My path took me past one of the loading docks. A delivery had been recently made, and the truck recently gone. There on the ground under the dock, amid the sawdust and litter and gravel was an inch-and-a-half of black and red-brown fuzziness. Bigger than January's wooly bully, and far more vigorous as well. Trucking right along, towards the middle of our foot-ball-field sized parking lot. They don't pack a lot of brains in that there fuzz.

I gloved up (immunosuppressed, you know, and I don't know where wooly had been) and cradled him in my hand. He curled up in a tight little ball. Possum. Ostrich. He can't see me; I can't see him.

I took him over to the patch of green that I took his compatriot to some weeks ago. It's greener now, and there were two Canada geese hanging out there like a teenage couple out behind the stadiums after school. I tossed wooly into the thicket, where even prying goosenecks won't go. A trickling effluent from our water treatment flows by there. The water is warm, and gives up its warmth quickly to the banks on either side. It's greener there than anywhere else around the building at the moment. Wooly should be safe there when March forgets about coming in like a lamb and takes on its more leonine features.

For a few minutes, the pain didn't bother me so much.