Who Messed With The Sign Board?

Marissa first became suspicious when that out-of-town couple that had been stopping by every day for the last week for a cup of coffee and some free wifi got angry looks on their faces and huffed  off without even coming in. As the morning progressed, she noticed that about half of all her customers were grinning when they walked in. The other half gave her quire looks when she took their orders. By ten o’clock, she had gotten one too many dirty looks from little old ladies. She threw down the rag she had been wiping down tables with and marched outside to see what had everyone acting so unusual this morning.

She found the sign board pretty quickly. It’s not like it was hard to miss, seeing as how she had not been aware of Java Joe’s having a sidewalk sign board before. And she would have known since she was both the owner and the manager of it. It also didn’t take long to figure out why it was there, since she also found a new but discreetly hidden spy cam mounted on the light poll a few yards away.

Moon-Moon, for all his brilliance with electronics, was little more than an over-grown child when it came to most things. His latest kick had been watching hidden camera pranks on the internet.  She also had a pretty good idea why this particular sign board got up outside her door. The yuppy couple that had been hanging around town for the last week or so had been not-so-subtly insulting their way through the whole town. On Monday, they had staged an animal cruelty protest outside the butcher’s because Hank the butcher had kicked them out for trying to get his customers to sign meat-free pledges. On Tuesday, they had harassed Miss Ellie over at the Big Horn Diner for not using ecco-sustainable, gluten free flours in her famous flapjacks. On Wednesday, they picketed town hall for gods’ only knows why.

All of this was because they had been up at Prairie Lake over the weekend “communing with the wild life” and had seen a bow hunter bag a moose. They had tried to get Han Ewing to arrest him for the offense. When Han had inspected the kill and the hunter’s license, he declared that it had been a clean kill and told the yuppies that if they didn’t want to see animals being hunted, they should stay out of the hunting grounds while the hunting season was open.

She cocked her head to the side and studied the sign. The problem was, she kinda was siding with the rest of the town on this. Even the town’s hippy werewolves, the Wilk Pack, understood the need for herd maintenance. There were more moose in the county than even the local carnivores could take, so it only made sense to allow humans a few hunting tags. The two out-of-towners had been acting like jack asses after they realized no one else saw things their way. ‘Cause really? Telling a big horn that she was not running her vegetarian diner right? That’s not a good idea.

She shook her head and went back inside, leaving the sign board right where it was.

******

On a side note, I got the inspiration for this post partly from that picture but mostly from an actual news story. If you'd like to read up on the photogs who threw a fit this week in Colorado because a bow hunter took an legal moose, it's right here. Enjoy!

~ Rebecca