What follows is a guest post………………………..

Friday morning our Newfoundland/Golden Retriever mix, Astrid, roused me from sleep nearly an hour earlier than I’d hoped to get up the day after Thanksgiving. She wanted to be let out, of course. So I growled to myself, stumbled downstairs into the dawn, opened the sliding door to the patio; and she slipped out to the back yard.

The blasted dog didn’t even pretend, by trotting over to the lawn, that she’d awakened me for urgent excretory relief. She merely stood on the wide step just outside the north-facing door, first daintily sniffing the west breeze from that side of the step, then turning to face east and sniff some more. Aaah!

That’s when the surreality began.

As grumpy I sat inside staring out the door, a westbound gray squirrel appeared from the right (east) side of my field of vision and bounced unconcernedly across the patio, without seeming to notice Astrid standing stock-still on the step maybe fifteen feet south of him. I cringed, bracing for inevitable carnage — or at least for a terrifying narrow escape if the oblivious rodent could levitate into the overhanging maple it was approaching before the alert dog snagged it. Gentle Astrid does very much fancy herself a squirrel hunter. She has caught one on two separate occasions during her three years with us, which would have been handy if I had been Daniel Boone hunting up supper. Astrid passionately chases the agile beasties at every opportunity, barking curses up tree trunks (“Come down and fight like a dog, you coward!”) when they escape aloft.

But while this varmint frolicked practically under her nose … nothing! The squirrel circled the base of the maple, rummaged a bit in the dry leaves underneath it, then continued west down two terraces, across a short length of lawn, and through the fence on that side. Astrid, still just outside the door, watched its travel with grave interest but never moved a muscle.

I was trying groggily to process the impossible sequence when more movement from the east caught my eye. Another westbound squirrel cheerily hopped along the same route, varied only by scurrying maybe five feet up the maple and then down before also bounding over the terraces and through the fence. Astrid remained a statue.

And then, with my dropped jaw still on the floor, I swear a THIRD squirrel bounced into view just as the first two had — west, up, down, around, over, and through — boing Boing BOING! Once more, Astrid contemplated them thoughtfully but motionlessly.

After Squirrel #3, though, the dog seemed to realize the post-Thanksgiving Day parade was over. She calmly stepped onto the patio and meticulously sniffed the maple tree and its fallen leaves that the wildlife had trodden. She even peered off in the direction the critters had departed, without attempting to follow their trail. Then Astrid all but shrugged and declared the show over. “Let me in and feed me breakfast, please!”

The whole sequence felt like a hallucination. If indeed it was, did I barge into Astrid’s, or did she into mine?

Nancy
28 November 2018