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Ramona applies the tourniquet
Wednesday, June 6 2012
Some years ago, Clarence the cat used to occasionally join me on walks in the forest. But for some reason at some point he stopped. He's a smart cat, and I assumed he must have had a frightening experience back there somewhere among the coyotes, fishers, and bobcats. But today he decided to join me, Ramona, and Eleanor. We went down the farm road and then headed up the Chamomile Headwaters trail, Clarence being every bit as annoying as he used to be. He likes to dive at each of my ankles with every step I take, hoping to rub the top of his head on them. And then if I outpace him (which I must do to get anywhere), he'll yowl and complain before dashing across the distance as fast as he can run, often ending with a flying leap onto the side of a tree about four feet above the ground. At some point the dogs managed to dig up a nest of half-grown Deer Mice babies, which were staggering around and vulnerable. To keep them from experiencing an unpleasant death, I put them in the hollow of a base of a tree and a leaned up a large flat rock. They'll probably die in there, but there's always a chance that their mother will come back and find them there. When making small interventions on behalf of wild animals, the best one can hope for is plausible survival.
Later, back in my laboratory, I heard Ramona and Eleanor engaging in their usual style of play out in the teevee room. But then suddenly (as sometimes happens), the play took a turn for the violent. I ran out to break it up and found a troubling scenario. Ramona had grabbed Eleanor's collar in her mouth (as she often does) and then somehow spun around the lengthwise axis of her body so that the collar was now twisted around her lower jaw behind her canine teeth. The only way to free her would be to somehow spin her body back around the other way. But that looked to be impossible. Meanwhile the tightened collar was acting like a tourniquet around Eleanor's neck, and her breathing was becoming labored, though for some reason she was not panicking. I ran off to fetch a knife so I could cut the collar off, but by the time I returned Ramona had somehow freed herself. I took Eleanor's collar off; what if this had happened and I hadn't been around?
This afternoon I drove into Kingston to pick Gretchen up from the Trailways station. Before going there, I first went to Herzog's to look for hardware suitable for hanging a casement window in a homemade casement. Unfortunately, they didn't have what I needed, so I ended up buying hinges and latches instead (as well as box of expensive self-drilling stainless steel screws).
As it had for the past few days, the sun made a few valiant attempts to emerge from behind the clouds, but then soon retreated.
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