Got back from a quicky late-night bite at the Grey Goose. I’d been gone for maybe 45
minutes. Kemba greeted me, of course, at the playroom door, all in a lather. God forbid I’d get back from even the shortest trip without dropping everything to play with him.
“Come on, Handsome, let’s go out in the run,” I said. “We’ll see what good stuff we find out there.” I was referring to the wide-ranging array of balls with which his run is stocked. I pulled open the porch slider and he bounded out. I followed, picking up the nearest object — a standard, beat-up tennis ball — and fired it sidearm against the mesh fence in the farthest corner of his run.
No reaction whatsoever from the duck dog.
I groped around in the darkness for another ball. Located one of those leopard-spotted ones he’d gotten for Christmas. Launched that one into a different corner.
Kemba stood like a statue. Didn’t even flinch. No chase. No fetch. Strange. Very strange.
“All right, guess you didn’t feel like playing after all,” I said. I wasn’t all that disappointed, since Thor was pitching for the Mets and what I really wanted to do was go inside and watch.
I went in through the slider . . . but Kemba didn’t follow. He posed at the fence gate, stock still, staring out at the front yard with laser focus.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m gonna let you out. But do whatever it is you need to do, and then come right back.” The last thing I needed was to go chasing him around the neighborhood in the dark.
He shot out of his run like a rodeo bull released from the chute (I’m guessing here), went sniffing insanely around one particular patch of grass, then pounced on the ball he’d been coveting, the only one that would do that night (see photo, above right).
We went back into the run. He dropped the scuzzy piece of rubber and felt — the remains of what was once an intact tennis ball — at my feet.
A little more than 200 fetches later, I was finally allowed to go in and watch Thor.
Next night I knew better than to mess around. I located Disgusto-Ball right away, and chucked it up into the branches. (That makes the game more interesting, because we don’t know exactly where it’s going to fall to the ground.) We both listened . . . but we never heard the ball drop. I shook all the trees. Nothing. I got a flashlight from the kitchen and combed the whole run, light patch by light patch. Kemba helped, but he was getting more and more anxious the longer we went without locating that extra-special ball.
After a pretty extensive search, I called it quits. This time as I went inside through the slider, I saw Kemba poised at the mesh barrier adjacent to our Danish neighbors’ yard, eyes trained on the narrow, peat moss alley between our fence and their stone wall. I went over with my flashlight. Yup. There it was. He’d located the World’s Grossest Ball once again. Apparently it had made its way along the branches, squirrel-style, and landed outside his run in the DMZ between us and our neighbors.
I went out the gate, rescued the ball, and sent Kemba on another 200 fetches, give or take. Disgusto-Ball would live to see another day.
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Disgusto Ball. I like it.
Poetry.