Two Posts from Dog's Plot
by David S. Warren

That sawed-off little shit, my imaginary brother William, is living in our chicken house again. Not that he wasn’t invited. I found him lying there in the straw bedding, covered with hens when I opened up the chicken house this morning. He didn’t wake, or he pretended not to.

Months ago I put out a call for him on Facebook (where he has a poorly attended account) asking him to maybe come and hang out here like he did before, because we were having problems with weasels and coons, but he has only responded a few months on, as weather got harsh. Chickens have a body temperature of a hundred six degrees.

William gets by most of the time, most seasons pretty much outside, then sometimes the ladies take him in, or he finds some other fairly comfortable situation. He is welcome enough, and it isn’t that I feel responsible for him …. he is independent enough, but as long as he is around, I can expect to get up in the morning to maybe find that the refrigerator door had not been closed all the way by the person who last used it, and who, by the way, must have eaten the last of the Mozzarella cheese out of hand, because there was enough there for four pizzas the last I knew.

This pair of wool gloves was knitted at least sixty or seventy years ago by Ernie Thomas, famous in my family, but dead before I was born: a lumber jack, camp carpenter, and trapper, who (with his son Harlan, built a camp in the late nineteen twenties on the island people used to call Failing's Island but we call Loon Island, close to the North Shore of Lake Bonaparte. The camp has a big central fireplace to which they connected a big box stove for heating during the hunting and trapping seasons.

One winter in the thirties or forties, Ernie Thomas fell through the ice as on his way back from running a trap line in the Bonaparte outlet to Mud Lake. His body was never recovered.

But we have the gloves and, for some reason, the moths have spared them completely. Georgia says it is because we have not put them away. I never use them. Don't want to wear them out. If we ever find Ernie Thomas, he will need them.
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