I don't have any pictures for this walk to share.
Yesterday I hit my head just as I got to work. It happened to be just a perfect Wack! to trigger my post concussion syndrome. This lead to me not really leaving the house today as I rested so by this evening Dannie and I were a little stir crazy. Happily about 8:30 pm I felt well enough I thought we should go for a walk and test it out.
It turned out to be a wonderful walk!
The air is cold enough most of the humans were inside. The moon is reaching fullness and there will be an eclipse later tonight! As we started the walk you could hear some coyotes in the distance, probably up by the cemetery, howl to each other and the herd protection dogs warning them off. We made our way by moonlight.
Fairly quickly into the walk I noticed that Dannie was on pretty high alert, I slowed down to see what he was doing. I'll admit I had gotten distracted by my own thoughts and amusements on the pattern of the moonshadows that spilled across the road in our path made, so I hadn't been as responsive as was usual. Watching him I realized that it had been awhile since we had taken a moonlight walk, so everything was new again. We made our way slowly up the street letting him re-explore the familiar surroundings with all it's new smells and appearance.
Then he stopped dead in the road and stared into the dark of the fenced in forested field next to us. This was an alert that requires me to stop and assess our surroundings, because he was telling me someone was there. Someone he was unfriendly with. If Dannie could talk he may have said something like, "Mom, I'm not sure able this, but if you want me to kill it I will."
It took my eyes a moment to pick out the shape that had him concerned. And a longer moment to determine what I was seeing. There were two horses laying down near the corner of the fence, I believe my youngest would call it 'Loafing'. They both were watching us. Dannie was once startled by a horse when he was a very little puppy resulting in him developing the terrible habit of barking at any horse he saw as if it was a threat. I had slowly introduce him to horses that live near us, but it had not seemed successful in the past.
This time he had not barked. I thanked the moonlight for making everything look just strange enough that he may not have immediately recognised them and barked, as usual. I rewarded him with praise and then, not thinking anything of it, told the horses to have a good evening and started to move on.
Of course this particular horse has good manners, so upon being addressed he stood and approached the fence, in case I wished to engage in a longer conversation, which clearly must be the case, because Dannie had stopped walking again once the horse stood up. Not wanting to be rude, I did stop and continue to address the horse. Explaining to him how Dannie had been startled once and was unsure of horses in general and it wasn't anything particular against him. I also awarded Dannie a treat and many words of praise for not barking at the horse. After what appeared to be a long enough pause to converse and not appear rude we continued on our walk.
This lead us past a part where the woods come right up the the road on both sides. I always expect an ambush hear. It is where I saw a coyotes run across the road and also tracks that everyone says couldn't be a crocodile, while clearly being a crocodile's tracks. Tonight something larger than an armadillo was in the woods to the right. I thought it was being too loud to be a coyote, so making a werewolf, wild hog, or deer seemed likely. Dannie was more concerned that there were horses behind us and maybe turning our backs wasn't the greatest idea.
Whatever was to the right decided to shadow us instead of moving farther away from the road and that's when Dannie's head whipped around. It was down wind from us, so it had taken its moving through branches to get Dannie to stop worrying about the possible ninja horse attack and pay attention to other things. We kept moving down the road. Dannie had excitement in every fiber now. He only sniffed at a fist sized rock he probably would normally ask if he could take home. He did wonderful all the way to the corner where the herd protection dogs, already on high alert told us to take our moonlight stroll in another direction.
We were having a great walk. Before we reached the ambush site I noticed you could see the moonlight reflecting off an old car that was almost completely obscured by the the overgrowth that came right up to the fence... And then we heard something moving through the area, again. As it was on the opposite side of the road I thought maybe whatever had shadowed us before had crossed the road and was going to shadow us again or maybe the horses had moved down to see what we were doing. We continued on with me praising Dannie when he was doing the right things and Dannie not barking but stopping and following other commands when given.
Why it didn't bother me that I didn't know what the large creature was shadowing us was or what it's intentions were, I don't know. Cuz honestly, I was just really enjoying the night and everything about it. As we went I became aware that there was still the original one to the right of the road and now the one on the left, it was about then that I saw that both of the horses were on their feet, watching us walk down the road. Soooo... I guess it wasn't them following us.
Nope, I still don't know what they were. My flashlight decided it didn't work at the one point that I tried to bring more light to the area. I did decide I would like the low light vision eyesight of the various metahuman types and that I was going to go home and do some moonlight work.
So that was fun.
Dannie is chasing a mouse, so I have to stop the story.
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