As in:
There was nothing funny at all about the way Travis Beck’s life had turned sour. That was true even if you were his ex-wife, having once walked in on one of his “mistakes.” (“It’s not how it looks!” he had the audacity to shout.) It was true if you were his former business partner who’d discovered, too late, that Travis was not nearly as knowledgeable about the high volume pump market as he’d claimed. It was even true if you were his former high school basketball coach, who’s one excruciating chance at winning the state title was extinguished when Travis missed two free throws back-to-back, either one of which would have sealed the deal.
You still wouldn’t wish this on him. The empty house. The end of his unemployment benefits. The evaporation of his misplaced investments, courtesy of first Enron, and then of some really bad bets in the day trading market. The stress-induced eczema.
His only friend left was Lance, his black Labrador, and on a Monday night, pretty much near the worse of this, when he couldn’t sleep, Travis took Lance for a walk down the street, toward the wooded creek that ran beneath the plateau that housed the trophy homes he’d once aspired to. He was thoroughly depressed, and didn’t feel like he had much to live for on Tuesday.
He was just about to make the turn back toward home, and his overflowing bill box, when he noticed the unmistakable silhouette of a male moose. The moose was only thirty paces away and, on first instinct, Travis was calm. He’d hunted moose and knew you could reason with them in such surprise encounters as long as you didn’t place too many demands upon them. This calm dissipated as soon as Lance barked. The moose charged and instinctively Travis dropped the leash and ran toward the street fifty yards back.
His only chance to outrun the moose was Lance, who distracted the enraged bull just long enough. When Travis reached the street he immediately ran up the hood of an old Chevy haul truck parked where the road ended. The rack on the moose scraped right up the hood and windshield after him, and the left side got wedged into the makeshift wooden siding behind the cab of the truck. The moose was stuck, though still enraged because Lance had now recovered his courage to come back and bark some more.
It was altogether horrifying for the five minutes until the police arrived at the behest of a nearby caller. Travis recovered Lance and walked home, still breathing heavily, still moist with terror and still flushed with adrenaline. He still wasn’t real sure what he had left to live for, and certainly nothing came to mind that was so important as to warrant running so hard from the moose. He figured it was just pure instinct, something in the genes dating back to one of Richard Leakey’s discoveries.
And then he began to feel sorry for the tranquilized moose. If he’d had any money in his jeans he thought he would like to buy the moose a beer. Yeah. A Moosehead Lager, for sure. Or two. Maybe next time, he imagined himself telling his new drinking pal, he’d ask the cops to tranquilize him instead.
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