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achieving predator status
Tuesday, December 4 2001
This morning in the perpetually-gloomy, thoroughly-unvegetated, postage-stamp-sized backyard, somehow Sally found something disgusting to roll in. When I let her back in from the yard, she tiptoed past me with a cat-who-ate-the-canary look on her face, something I detected even from the corner of my eye whilst surfing the web. I thought nothing much of it until I caught a whiff of the aromatic wake she had left. It was some sort of horrible worst-possible-state-of-decaying-animal smell. I knew, for my own sake, I had to act fast. I picked her up off her favorite chair and put her in the bathtub, scrubbing and scrubbing until the water was no longer visibly discolored. Sally knew she'd done wrong, irresistible though her act had been, and she just stood there passively throughout the entire process.
Later, when we went to the Vale of Cashmere, the number of quarters lying visibly upon the muck in the fountain pond reached four and the hawk I'd seen on the statue yesterday was soaring low over the canopy, possibly hunting squirrels and chasing them down from the trees. There were so many on the ground that Sally had to make decisions about which ones to chase and which to ignore. Some of the squirrels were more daring than others, cursing at her and lingering on the ground until the last millisecond, not wishing to dignify her predator status with escape. There used to be some squirrels who acted this way with my parents' dog Fred back on the farm, but he caught a number of them and now the only squirrels left fully recognize his predator status.
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