Starfish Hunter...
You’ve met Ro-Dog before, I think. He’s a wonderfully athletic male orange tabby of about one year who thinks he is a dog, hence the name. Still, he has the hunting gene common to most felines. I thought it was bad when he brought in mice of all sizes. I was even more sympathetic and sorrowful when he managed to catch a small bird one day. He seems to have learned to be so sneaky that the bell doesn’t even give the birds enough warning. Perhaps we’ll have to equip him with a motion-sensor with some sort of warning device, though I think that would make his late night in-house prowlings pretty obnoxious for the paying tenants. But I draw the line at snakes. At least we thought it was a snake.
One morning Hollie and I awoke about the same time. We both usually sit up and look over our feet to see what the weather and the bay are looking like. It is a luxury we enjoy and appreciate every morning. It came at a price. Where most folks have a formal living room, we have a king-size bed. Since we don’t do much in the way of formal living, we thought the great room was adequate, and decided not to give up a great view to an always-empty room. But I digress.
Hollie has much better vision than I do. She issued a sound of some sort of wonder, tinged with a certain amount of disgust. “Ro’Dog has brought in a SNAKE, and it’s draped over the footrail on my desk!” Now, being the modern, progressive man that I am, I reminded her of an applicable bit of logic: “Well, he’s YOUR cat”. Hollie is nothing if not fair, and so she crept out of bed and sneaked (snuck?) up on this “snake”. “EEUUUW!” she said, or something quite near that. “It’s not a snake, it’s a freakin’ STARFISH!” Well, this was enough to get me out from under the covers, where I had gone just to make sure my hair stayed warm.
“A WHAT?” I asked, wondering if the covers had affected my hearing. Hollie repeated herself, and began wondering aloud and then asking if I could tell if it was dead or alive. This is not a simple question with a starfish. A recent death is difficult to detect. It made no attempt to sprint for the door. The one arm clinging or dangling - hard to say - over the foot rail argued for life. I bravely picked the starfish up – something which most decidedly would NOT have happened in the case of a snake. It was difficult to tell, but I thought the thing might be dead. I declined CPR. I figured that either way, the bay was the best place for this guy. He could assume his position in the food chain in either condition.
I walked down to the edge of the water and frisbee’d our unwanted guest 15 or 20 feet out into a receding tide. Over breakfast, Hollie and I marvelled at the effort required for a 7 pound tabby to haul his 1-2 pound treasure home. Assuming he found it on the beach, and that it didn’t slither in by itself, that means that Ro-Dog had to haul this starfish up a flight of 8 very steep stairs from the beach, across approximately 150 feet of yard, and another 40 feet of gravel driveway to the garage. Then he had to take it though a dog-door into the garage, and through another one into the laundry room. After that, there was a raised baby gate, designed to stop dogs but not cats, to limbo under and about 40 feet of ceramic tile hallway and finally across the bedroom carpet to the desk. It pretty much boggles the mind. Not to mention that the starfish looked intact and unbloodied after all this. I must admit that I don’t know if starfish even HAVE blood that we would recognize, but it is amazing all the same. Ro-Dog’s incredible journey.
The next day I took the dogs, including Ro-Dog, for a walk down the beach. About one hundred yards east of our stairs I came upon a dead starfish, caught way above the tide line. It is hard to tell one of these things from another, but after our intimate association of the previous morning I am pretty sure this is “Ro-Dog’s” starfish. Ro-Dog feigns indifference and declines to identify. So once again I determine that the best thing to do is to send this starfish swimming. Repeating the frisbee tactic of the day before I wonder just briefly if the shock of hitting the water from 5 feet up in the air might have been responsible for the current condition of this fellow (or gal) but I can’t blame myself for this. These things happen.
We were over one hundred yards from the stairs. The next low tide was not until 2AM. These things seemed unimportant until the next morning at 730AM when I got up to get my robe on and my toe hit something cold and squishy. I know you don’t believe me, and as sad as that is, it really doesn’t change the truth. Ro-Dog’s starfish was back in my room. Not under the desk this time, but right in front of my dresser. Same color, same markings, same absence of activity or personality.
I expected to hear Rod Serling at any moment: “Jim Carroll thought the little place on Rocky Bay that he shared with his partner and his dogs was on a body of water known as Case Inlet. What he didn’t realize until just this morning was that the gently lapping waves on his beach marked the edge of a strange sea known as the Twilight Zone.” Cue the music.