Nano-Sapiens: Carter and the Father's Day Smoker
This month, Carter chases stone balls and saves the day on Father's Day! Plus critter pictures and their takes on June! Enjoy this month's Critter Tails!
Welcome to June!
It is June! And June means summer, and heat and BBQs where ice tea and heat are in mortal combat. It also means that Father’s Day is right around the corner.
With Father’s Day later this month, we want to make sure to say Happy Father’s Day to all the dads, substitute-dads, and pseudo-dads, science-dads, art-dads, and everything in between. So, during this month of June, make sure to thank all your male role models and figures in your life! I know have I have several that have helped me through much.
And Tod wrote another cute little Carter story for Father’s Day this month! Hope everyone enjoys it.
And Aki is hiding… somewhere. Like the Sith mistress that she is in her heart.
Carter and the Father’s Day Smoker
The dog’s wide black-brown eyes stared across the field of the battle at his opponent. His tongue lolled out the side. He panted a little with excitement as he watched his feline opponent.
The feline smiled. The uptick of whiskers, the crinkle of a nose, and the low rumble of a purr from deep in his chest, said he knew he had the dog at a disadvantage, again.
Carter’s black-brown dog eyes blinked, and he gave a low half-woof. He wasn’t allowed to bark at full voice inside. His collar flicked over and translated his canine chatter for his adoptive father.
“Dad, I think I’m doing better this time.”
Timmy’s gray tabby Maine Coon tail twitched. His deep bass voice came from a collar with a blue LED that matched one on his Newfie son.
“Really, Carter? Looks like I have more territory.”
Carter blinked at the board, careful to not let his jaws go over the board. People weren’t understanding about him being a Newfoundland dog, and drool is love, as his family always said. But there were limits.
Drooling on the battlefield was one of them.
The Go board didn’t look too bad to him. More importantly, he had a whole lot of white stones on his side that he’d captured.
But he really couldn’t see where to go next. “Pass.”
His father replied the same way: “Pass.”
They added up the stones each had captured. Carter was way ahead and his tail went high. Then they each added up their territories. As they did so, Carter’s tail slowly sank.
Timmy, his father, had won by 20 points.
Carter laughed. His tail went happily to work again. “Well, I guess I spent too much time chasing stone balls.”
His father laughed back at him. “Yeah. Dogs tend to do that. Newfies aren’t real territorial, but almost all cats are. So, when we’re playing Go, we tend to pay more attention to territory, which helps a lot with the scoring.”
From the sideline, three Maine Coon kittens sat cheering both of them. Charles, a gray tabby like his father, gave a whoop. “Y’all did great. Now, Dad, Mom wants you, and we need to borrow Carter.”
Timmy cocked his head and watched as the three kittens herded Carter out of the room. Carter watched him as he moved away, directed by his smaller, older siblings.
Raymond, the orange Maine Coon kitten, announced, “Carter, remember our plan to surprise Dad for Father’s Day?”
Carter gave a vigorous nod, throwing slobber everywhere, which his siblings ignored as only a feline can ignore something too disgusting to notice. “Yes. We’re gonna smoke fish for him.”
Charles gave him a cat laugh in return. “Yep. And Mom bought us sablefish. It’s supposed to be the best fish ever when it’s smoked.”
Carter walked over to the cooler and nosed the lid open and took a big woof of smell. “I don’t know if it needs to be smoked. That smells really good.”
The three kittens were between him and the cooler before he could blink.
All three of them said, “Carter?”
Carter’s tail drooped and his ears sagged. “Oh, I’m sorry. I won’t repeat what happened last time.”
Valerie, his tortoiseshell older sister, purred. “Try on your new mouth glove. We need you to unplug the smoker. Mom helped us test it to make sure it turned on, but now we need to load it.”
Carter nodded. There was the mouth glove. It was a sort of big crocodile mouth thing of leather dipped in rubber and then wrapped in leather. The leather kept him from biting through the material while still insulating him just in case he got too close to electricity. It also kept him from drooling onto plugs or sockets. Humans and cats could be so picky, and not just for safety reasons.
All four of the kids really appreciated it since it let them work plugs using Carter’s strength.
Carter ambled over behind the pellet grill and carefully pulled the plug out of the wall, shook himself, and put the glove down next to the grill. He knew that even his translation collar with its blue glowing LED didn’t work when it was for his canine mouth when he wore that glove.
“Okay, guys. It’s done.”
The three kittens cheered and then herded Carter over next to the grill. They climbed up him, which he was more than used to. From there, they he got up on top of the grill where they could open up the lid.
They made sure that everything was clear inside and had Carter pour the wood pellets from a nearby open bag. The kittens had checked out the pellets the day before, so the bag was ready.
Carter sneezed from the pellet dust and had to work hard to keep that from spilling pellets. But eventually Raymond said the bin was full.
Carter counted the three kittens. “One, two, three. Okay. Everybody’s here.”
While his siblings closed the lid, Carter backed up and got his mouth-glove. Glancing back to make sure everybody was still okay, he plugged in the pellet grill.
Charles reached carefully down and turned the dial from off to smoke.
They settled in to watch it heat.
Carter looked at the temperature. “80F? What does it need to be?”
Raymond’s orange tail twitched as he replied, “About 180. It can go up and down a little bit from that. But then we can put the fish in and smoke it. Dad’s gonna love this Father’s Day dish.”
Carter shook his ears vigorously. “That reminds me. Father’s Day. Did it start the same way as Mother’s Day?”
Charles laughed at Carter. “I knew you would ask, and I looked this up on Critter Explainer.”
The other two kittens nodded along.
“Over a hundred years ago, a girl named Sonora wanted to honor her dad. He had raised six kids all by himself after their mom died. That’s where it started. You know, just like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, stores pushed it because they wanted to sell more stuff. But most people just liked it because they wanted to honor their dads.”
At that point, Raymond, who’d been watching the temperature probe every now and again, interrupted with a meow that didn’t translate.
Valerie gave him a mild hiss. “You’re lucky Mom wasn’t here and that your collar didn’t translate that for Carter to understand.”
Carter didn’t bother to tell them he understood what Raymond had said. Mom was one of the leading proponents that feline collars should include impolite words.
Raymond’s ears drooped and then perked back up as he said, “But look at the temperature.”
All four kids looked at the temperature. 250 degrees and still rising.
Carter thought for a second. “Isn’t that too hot?”
All three kids replied, “Yes.”
“What are we gonna do?” asked Charles. “We don’t have time for anything else.”
Carter thought for a second. “I have an idea.”
He went over to the corner where the box that the grill had come in was laying — a combination cat and dog fort, depending on who was outside at the time.
Inside, sure enough, he found the manual. He thought he’d remembered that from his nap earlier. He grabbed the manual in his mouth, being careful not to get it too wet, and brought it back to the kids.
“Can y’all hold this open for me?”
Raymond looked from the manual to Carter. “How come?”
“Well, I can read a little better than y’all if I work at it. Dad has been helping me. And he says manuals usually have a troubleshooting section. Although it rarely involves shooting the problem. But let’s see if the manual tells us what’s going on.”
They paged through the manual, and Carter eventually found the troubleshooting page. He concentrated really hard and read the page very slowly and carefully. After reading it, he got up and ambled over to the bag of pellets the kittens had opened yesterday and had him pour in today.
Reaching out, he very carefully and delicately ate a pellet out of it.
The three other kids were asking him, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?”
Then he walked back to the box fort and found their “sandbags”. Which were the other bags of pellets. He carefully opened the top of one and ate another pellet.
He sat down in front of the other kids.
“The problem is the bag we opened yesterday is now damp. It’s so humid here. On the Gulf Coast, our air is wet. In Houston, you can’t let pellets sit out like that. The wood sucks up all the moisture from the air, and then it doesn’t burn right. And you get too many pellets in the grill. Then they all dry and burn at once. That makes it too hot. Listen to this.”
This time, the kittens followed him over to the first bag where he, again, delicately ate one pellet.
Charles said, “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Right.” Carter galumphed over to the other bag. The kittens followed like three little magnets attracted to a gigantic piece of iron.
“Listen carefully,” whispered Carter.
He delicately bit into another pellet from the new bag.
*SNAP*
All three kittens were amazed. “It— it makes noise.”
Carter nodded.
Raymond ran over to the smoker and turned it to cool down. They all four impatiently stood there watching as the temperature went down.
It was much less than an hour, but it felt so much longer.
But once the temperature showed cool, they double-checked by nosing around carefully the box where the pellets were stored.
Carter declared, “It’s warm, but safe.”
Then using his mouth glove, he unplugged the smoker. The kittens found a bucket from the garage, and between the four of them, they dumped most of the pellets out of the feeder bin.
Carter carefully refilled it from the good bag. They closed the lid.
Carter counted his siblings again. Still three. That’s always good. One extra would be a problem. One less would be a bigger problem. Three was perfect.
And he plugged in the grill. They turned it back to smoke, and this time, they all watched it until it had been stable at 180 for some time.
Later, after they’d smoked the fish, their mom had told Timmy about the surprise. They all sat down at or on the kotatsu - a small table with a heater for winter.
Carter sat with his parents while the kittens brought in the food.
Raymond dragged in a plate with an entire huge fillet, smoked just for their dad.
Then Charles brought in a fillet cut up into four portions and said, “This is for we three kittens and Mom.”
Carter cocked his head. He didn’t think his brothers and sister had forgotten him, but he was a little worried.
Then little Valerie brought out a plate with two entire half fillets — one smoked and one raw. Carter started drooling even worse than usual.
Valerie and her two brothers sat in front of Carter. Valerie hugged his muzzle. “Carter saved the day today, so we made him a reward. We made a half filet that’s smoked and a half filet raw so he can decide which he likes better.”
With that, there was silence except for the sounds of chewing and an occasional sigh of happiness from a very happy Newfie.
When they had all finished, Valerie said, “Well, Carter, which one did you like best?”
Carter thought about it. It was important, so he thought about it some more. Finally, his ears perked up, and his tail slowly wagged back and forth and moved up high.
“Well, it’s good that today’s Father’s Day because I have the best dad in the world. He teaches me a lot. Like, don’t always chase balls.”
Carter gave his dad a lick. Timmy was better at not being bothered by slime than Veronica was. “I love you, Dad, and I will always learn from you. But in Go, I still think it’s more fun chasing the stone balls even if I don’t technically win.”
All the cats laughed with him.
“Most of all, Dad, you taught me how to take the extra effort to read when I needed to. Or any of the other things that I need to do. And because of you, I learned about the wonders of smoked fish.”
He looked around at his family. “Smoked fish is definitely better.”
They all laughed and went to work cleaning their paws of the delicious smoked fish from Father’s Day dinner.
Chaos Tip of the Week
Make sure to keep track of your head. After all, it is where you store your memory banks. So it holds more than its weight.
Critter Question of the Week
What is one thing you like to do for your father or to remember your father (or other male mentor)?
~Anna and Tod
More IP Writing on the Way!
Anna and I are please to announce that our story, Family Honor, has earned a spot in the Annals of the Auran Empire anthology. Arbiter of Worlds has a blog post with the complete author list and more details. The anthology is set in the Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint RPG universe of the Auran Empire. (Think Fantasy Rome.)
Crowd funding opens June 8th, and you can sign up to be reminded via BackerKit now!
https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/8b8be898-82a5-4dc9-868d-aa9a9b449f6e/landing
We’re pleased to see our fellow Alpha Mercs joining us: Zane Voss, Sam Robb (the first anthology we were in was also with Sam), B.K. Gibson (who also gave great developmental feedback during edits https://coldlightrpgpress.weebly.com/), and Nathaniel McIntyre.
We think our story has the most interesting one liner in the announcement:
“Family Honor” by A. Kristina Casasent, featuring a Ring Against the Wolf, tells the story of a Tirenean nobleman struggling with the challenge of producing an heir with his new wife.
For more details, checkout the Arbiter of Worlds blog!
