Shoulder Savages

May 31, 2013

Shoulder Savages

            A fight broke out in my neighborhood at three a.m. the other morning and woke me up.  Neighborhood is a little misleading, since the houses in my subdivision are separated by large, wooded lots, and the noisy altercation was a lot closer.  I was awakened by the thud of bodies hitting my roof! The vicious growls and high-pitched squeals of desperation indicated a raccoon brawl was taking place just above my bedroom.

            Ordinarily, I wouldn’t write about the fight, since it didn’t take place on my daily shoulder walk, but the next morning, as I walked through the narrowest, most heavily wooded section of my gravel road, I heard a distinct growl in the underbrush nearby.  Suddenly, I reconsidered whether the menacing growls I heard on the roof were really those of a dominating raccoon.  There have been cougar sightings in our county.  One of the big cats decimated a livestock herd last summer in a nearby town.  Could that have been what I heard in the undergrowth?

            I have to give my mom and dad credit.  When I told them my theory about the sound from the bushes, they managed to keep completely straight faces with almost no eye rolling at all.  They’ve listened to my wild imaginings for fifty-eight years and have learned how to respond.  Could the source of the sound have been something other than a wildcat running amok in High Ridge they asked, using the calm, deliberately neutral voice of skilled, mental healthcare workers dealing with an excitable patient?  I conceded that it was possible the sound might have been the deep-throated croak of a bull frog; although, I quickly pointed out that the two sounds are similar, so we couldn’t completely rule out the cougar possibility.

            It’s true that I haven’t run into too many wild critters on my daily walks, and few, if any, of those could truthfully be described as savage.  The largest animal I’ve encountered was a white-tailed buck standing in the middle of my little gravel road very early one morning last July.  If I understand how to count the prongs properly, he sported an eight point rack and considered me with something more like disdain than savagery. After giving me a bored glance, he strolled---it’s the only word for it---up the hillside into the woods.

             Other animals I’ve met on the road were considerably smaller than the deer.  Rounding a bend on my street last week, I was surprised to see a line of three tortoises, each separated by twenty or thirty feet, moving down the road.  I felt like I was bringing up the rear of a very slow moving parade.  None of them took note of me as I passed by.  Actually, most of the animals that cross my path on my walk pay little attention to me.  Rabbits and squirrels dash back and forth across the road as I march along, taking care of their business despite my presence.

            Not surprisingly, the animals I’ve had the most contact with on my daily stroll are dogs.  When I first started walking, I carried a large stick, but only through one section of my route where there were lots of dogs.  I stopped toting the stick when I realized that my neighbors are pretty responsible; for the most part, the dogs were all secured.....with a couple of exceptions.

            One morning last summer as I was returning home, a dark streak moving through the trees caught my eye.  I wasn’t sure what the movement was or even if I’d really seen something, but as I entered a straight section of the road, I could see two hundred feet in front of me, standing stock still, a large, black Rottweiler. I came to a halt, uncertain whether I should continue toward the dog, and it stared straight at me without moving. In my head, I began to hear the music from The Omen.  Remember that old movie from the ‘70’s, where every time the large Rottweiler appeared, accompanied by mysterious Latin chanting, some type of horrible mayhem occurred?  (This is the kind of melodramatic thinking that my parents have had to deal with for years.)  After a moment, the dog turned away and raced off up the road.

            My neighbor’s Rottweiler is a mild-mannered sweetie named Raven. I decided she had escaped somehow and was the dog I’d seen that morning.  When I commented to her owner that I’d seen the dog on the road, however, he maintained that she’d never left the yard……cue the music from Twilight Zone.

            My other canine encounter had a different outcome.  As I was moving through that section of the neighborhood with the strong dog presence, I saw a medium-sized, shepherd-type fellow racing toward me across a couple of unfenced backyards, yapping all the way.  I grabbed up a completely insubstantial tree branch and tried not to panic. Deciding that the best defense is a good offense, I turned to face the dog, pointed my stick at him like Moses condemning Pharaoh with his staff, and, using my best James Earl Jones voice, bellowed, “Nooooo!”  Instantaneously, the dog’s perky tail clamped down between his legs, his ears flattened, and he dropped to the ground.  From his belly-dragging posture, his whole demeanor whined, “Geez, lady! I was just trying to be friendly. Chill!”

            Okay, so maybe savages is a bit of an exaggeration,…..but I’ll keep looking out for that cougar.