Fishmongering

Is your brain not big enough, Halibut?

For its brain-and-agility embiggening effects, I have embarked on a week of eating fish. And where might you catch fish, Halibut? At the bottom of the garden? Under the hedge, perhaps? Maybe fishlings cavort with the elusive mouse under the deck.

I confess that these are not wild, claw-caught fishes. In fact, I have been purloining from the humans who have some source of their own. If the local birdbath had inhabitants other than mosquito larvae, I could ask Gooney and Bhiksu for tribute. Why should they not use their unusual webbed feet for a change?

The fare is, I admit, a little bland, if maddeningly healthful. So I have developed some excellent recipes. Here is one:

1. Open the fridge with your paw and remove a filet from its wrapping of waxed paper. Feel free to tear the paper ad lib.
2. Drag into a corner of your cave.
3. Roll well in mouse droppings.
4. Serve at once.

Since all of my entrepreneurial offerings have met with resolute lack of taste and interest, I am loathe to consider re-opening Halibut's Fish Restaurant. But a private dining club perhaps?

Even fewer signs of the Apocalypse

It seems that recent scattered showers have been due to avian sponging. It is well known to me that many of the feathery tribe (particularly Turdus migratorius and Bombycilla cedrorum) are notorious sots.

Their common device is to wait until the fruits of trees, for instance of the genus Sorba, are well fermented. Apples will also do. (Top alcholic content is achieved just around this time of winter, in fact.) Then the sozzlers descend in clouds and get on with berry-bibbing. Sometimes, if you're lucky, they will drop off the branches, infused with a delicate hint of wassail.

This week in dead animals

Here the the days are lengthening apace. The sun has returned, brought back by the sacrifice of the chosen ones, toothsome magpies. We are still picking the sinews from between our teeth, every discovery a delightful rancid surprise.

And yet the humans live in fear, as they usually do, gibbering about an Animal Apocalypse. They feel guilty about their poisonous habits, and suspect the Big Cat in the Sky is sending down a disapproving rain of fauna on their meagrely stocked heads. "Some had no eyes." Indeed.

We know what we would do with a thousand tasty birdies falling from the sky.

Countdown to the Solstice: Casserole's On

My hare -- or a replacement -- is alive and dancing in the Park. I saw him dart from a denser, safer spruce than Badger can boast of, bounding along the surface of the snow, ending his dance on two springy hindquarters. Lovechild of lady meerkat and a boomer.

He was looking right at me, damn his eyes! It is hard to be a secret black puma in the snow. (The sun was going down. At 3:15 pm or so. But the long shadows are blue, not black.)

And damn those springy stringy quivering thighs! I'll have to marinate them for days.

Mr H's Sporting Tour of the British Isles

Following the Oystercatcher from the northeast to the southwest takes stamina and tact.  In fact, in places I have been taken for a mysterious puma, sic:

My gratitude to http://www.bigcatmonitors.co.uk/, but I do think they've photoshopped the teeth to look rather too 'American'.

The Oystercatchers have their headquarters down here, along with delicate egrets, delightfully rancid cormorants, and gamey gulls -- all the makings of a Halibut 'Celebration' Pie.  Must get shopping.