6:50 a.m. Maria: “Jon, you’ve had a tough week, you haven’t been sleeping so well,  you should sleep late this morning. I’ll shower first and then go take care of the animals.”

Jon: “No, that’s sweet of you, I’ll get up in five minutes. I just want to shake myself awake.”

7:00 a.m. I was fading in and out.

I suddenly heard many steps thundering up the staircase. It sounded like a herd of buffalo,  only buffalo don’t bark.

In a few seconds, the door crashed open and the wild pack of  vicious dogs came charging into the bedroom, leaps up onto my bed, and jumps all over me, barking, licking my face, burrowing under the covers.

It is chaos. I sputter, shout and curse, and then Maria comes into the room. “Oh, that’s so cute. They love you and wanted to check on you.”

Fate and Bud are light and graceful, when Zinnia comes to greet you, it’s like a 150 lb. sandbag landing on your stomach. You can see stars.

One comes at me on one side, the other takes the other side, the big dog charges right up the middle. I felt like a deer trapped in the woods by a pack of coyotes.

I am suspicious of Maria’s account, especially when I see the evil gleam in Maria’s eye. She has been known to sic the dogs on me when I am sleeping while she is up and doing chores.

This is payback.

Then, just as suddenly, she calls them off, yelling “breakfast!” and all four of them vanish down the stairs and out into the living room.

Maria has been successful in portraying herself as a sweet and shy artist, but really, what kind of woman urges her traumatized husband to stay in bed a bit, and then when he does, unleashes a pack of crazy, vicious dogs on him while he sleeps?

The same kind who pushes an older man out of the way as she rushes to get into the warm shower first on cold winter days while the old man shivers in the cold.

Oh, she says when the dogs come thundering in, I thought you would love having them wake you up, but her chuckling and demonic look tell another story. She was gleeful.

I reached for the camera to capture the attack in bed, but it fell on the floor. I did have the presence of mind to make the wild dogs stay while I ran down the stairs and turned around to get their photo, to capture the evidence.

These were not dogs rushing to say hello and shower me with kisses. I could swear I heard a voice down below yelling “get him up,” right before the pack came rushing up the stairs.

Don’t be fooled by these cute faces. This bedroom assault was a scene out of Jack London’s, The Call Of The Wild, Zinnia was transformed:

“And not only (did) she learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from (her). In vague ways, (she) remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs  ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.”