This offbeat tale appeared on CNN today:

Call her Lazarus — and then some. The ring-neck duck has been shot by a hunter, rescued from two days in refrigerator by his wife and — in its latest brush with death — resuscitated on a veterinarian's operating table.The one-pound female duck stopped breathing Saturday during an operation to repair gunshot damage to her wing, said Noni Beck of Goose Creek Wildlife Sanctuary. Veterinarian David Hale performed CPR and managed to get the fractured fowl breathing again after several tense moments."I started crying, 'She's alive!'" Beck said.

Perky grabbed national attention last week after a hunter's wife opened her refrigerator door and the supposedly dead duck lifted its head and looked at her. The duck had been in the fridge for two days since it was shot and mistaken for dead on Jan. 15. Perky, who now has a pin in her wing, will probably not undergo any more surgery because of a sensitivity to anesthesia, Hale said. The duck is recovering from its latest ordeal.

While this saga is interesting enough in itself, the animal corpse lying in state in the refrigerator made me think of a story. The creature involved in the story was named Pookie, not Perky.

This was in San Francisco, that golden mecca that prides itself on the unique and sometimes surreal attributes of its residents. One girl, Debbie, worked in accounting and was a withdrawn and sullen personality. She befriended several of us as our work groups shared several facilities including a spartan ladies room and a staff lunchroom. Debbie was not a master of easy banter and was notorious for making outrageous and wholly inappropriate statements at the wrong time and to the wrong people.

One day when we were huddled around a lunch table, Debbie came in dragging what appeared to be a large gunny sack. She announced grandly that since we had deigned to extend to her an olive branch of friendship (since so few had, apparently), she wanted to share some of herself with us. The gathered group at the table exchanged nervous glances. She loosened the cord of the gunny sack and with some effort, withdrew what can only be described as a giant fur coaster. It smelled to high heaven.

"What the hell is that?" someone blurted out.

"It's a beaver pelt. I dried and cured it," Debbie replied easily.

As the details unfolded, we learned that Debbie collected roadkill. She would spend her weekends driving along country roads with the intent to seek out carcasses of critters unfortunate enough to come into contact with a speeding vehicle. Her refrigerator at home functioned as a mini animal morgue and she was developing an apparent talent for taxidermy.

Seeing our reactions (which actually was revulsion but which she misinterpreted as fascination), she began to bring in various specimens to share with us at lunch. I have to say, she had something of a talent for creating lifelike poses of these stuffed creatures which she mounted on little pedestals with sticks up their backsides to keep them upright. And there was that time that someone read on the news that a mountain lion had been killed on the road up near Santa Cruz and Debbie disappeared for two days in a quest to capture this elusive prize. She returned to work, dejected at his failure to do so (I like to imagine her carrying a stuffed mountain lion slung over her shoulder on the streetcar to work, had she in fact found the mountain lion).

Alas, the show and tell of Debbie's animal collection came to a crashing halt; her downfall was Pookie. Pookie was a squirrel she had found on the road on one of her treks. She'd done an inspired job stuffing him, even attaining a rather lifelike flow of his glorious tale. She'd affixed his paws so they were clenched, as if he were going to leap into flight and grasp for the trunk of an oak tree. The only flaw with Pookie (for this is what she named him) was one of his eyes. She never got it just right, so she put a band aid over it. It made him like a little pirate. Of course we were treated to our introduction to Pookie at lunch. She had a habit of withdrawing her creations from a bag and planting it firmly in the middle of the table for our admiration as we were eating You can imagine it usually put us off our lunch. For all her skill in stuffing, she never used enough borax to keep it from smelling.

So on this day when we met Pookie, we finished lunch and Debbie returned Pookie to his brown bag and (unbeknown to any of us), put him in the lunchroom refrigerator. Soon after, the CFO of the company wandered to the refrigerator to collect his brown bag lunch, took the bag with Pookie and returned to his desk. Someone said he screamed like a little girl when he open the bag and saw the one eyed rodent staring up at him.

The company had to bring in a HazMat team to clean the refrigerators. And well, that was the last we saw of Debbie.