When Duncan and Guenever understood that Duncan was going to die very soon, they decided to put together a final, glorious performance.  Duncan and Guenever had lived and worked together for as long as they both could remember.  During the olden days they’d co-habituated  with five difficult goats, two catnip crazed but talented cats, and their son Chris in a stone house in a country hamlet.  The early productions took place in woodland clearings on solstice and equinox nights whenever the moon happened to be full.  Duncan’s mysterious pennywhistle compositions mesmerized the gathered crowd of ravens and crows, skunks, foxes, raccoons, deer, bear, and muskrat.  Tacked to the trees were Guenever’s enlarged black and white photographs of humans with cow and pig heads in slinky white cocktail dresses .  With  hemlock sticks and kitchen implements, Chris wagged his tail to the rhythm of his taps on  a collection of pickle jars, tuna fish cans, and an especially resonant empty beer keg.    The goats pranced in ceremonial red and golden cloaks as they acted out strange creation myths they’d helped devise during many late nights, bottles of Pinot Noir, and plot point arguments with the cats.  The cats, who considered themselves creative geniuses,  sat on the sidelines, eying the chipmunks, and purring along with the pennywhistle.

Many years later, Chris bid temporary farewell, and set out for the western territory, beyond Terrier Pass.   Duncan and Guenever  and the two cats drifted to the city.    They were sad to leave the goats behind, but the goats were essentially stick in the muds, and not particularly adventurous.  Oh well, thought Duncan and Guenever, they’d probably drive us crazy with their complaints about the lack of quality grass and the snootiness of city goats.  We’ll come back to visit them on weekends.  The urban productions had some of the same quality of the woodland shows, but with a decidedly different approach.  Instead of creation myths, the cats moved imaginatively  into the future, and began writing  plotless tales about an earth after the nuclear holocaust populated by insects who sipped green tea and told ghost stories in small white plastic houses with picket fences.   Duncan began playing around with electronic gadgets with which to make interesting sounds to add to his pennywhistle tunes.  One morning, Guenever found an old German video camera lying on the sidewalk outside their apartment.  She became obsessed with the metaphor of doors, and began shooting footage of dogs and cats  moving in and out of subway doors, elevator doors, taxi cab doors, and Bloodhound workers emerging from manholes.  The actors were now a motorcycle gang of gray and black squirrels – the cats enjoyed working with them because, unlike the goats, they had no creative aspirations.

So now, at the end of his long and beautiful life, Duncan and Guenever, Chris and his wife and children, the cats, and all the goats gathered together at the stone house in the country hamlet to make one last moonlit production together.    As in the past, the cats and goats battled over the fine points of a new creation myth, though they didn’t drink as much red wine as they used to, and by midnight they were sound asleep.    The weather was perfect, the audience was ecstatic, the goats were sublime.   According to the articles in the Wild Chronicle the following day, Duncan and Guenever’s show far surpassed the most discerning critics’ expectations.  Guenever realized she had a rough road ahead for awhile, but the spirit of this final production helped ease the pain.   Also, she had a new distraction.  Unfortunately, the goats were very bored and had changed their mind about the prospects of living in the city.  Guenever had  to figure out a kind and gentle way to discourage them.