Today while walking by the coast I stopped to watch a three legged dog play in the sea. Its owner was throwing a frisbee far out into the water for the dog to fetch and bring back. I was amazed at how well the dog swam and ran with his missing leg…and peed on two legs too without falling over sideways.
What really amazed me though was that suddenly a seal popped its head up infront of the floating frisbee. The dog swam out to it and they stared, nose to nose, at each other for some time before the dog swam back to the shore to its owner. When the frisbee was thrown out into the water again the same thing happened again and again until the seal eventually swam away.
It was beautiful to watch, it felt strangely special… a magical moment between two animals that probably don’t come across each other very often in the water.
Not quite as exotic, but when I lived in Dublin, one day my cat had been outside, and I hadn’t seen her for a couple of hours and was getting worried, so I went upstairs to see if I could see where she’d got to. I looked around and eventually spotted her in a small field of wasteground out the back of my garden, sitting at the feet of a big horse. The horse was bending its head down to the ground to sniff her, and she was looking up, nose to nose, sniffing back, completely unafraid. It was a gorgeous and unusual sight, backlit by the setting sun, and is a memory that endures like a photograph.
I went to New Zealand about seven or eight years ago, and one of the weirdest things I saw was a field full of penguins and sheep. The penguins start coming in from the sea around dusk and going hop-hop-hop up the beach, and pretty soon they were in the grass with the sheep, who were totally nonchalant about it.
Several winters back here in Connecticut, it was a particularly cold night, lightly snowing… I parked my car out front and began to walk in when I saw an enormous dog come trotting down the road on my side. He was a Husky or Malamute, he was big, and when he saw me he stopped abruptly. Right then, out from under him, came a small, similar colored cat. It curled around his chest and back under his body… He then turned around and trotted back the way he came, cat underneath and everything.
It was as if they were sneaking away to make-out or something…it was cool.
The other evening I found my cat and a hedgehog standing right next to each other on our front driveway. The cat wasn’t bothering the hedgehog which hadn’t even curled up into a ball. They both looked very relaxed about the whole matter.
