying to backup through a door you cannot backup through. Ardis, aware of what was going on and the predicament his dog was in realized he must get Fat Dog all the way out before he could get him back in, so he dropped to his knees and frantically pushed on the dog’s rather large butt. Fat Dog was having nothing of this idea of going out on the deck, and his legs were flailing in the opposite direction. Finally, Ardis sat on the floor and using his feet, rammed the plump canine out onto the porch, much the same way you would unclog a toilet with a plunger. Once completely on the porch, Fat Dog spun a remarkably fast 180 degrees and headed back into the doggie door. Ardis grabbed Fat Dog’s collar as his head appeared though the door and placing both of his feet on the door for leverage, pulled the dog back into the house. He noted that the sound of pulling the dog through the door was a combination of the sounds of pulling 10 feet of Velcro apart and the sound of putting your finger in your mouth and making a large pop.

Safely back inside both Ardis and Fat Dog stood on the couch and watched the bear finish the kibble and wander off.

After this incident three things happened: the kibble pan was kept in the house, Ardis put parental controls on the TV for when he was at work and Fat Dog was grounded for two weeks for using the “S” word.

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