Early Morning Monsters

I can't believe in my last pupdate that I forgot to tell you all about the early morning MONSTERS that Mommy and I had encounters with while on vacation. It was in our second week at Grandma and Grandpa's house, after Auntie Naomi and Uncle Fred had left. We were woken up one morning around 4 a.m. by a tussle and growling outside our window. Now, the house is kind of weird and even though our room is on the second floor of the house our windows are at ground level so it was like the growling was happening right in our room! I'm smart and I sleep on top of the covers, unlike silly Mommy who insists on sleeping under them, so I was able to leap right up and run to the window and BARK!BARK!BARK! at the monsters before Mommy could even get on her feet. Mommy went to the window with me and looked outside but couldn't see anything. I thought we should go out and chase the monsters since it was around full moon time and very bright outside, but Mommy said no, they could wait until sunlight. When we got up in the morning I wanted to go out right away so we did. I led Mommy to where the fight had been and I sniffed and sniffed while Mommy checked out the footprints. Mommy and I concluded that a fox and a raccoon had been fighting over something yummy outside our window. I tracked the fox to a hole that was dug by a tree and Mommy bet me that the fox had taken the yummy thing and burried it there and then gotten it later. When we went for our real walk we found a whole bunch of hawk feathers and so we think the yummy thing had been a hawk that the fox had got when it swooped down on something small like a squirrel in the full moon light. Mommy and I figured that was the end of the monsters since the hawk was probably all eaten up by that afternoon, but we were WRONG!

A couple nights later around 4 a.m. again I woke Mommy up and said I had to go potty. Since I had gone to bed that night around 6 p.m. Mommy believed me and got up to go out with me. We went out in the backyard and I wanted to go down to the lake. Since it was still a full moonish night and everything was very bright Mommy said okay. We were part way down the hill when we heard rocks clunk clunking by the water. Mommy whispered, "I wonder if there is a deer down there somewhere." and we went down to look. Before we got down to the dock I started smelling MONSTER by the boathouse. I sniffed and sniffed and ran around and Mommy didn't realize it was a monster I smelled so she whispered, "Enough sniffing, the deer is gone. Let's go out on the dock and look at the water in the moonlight." Then she stepped out onto the dock and THE MONSTER GROWLED AT HER FROM UNDER THE DOCK!!!! You should have seen Mommy flying backwards up the stairs from the dock!! It was very funny. I started barking and barking and Mommy tossed a stick down by the dock and a big fat raccoon came tearing out from under the dock and ran down the beach. Mommy laughed and said, "Well, there's our monster." and then we went out on the dock to look at the water in the moonlight and then we went back to bed. That morning we could see that the raccoon had been sitting under the dock turning over the rocks on the beach looking for crawdads.

I'm not convinced that monsters and raccoons are the same thing since the raccoons at home just run up trees and don't growl at us. I think monsters disguise themselves as raccoons up in Wisconsin.