16 September 2002 - ground-eating lope

He stretched into an easy, ground-eating lope, not because dirt is yummy (though, under other circumstances, he had found it as delicious as any bad novel), but because, due to a quirk of his upbringing, he, unlike those others who had been sternly warned to avoid cliches like the plague, had never heard of the plague—and this muddiness, he reasoned, was the best way to come clean.