While Molly and I were driving through Richmond heading for Moon, Virginia (I love the name), I was thinking about things that Molly would be experiencing for the first time.
Little did I know.
Molly was a city dog. She lived on the fourth floor of a downtown cooperative. She had to ride the freight elevator to visit the sand pile, or to play with her canine friends in the doggie park a couple of blocks away.
Inner city living for dogs was a different life style.
As examples, Molly had experienced the flashing lights and sirens that accompany a presidential motorcade, and the thunderous boom-booms of the Fourth of July fireworks, but she had never been close to a horse.
Arrgh! A horse! She saw her first one at Moon. And it scared the bejeebers out of her.
I don’t remember if the horse was roaming free, but it might have been. Other animals did, especially dogs. Water closed off three sides of the community, and everybody’s pets routinely visited everybody else on the tiny peninsula.
So seeing the horse grazing on some grassy plot, whether tethered or not, wasn’t unexpected. But Molly froze. She stared straight at it. Then her fear turned into yells. Slowly at first, then growing in intensity, her raspy, throaty bark grew louder and louder, as she all the while hid behind my pant legs.
The horse continued to graze, undaunted as far as I could tell.
Before the weekend was over, Molly would have yet another first, another adventure -- equally terrifying, if that was possible.
Back home, outside of our neighborhood doggie park, Molly had not known what it was like to roam without a leash. In Moon, mostly because she hung close to her well-trained buddies, Jesse and Lucy, she was awarded more and more freedom. Until, on Sunday, I think, her unquenchable curiosity induced her to explore on her own.
She set out to find some new adventure. And when she did, Molly was forever lucky they were in a cage.
After we discovered Molly missing, we were sure she had headed back to see Mr. Dobbin. Not this time. She had found something even more mesmerizing than a horse.
We searched up and down Fitchetts Wharf Road. Nothing. Then my friends, Bob and Rosemary, and I just stood quietly, to listen for some sound, some whimper, some raspy bark to lead us in Molly’s direction.
For awhile, nothing.
Then abruptly, the barking began. Loud, and desperate. She sounded as if she were in a battle for her life.
The barking came from the direction of the Wharf, itself. I tore across several neighbors’ yards, four maybe, expecting to find Molly struggling in the water.
Instead, she was in a neighbor’s back yard, face-to-face with several of the orneriest looking birds I had ever seen, or heard. Their squawks sounded as desperate as Molly’s barks.
I, myself, was frightened and I could only image what both Molly and the birds were going through. I expected the birds to rip their cage apart. Their squawks reminded me of a happenstance experience on Barracks Road, just outside Charlottesville, while I was in school, when I came across a grotesque cock fight, an experience I loathe thinking about to this day.
In my haste to reach Molly I had forgotten her leash. As I pulled her away by her collar, I remembered thinking, “Molly, girl, you can’t possibly know what you got yourself into.”
My friends said Molly’s newly found combatants were the neighbor’s prized birds. It was only my fearful imagination, surely, that retrieved any previous ugly encounter.
Riding back to Washington, I imagined Molly relating the weekend’s adventures to her buddies in the 26th Street doggie park. I wondered if she would embellish her tale – a monstrous horse, fifty feet tall, and dragon-size birds, at least a hundred if there were a dozen.
