Report to The Agency: The Enemy Stinks.

M3 meets the enemy – and he stinks

I guess I should have seen it coming. It was such a rookie mistake, and in this business, if you make a mistake, you pay for it. It stinks, but that's the way it is.
It was just another early morning on assignment. I had just returned from taking my human for a walk around the block, enjoying the fresh air and watching the dawn break gracefully in the eastern sky. Perhaps it was the slightly warmer air, maybe the faint scent of spring, I'll never know, but my usually finely honed secret agent powers were lulled into an uncharacteristic relaxed attitude - which would cost me dearly.
When we arrived back at HQ, I went out to do my daily patrol of the perimeter, when I suddenly spotted a strange cat in the driveway. I am, of course, familiar with all the cats and dogs in the neighbourhood, so when I failed to recognize this one, I went to investigate and have a look at its credentials.
That's when things went horribly wrong. At the very last second, before everything turned to slow motion and I blacked out... I saw that the cat had a white stripe down it's back, and that is was slowly turning it's back end to me. I saw the moist droplets in the clear morning air, and I felt them hit my fur like tiny needles burning my skin as they landed.I tried to stop. I tried to duck, roll and run for cover, but it was too little, too late. The full shot hit me squarely in the face. I had been skunked!
The horror! The horror!
That most wicked agent of C.O.N.T.R.O.L. Agent Skunk, had out foxed me - or out skunked - me.
The next few hours are a blur of yelling, of being carried, of people cursing, water running... I remember trying to rub the stink off on all the furniture in my humans' house, but to no avail. I was washed, perfumed, dried, perfumed again, washed again until I collapsed exhausted on my bed and fell into a deep and restless slumber filled with nightmare visions of giant skunks pointing at me and laughing through green clouds of stink.
It is now days later - I'm fine, and able to carry on my regular duties again, but my humans... well, it will take me weeks to air them out enough for them to stop smelling - and the furniture - well, you'd think they would clean the place up a little better once in a while.
But the next time I meet Agent Skunk, I will be ready with my can of Skunk Away in my backpack. He will not catch me by surprise again.
Yours,
M3

Report to The agency: M3 picks up.

Report to The agency: M3 picks up.

I’m sorry I have not sent in a report in a while. I’ve been having a very difficult time of trying to decipher messages from The Agency because I have been getting what I thought were conflicting messages – some new, some old, some related to my assignment, and some apparently completely unrelated to anything.

Today I finally figured out what it was. As you know, messages are sent to me in a variety of ways. Some come from The Guardian, others – and the most regular ones – are the ones that I pick up from the ground when I take my humans for a walk. Some of the messages are hidden under bushes, others near rocks, trees or by mailboxes or fire hydrants. In order for me to understand what my assignment for the week is, it’s terribly important that I pick the messages up, take them home, and then sort them into the right order.

Unfortunately, the humans – not mine, of course, but others – have a strange and annoying habit of leaving bits of paper and coffee cups and other trash all over the place. Since many of these smell a lot like the messages I get from The Agency, I pick up as many as I can and bring them home to sort them out, and that’s where the confusion comes! Instead of getting something like “Be sure to check if The Guarding is watching the children at the school crossing.” I get “Horton’s Snickers Maltesers at Domino’s Pizza in a Starbucks cup.” What am I to make of that?

Please help. We need to get the message out to the humans to stop littering – it makes the work of secret beagle agents very difficult!

As always, I remain,

M3