Zeke

Zeke

Ezekiel (Zeke) Daniel Daschund

by Leonie Edge

Part One, 03-28-03

Ezekiel (Zeke) Daniel Daschund was a long, low-slung sausage dog, with a happy nature. He was so low-slung that the only thing you could see in tall grass was the very tip of his curved tail, standing like a warped flag pole as he followed an interesting scent with his keen wet nose.

Now that nose was amazing. Long and buttinski, it could sniff out food smells further than you can shout. It was flexible, just like our noses, and Zeke needed that in a nose. Sometimes he ran full-pelt into a glass door in his eagerness to get to food, so the nose had to do a u-turn just to survive.

Pretty soon, greedy little Zeke could no longer fit into his dog basket. Where was his new bed to be? Onto the couch! Of course, that made it difficult for any humans who actually wanted to sit on the couch and watch television, but anyone who has a daschund knows that they tend to take over your life. So his parent-owner put up with it, mainly because she felt sorry for her little dog.

The next week, he couldn't fit onto the couch. So, still feeling sorry for him, she let him sleep on her bed. There were a couple of problems with this: Zeke's parent-owner was actually married, and whilst John really loved Zeke, almost as much as Zeke's parent-owner, John believed that the bed should stay in human control.

Zeke didn't. He thought that he was entitled to at least some of the bed. So he would roll over in his sleep and push with his powerful legs and just about push both of his parent-owners out of their own bed.

And he snored. They didn't get much sleep with Zeke's snoring, it sounded like the worst possible mixture of avalanche, earthquake, thunder and Niagara Falls close up. But he was allowed to stay, mainly because he looked at them both with beautiful eyes that were like liquid pools of mud, and the parent-owners just melted.

But Zeke kept eating. His parent-owner came home one day to find that Zeke was really upset: poor long Zeke couldn't even fit on her bed. Trouble was, Zeke's parent-owner, a very nice lady by the name of Sally, did not realise that letting Zeke have all the food he wanted was doing this to him.

So like those funny long balloons you keep blowing up to see how long they can get, Zeke just kept on getting longer. Thankfully he did not explode - imagine the mess that would have made! Yuck! Zeke knew, but he loved food too much to stop now. Oh, no, not Zeke.

Eventually, Zeke had to sleep in the hall. People kept tripping over him, and he would scream and look at them reproachfully, and they would apologise profusely. Until the next time they went into the hall, and then they would trip over him again. It took quite a bit of explaining to visitors, and John and Sally prayed that Zeke would not have his photograph taken for the local paper. They had enough trouble already, without people coming around to look at the metres-long daschund, and laugh. It would hurt Zeke's feelings, they were sure.

Eventually, the hall was too small. Zeke slept up one side of the stairs, and he ended up with a body full of zig-zags as he could only sleep in the one position, or risk sliding right down the stairs and ending with a thump on the bottom.

The only time I have seen a longer sausage was a world record one on television, and that was a standard edible one, not a dog!

Next week, I'll tell you what happened with the world's longest daschund, and how good came out of greed.