Heron Lake Plateau I'm a police officer. I'm a police officer and I want a cup of tea.

Owen's caterwauling diminished but the hiccups continued. This may have interfered somewhat with the gravity of the situation as the boy stared long and hard at his father. "It's just gonna sit there"...? Yeah, no, that's what he'd thought last time, and just look where it had gotten him! Owen would have thought that Quixote really would've learned better from the antler's sneakiness all around, here, just now. Did the puppies get all the brains in this family, or what? "Like a fancy stick," Owen's ass! The thing had fought back! Owen wasn't about to be lured in by the thing again no matter how delicious it smelled. Stinky ol' Quixote could try fighting the thing if he was so hellbent on insisting on its harmlessness.

In fact, Owen got a vague feeling that his elder might be quite amused by all this, irritatingly enough. He set his jaw and emphatically shook his head at his father, with his skull occasionally interrupted by little jolting hic! hic!s still along its orbit. - No way, not doing that, not never. - and, Nyuh-uh, HIC! he simultaneously signed/said. Then he glued himself firmly to the side of Quixote's leg opposite from the spiky antlerbeast, pretty much as far away as he could get while still keeping his wolf-shaped shield close at hand. I mean the least Quixote could do was protect innocent little Owen when the nonsense the older wolf was spouting was inevitably proven wrong, here. Aaaaany moment now. ...Owen regretted though that his ninjalike stealth in hiding within the black shadow of a big scary black wolf here was rather spoiled by these continuing hiccups. Ugh. So instead of keeping quiet and hiding, Owen experimentally decided to give the thing a threatening little warning growl.

Grrrr-hic!-grrrr-hic!-grrrr!

Owen gave it up in disgust. Not only was his breathy and high-pitched puppy-growl not nearly as menancing a sound as he'd hoped, those blasted hiccups just kept coming, here, and ruined what little menace and effect he might otherwise have generated. He glared at the antler: the thing just sat there so proud and smug, but almost certainly it was secretly laughing the fur right off itself somewhere deep inside. That is, if it had had fur. Or insides. Or whatever. Point was, it was obviously mocking Owen now and the pup didn't like it one bit.

But he still wasn't stupid enough to go up and confront it. Most assuredly not!