Fowl Weather Read Online Free Page B

grabbed the little fellow by the scruff of the neck, ushered him off the porch into the hard-packed snow, and turned to close the door. His baseball-size eyes bore a wounded look.
    â€œNothing personal,” I said as I watched him pad away. “You’re welcome back when you can tell me what all of this means.”

CHAPTER 2

Vanished
    I didn’t waste my days pondering whether paranormal creatures inhabited our woods; I was too busy battling the hose demon. Linda had snapped the handle off the push broom while using the brush end to bludgeon the ice in the girl ducks’ wading pool. That gave me the brainstorm—which should have come six years earlier—of emptying the pools in the pens before we went to bed, so that they wouldn’t freeze overnight. But our ice was like a disgruntled rat. Rousted out of one hole, it took up quarters somewhere else. As I yanked the handle of the duck-pen door, the door deflected several inches at the top but refused to budge at the bottom. Freeing it meant spraying the ground with hot water, then sloshing away the water with our mended broom so that it didn’t freeze again within minutes.
    Leaving snow prints across the basement floor, I grabbed the loose end of the hose that was attached to the laundry sink and began walking it down toward the clamoring ducks and geese. It stretched taut prematurely, a victim of the hose demon. I snapped the hose like a whip. An inverted U sped across the yard, then anotherand another, as I continued thrashing my arm without effect. Groaning, I threw down the hose and cut a fresh path through the snow back to the basement.
    The coupling between the two fifty-foot-long hoses had somehow managed to snag on a chip in the concrete floor no larger than a Susan B. Anthony dollar and no deeper than a mosquito’s wing. Dislodging the connectors, I trudged back downhill, yanked the hose toward the agitated waterfowl, and was caught short a mere yard from my goal. This time, the narrow lip of the coupling hugged the edge of the open basement door, an obstacle so circumspect and unobtrusive I never could have purposely snared it there if I’d tried a hundred times. Flailing the hose vertically and horizontally, then whirling it around and around in jump-rope fashion failed to convince the dozen or so molecules of the coupling that held hands with a few atoms of the door edge to abide by normal physical laws. Instead I was forced to troop uphill again into an arctic blast of air and liberate the hose by hand.
    Linda met me just inside the basement door. “Who are you talking to?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked. But I knew what she meant. I had been shouting, “Let go! Let go! Let go!”
    â€œYou look out of breath.”
    â€œIt’s that stupid hose. It keeps getting stuck.”
    â€œIt catches on anything,” she told me. “Does it ever stick on the door for you?”
    I grimaced and headed back toward the duck pen. Linda had carefully shopped for an all-weather ultraflexible hose that wouldn’t twist, tangle, or crease no matter how we abused it. Technology proved no match for the sorcery of the hose demon, which transformed our pricey “Kink-Not” model into the “Kink-Now.” After turning on the laundry tub spigot full blast, I slumped backoutside to meet the tiniest trickle of hot water. A fold had mysteriously formed in the sophisticated petrochemical hose exterior and its woven miracle-fiber interior near the basement entrance, and no amount of untwisting, untangling, or uncreasing via thrashing, flailing, or whirling would release the water flow. Once more I scaled the hill and dragged myself toward the house as our goose Hailey honked curses in my direction.
    After I had melted the ice in front of both duck-pen doors, filled the pools, replenished the food, and herded the ducks and geese to their respective homes, I decided it was time to do something about the