Page 23 of Plaidypus
I picked up the cow tag and waved it at Leonard. “I will go stick this on her ear if I must, CDC!”
Leonard shot Nancy a glare. “Why did you tell her that?”
The vampire grinned and showed off her pointy teeth. “It’s more fun watching a woman work you over rather than the other way around. It looks like the mouse is actually a huntress. It’s unusual for a prey species to actively hunt her dinner, though. Platypuses are classified as a prey species.”
“They’re also typically Australian,” Leonard replied in a dry voice. “Having met my fair share of Australians, even the ones with prey instincts tend to be lethal in some fashion or another. The female platypus is, admittedly, one of the least dangerous species on that specific continent.”
I claimed my moose’s new tag, grabbed some twine, and growled at the lycanthrope before grabbing my coat and shoving on my shoes so I could lay claim over my moose. “You can put Icy in a nice habitat, but I maintain visitation rights. She’smine. And assuming I can find a job, I’ll even help pay for her care bill. Whatdozombie moose eat besides grass and dirt she mistakes to be grass?”
“We have no idea. We don’t usually have access to zombie moose.”
“Well, that’s not my fault for your failure to come here earlier.”
Theresa snickered. “She has you there, Leonard. Now you’ve offended her through not showing off your handsome self sooner.”
Mina giggled. “You’ve lost this one, CDC. You may as well just throw yourself at our feet and beg for her to do what you want now. As I am wise and paid attention to the file record noting there was a zombie moose to contend with, I looked up relevant hunting laws, and she’s correct. She hit the cow. With the right tag, which she has, the cow is hers.”
“But it’s a zombie,” Leonard complained.
“But it is her zombie. She has claimed it. She’s even sacrificing a lot of supper for her zombie.” Mina gestured at the drawer with the rest of my tags in it. “We might have eaten half a moose.”
“That was more like a quarter,” I admitted. “That cow was injured and unlikely to make it, and I’d left my calf tags at home, so I may have caught the calf and took him to a rescue. He will one day be a strong bull.”
Matthieu chuckled. “It’s true. She brings home this dead cow in the back of her truck—and donotask me how she managed to haul that animal into the bed of her truck. Then, she opens the cab, and she hauls down a roped calf. The poor thing is terrified, but she made a harness for him, tied him to the porch, and called the cops to get the poor thing relocated to a rescue. While she has a winch, I am confident she didn’t use it to get the cow into the bed or the calf into the cab.”
I rolled my eyes, as I had a few practitioner tricks up my sleeve meant to make getting my kill home easier so I could butcher it and put it in my freezer. “I used the winch plenty. Anyway, I skin, clean, and butcher my own moose, and I take the hide to be tanned, so it’s better if I take the whole animal home before doing the work. I try to use everything possible.”
The hooves went to buyers who wanted them, I’d lost count of the number of heads I’d sent over to taxidermists for a good price, and every suitable bone I either kept or sent to a carver so nothing would go to waste.
I left the offal for scavengers in the woods, as I drew the line at figuring out what to do with certain organs.
Leaving the vampires, sex demons, and lycanthrope to continue the discussion, I took my moose’s tag outside with twine, approached her, and waited to see what she would do.
Like yesterday, she opted to snuggle with my shoulder, which made it easy to tie the tag around the base of her ear. “Good girl,” I praised, discovering that while she was a zombie, her coat remained intact when I patted her, although I dislodged some frost and snow. “I’ll make sure the CDC takes good care of you.”
Icy snorted at me, flicked her tagged ear, and went back to the serious business of destroying the front yard, once again struggling to differentiate between grass, snow, and dirt.
Oh, well. My zombie moose wasn’t the brightest, but if she wanted to eat dirt, who was I to tell her no? I went back into the house, returning my coat to the rack and kicking off my shoes. “I have tagged her, so she is mine.”
“You can’t win this one, Leonard,” Mina announced.
“I see that.” The lycanthrope sighed. “What’s a little extra complication? If you’re that determined to claim ownership over the moose, I can’t really argue with it.”
“Of course you can’t. The hunting laws here are pretty clear. If you hit a moose, and the moose dies, and you have a hunting tag, you can claim that moose legally. As I have the tag and I killed her, she’s mine. It just became slightly more complicated when she decided death wasn’t for her.” I eyed my brother with interest. “Could I claim ownership to the moose if she’d become a vampire moose?”
“No,” my guests announced, and their no-arguments tone made me laugh.
“Vampires are classified as sentient beings,” my brother replied in his most dignified and offended tone. “You can’t just claim ownership to a sentient unless you are a lycanthrope female who has set eyes on a lycanthrope male. And even then, you need his consent first. From my limited research on the subject, waggling your finger is usually sufficient. Single female lycanthropes are that rare. Zombie animals aren’t sentient, not in the legal sense. As she’s pretty helpless, you have a strong case for claiming her.”
I checked out the window at my moose, who tried to chew on a rock. “Helpless is one way to put it. Maybe we can train her to be ridden? Or would she decay if we saddled her?”
Leonard joined me in staring out the window at Icy. “Her species of zombie doesn’t typically decay much if at all. The little decay she has was in the time after her death but before her revival as a zombie. I would put it at no more than twelve hours, judging from the little I know of putrefaction in larger animals like deer and moose. She didn’t enter rigor mortis, although it’s quite obvious she was deceased for a period of time. And the damage on her, admittedly, might be from her close encounter with your truck rather than decay. As she’s a zombie, the damage can be mended with practitioner magic. What we don’t know is if your zombie moose has a soul. Zombies vary on their possession of souls, so we’ll need to either inquire with someone who can discern the truth or do testing. As you’ve claimed the moose, we’ll likely have to use magic or bargain to find out if your moose has a soul.”
While I’d used practitioner magic for doing things like hauling carcasses into the bed of my truck, I hadn’t considered how it might be useful for repairing something like Icy’s tattered hide. All in all, the introduction between vehicle and animal had done nobody any good.
Of the three of us, I’d gotten off the lightest, although having to serve as my brother’s dinner had come as an unwelcome surprise. I tried not to think much about what would have happened if my brother had drained me dry like he’d done Icy. Would I have become a vampire, too?
Had I become a vampire—or any other type of undead—we’d both have contracted a severe case of permanently dead. Rather than focus too much on it, I returned to my breakfast and began the serious work of polishing off my meal so I could get some sleep.
