The Katy Prairie is a maize of sloughs, bayous, creeks and marshland
prairie that eventually drains into Galveston Bay, mainly through the
Buffalo Bayou watershed. Buffalo Bayou runs right through downtown
Houston.

Only the vast Addicks and Barker reservoirs, about 20 miles west of
downtown Houston, keep Houston from being washed into the bay after a
good rain out here on the prairie. Unfortunately, the prairie west of
the dams is rapidly becoming a maize of subdivisions, bisected and
dissected by channelized, civilized, concrete-ized, watercourses and
ditches - all of which feed into the reservoirs.

One of these subdivisions called Cinco Ranch. It's about 10 sections of
high dollar homes, just west of the Barker Reservoir, where gated
communities are the order of the day, armed guards keep the riff-raff on
the other side of the fence, and Good People live.

The folks who bought into the good life at Cinco Ranch have an ongoing
problem with their pets disappearing. They turn their yap dogs loose to
dump on somebody else's piece of suburbia and quite often the mutts stay
gone. The phenomenon has been written up in the weekly wipe, cussed and
discussed at PTO meetings, and, in general, been a hot topic of conversation
with everybody from vivisectionsists to communists suspected.

What'n hell is happening to the goddam dogs?

Some suburbanite finally figured out what the regulars down at the coffee shop
had known all along. There's a hell of an alligator population in the reservoirs,
they're hungry, there's a natural avenue from their house to dogburgers on the
hoof, and they can't be culled without an act of the legislature.

Maybe there is a god.