Saturday Morning Cartoons

Back to your regularly scheduled silly Bast stories.

Aside from Bast, I have a few other pets, including two chinchillas, three small parrots, and a goldfish I won at the fair. Because I'm incapable of picking out normal pets, one of the chinchillas is missing his back foot and the toes off the other foot, one of the parrots has tail feathers that grow sideways, and the goldfish is a goldfish I won at the fair, which makes it weird enough.

As you can imagine, running this menagerie around a wolfdog can be a lot of extra work. Wolfdogs have notoriously high prey drives. Now, "high prey drive" does not mean "vicious killing machine" - it just means that if they see something running, they just gotta chase it.

Luckily for us, Bast isn't very interested in my other critters, since he doesn't interact with them often. He's a little afraid of the chinchillas - the older one is mean as hell and bites Bast if the dog is foolish enough to put his face close to their cage - and it was very easy to teach him that the parrots aren't toys, either, because they also bite the everliving shit out of him if given half a chance.

Prince of the Forest, but not of the household

I thought that Bast was indifferent to the parrots, since he's not allowed to either eat or play with them, but I thought wrong.

Last night, Bast came trotting in from the back door, which I leave open in evenings for the cool breeze. Since Bast regularly darts in and out of the house on his wolfy little errands - stealing things, hiding food - I don't normally pay much attention to his comings and goings except to glance up and be sure he hasn't stolen something important.

On this particularly Bast errand, he stalked across the living room and stood sentinel in front of the parrot cages. It isn't like him to be still for very long, so after a minute or two, I glanced up to see what his issue was. Bast stared, head low, intently peering underneath the parrot cages, from where I could hear a soft fluttering sound...

I stood up and walked over with a sense of dismay rising. Yes, there was definitely a rustling noise coming from under the bird cage. I got on hands and knees to peer under and discovered what Bast's errand was...

A small, slightly slobbery, and very terrified female sparrow was spazzing out underneath the cages. Bast had brought a LIVE BIRD into the house and, I guess logically, put it with the other birds.

Like, "Hey! You like these, right? I brought you another one. This is where birds go."

Bast, always eager to help, had assumed the same army-crawl position as me and was scootching up towards his new friend. I shrieked at him to get back, and he gave me one confused - but definitely not ashamed or concerned - glance before backing up to his haunches to wait.

After some finagling, I was able to get the poor, terrified sparrow out from under the cages. Unfortunately she flew straight up the chimney, which Bast let me know by bounding over to the fireplace and giving off one loud and very unhelpful WOOF.

By the time I got the sparrow caught, I was covered in ashes, Bast was tap dancing in glee, and the poor bird was shaking in fear. I didn't want to release her immediately, since she was exhausted, so we let her rest in one of my spare cages, which I hastily snatched from the shed and dusted off.

No, Bastas. I don't need any more birds, but thank you. That was misguidedly sweet.

We released the little gal outside, where she promptly winged the hell out of here, not that I blame her. But for all her fear, what blows my mind is Bast managed to carry in such a delicate creature without harming a feather on her body. She was barely even slobbery. He must have been so careful with her, not only in catching her but then in bringing her inside.

He's like Snow White the Idiot Savant or something.