Hey there,

This is Dozer, your neighborhood armchair investigator and gourmet. In a nutshell, my missing squeaky hedgehog toy led to one epic Pawsburg road trip – Featuring wit, grilled chicken, persuasive skills, the Pooch Playhouse, a sprinkle of loyalty and Bulldog Bay at twilight. Got my squeaky friend back, but not before some doggie hockey. Ended the day with a victory feast! Next time remind me not to lose toys, it’s exhausting!

Duo of Dozer and Dinner,
Dozer

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They say the best adventures start with a dream, a distraction, or a destiny; mine, however, started with me losing my squeaky hedgehog toy.

One fateful, starry night in Pawsburg, I, Dozer, of broad shoulders and of an insatiable appetite for grilled chicken —rather like the bird actually, except I had no feather and flew about as high as boulders generally do— woke from my nap by the picket fence, realising my most cherished possession had gone missing. An inexplicable mystery, much like the human obsession with green beans, a vegetable I, by all means, loathe with an intensity usually reserved for mailmen and a particularly grating cat from down the lane (but that’s another story).

Casting around with the urgent desperation akin to a beloved, corpulent aunt that has misplaced her spectacles, I spotted a trail. A series of whimsical footprints leading towards Collie Canyon. They were remarkably close to my squeaky nemesis’s size, a realization that would have delighted Sherlock Holmes, who frankly could be a fellow canine for his comparable level of obsession with often mind-numbing minutiae. Ah well, onward then, to retrieve what’s rightfully mine.

My first pit stop was at the infamous Pupperoni Pizza. Nudging open the door with my substantial bullock’s head, I beheld the tantalizing aroma of my beloved grilled chicken, which was for me the equivalent of a neon sign that screamed ‘Food coma awaits!’ Turning my wit and charm into full gear, I persuaded Rosie, the chow-chow waitress, to slip me an extra slice on the house. Would it make me slower on my journey to Collie Canyon? Possibly. Did I care? Not in the slightest.

Next, I paid a visit to the Pooch Playhouse. My friends tell me it’s less of a store and more of a wormhole into plush paradise. I had an ulterior motive, however; Sheba worked there part-time. Granted, she and I were the odd couple of Pawsburg, a pair that seemed as congruent as summer snow. But our friendship held a simple truth: loyalty transcends size, breed, or the fact that one of us thought Fetch-N-Bites was a superior restaurant to Pupperoni Pizza (a claim utterly scandalous, in my humble opinion).

“They took a detour to Upper Black Bulldog Bay,” Sheba said with unerring confidence. She always said things with unerring confidence, one of her many charming and annoying qualities. “Don’t ask how I know. You won’t like the answer.”

I didn’t, but the day was young and the road was calling. The feeling consuming me was akin to what humans call wanderlust – the same emotion that convinces them to strap tents to their backs and walk up vertically high mountains. Quite why they can’t just sleep in the open without the effort of climbing first is beyond me, but since they do insist on feeding me green beans from time to time, I feel that we have already established that humans can be puzzling creatures.

Never in my life had I explored Bulldog Bay so late in the evening. As twilight graced the horizon, despair started to knock on the doors of my hopeful heart. But right then, whilst I was contemplating the futility of canine-kind’s existence, I spotted it! There bathed in celestial moonlight, my hedgehog!

That it was being used as the puck in a game of doggie hockey at the Shih Tzu Stadium was a minor detail, and a situation to be rectified, courteously or not so courteously, once I’d finished my victory feast of grilled chicken at the Fetch-N-Bites.

All’s well that ends well, is an adage humans spout. For me, the adage goes, ‘All’s well that ends with grilled chicken and my squeaky hedgehog toy,’ and so it was, on what will forever be remembered as my grand Pawsburg road trip adventure.

By the way, just for the record, never lose a squeaky hedgehog toy in Pawsburg. The retrieval process is exhaustingly entertaining.

The End.

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