Irrelevant Cheetah

When I was a child growing up in Slodovetskiwazaskatsia, my father had an unusual avocation. Not content with scratching a living from the arid earth that constitutes 87% of my homeland, he was always on the lookout for something different. He briefly made an attempt at selling real estate, but the concept of “flipping” property was lost on him, and my mother axed the idea the second time she had to help him set the house upright once again. “Jorgen,” he would say excitedly, smelling vaguely of artichokes and wumpus-breath, “there’s more to life than farming and picking up wumpus manure. There’s money to be made here, I just know it!”

Thus, he came up with the idea of wumpus-herding. I tried to explain to him that the reason nobody ever owned more than one wumpus was because the plural of the word looked really, really silly, but he refused to listen.

The conversation at the local Mill & Feed went something like this:

Dad: I’d like to buy some…

Clerk: Yes?

Dad: Some…

Clerk: Yes?

Dad: I need to buy more than one wumpus.

Clerk (hesitant): You mean…

Dad (almost screaming): Yes! I need to buy some wumpii!

The encounter just went downhill from there, and ended with my father being tied to a chair and dumped in the middle of the Wazaskatsian River. Of course, the Wazaskatsian’s average depth is about seven and a half inches, so it was more of a symbolic punishment than anything else. Once he managed to free himself, he politely returned the chair via the front window of the Mill & Feed and made haste to the supply store in the next village.  

It makes sense, when you think about it. If owning one wumpus is good, then owning more than one should be better. However, Slodovetskiwazaskatsians are notoriously picky when it comes to two things: food and plural possessives, and they feared that total anarchy would ensue the first time Dad tried to explain what all of the wumpus feed was for.  

Using a combination of clever disguises and a phony eBay account, my father finally managed to acquire five wumpii, including a breeding pair. Unfortunately, a month later we learned why wumpus-breeding is strictly controlled by the government in special soundproof buildings: The mating call of the male wumpus, we learned, has been likened to the sound of an elephant seal being anally violated by an oboe. Four days into the mating season, he was put on official notice by my mother that the wumpii were to vacate the premises post haste. After finding homes for two of them and releasing the others into the wild, he shame-facedly admitted to my mother that he had neglected the artichoke crop.

He told me later that he got used to sleeping in the barn after a week or two.