Before the attack: It wasn’t exactly harmony, but there was an interconnectedness to the sights and sounds around me.
There was rhythmic ambient noise. When I listened closely, I could isolate each component: Chirping, buzzing, fluttering… probably more. Each sound occurred at its own cadence, but their cumulative effect was a low, ubiquitous hum.
Green beneath my feet. Looking down, I could make out each blade of grass in intricate detail. Looking forward, the infinite blades became a single sheet of green, their expanse only rivaled by the blue sky above. Green and blue. From a distance, it was a picture that could be painted in two strokes.
Two dogs came into view. Both yawned and stretched their bodies unhurriedly. Doubtless they had just awoken from a nap, and their unbothered demeanor suggested that despite their size, they were predators here.
I figured that I ought to spend some time observing these dogs. There was a lazy confidence to their ambling. One was larger than the other, but neither was in charge – they travelled together without an obvious leader or follower.
Without warning, the larger of the two dogs abruptly changed direction. In an athletic display of acceleration, it abandoned its casual trot for a full sprint. The sudden change in speed and heading indicated that it had seen, smelled, or heard something of interest in the grass nearby. There was no question that the larger dog was on the hunt, and both myself and the smaller dog were watching with keen interest.
After a long sprint across my field of view, the larger dog pounced at something. Just as the dog jumped, its target became visible – a red songbird, now shooting vertically upward from the grass like a rocket, narrowly escaping the dog’s outstretched paws. The bird somersaulted upward, caught its balance mid-air, and glided away.
What a marvel of reflexes from this bird! It had shot itself into the sky so suddenly and so instinctually that it had seemed almost visibly surprised to be airborne. The larger dog watched on wistfully as its nimble red prey disappeared into the horizon.
Prey… Was that bird really prey? There was a strange playfulness to the exchange, I reflected. The bird was tiny – it would have barely been an appetizer for a hungry dog. If it had caught the bird, the meal wouldn’t have been worth the energy spent earning it. So why bother?
The sun was setting now, noises and colors around me dimming. The dogs – laying peacefully at the base of a bush – were neither asleep nor awake. It was a dusk like any other. An unwinding of the day, an inhalation, a brief moment to consider and appreciate everything that had transpired between the previous night and the imminent one. It was the kind of dusk that myself, and the dogs, and the birds, and the world around us had let wash over us countless times. I could never have known the attack was imminent.
The attacker:
A skunk. A skunk! I didn’t even see it, but obviously I smelled it, and suddenly both the dogs were yelping and sprinting wildly in all directions, zipping around the backyard, and I was out of my chair and sprinting wildly in all directions myself as I tried to corral the dogs without getting near the skunk myself. And I shouted and shouted, at a decibel not fit for the suburbia of my surroundings, for my parents to emerge from depths of the house, to help me wrangle the delirious, sprinting, snarling, skunk-sprayed pet dogs, shouting even louder now, the peace of the neighbors the least of my issues.
My parents threw open the back door and now there were three of us chasing two dogs, the neighbors and the passersby looking on, and we caught them, we cornered them with our advantage in numbers, though they were frantic, broken, continuing the running motions of their legs even when lifted above ground, infected by a disarming smell, disillusioned, confused about their world, and with a truly crazed look in their eyes. And actually it was a crazed look in three out of their four eyes, because Maple, the larger of the two dogs, the bird-chaser, had been sprayed directly in an eye by the attacker and couldn’t open it.
We were all on the back porch now, stunned by the witchcraft of the skunk, concerned primarily with the eye of our prized puppy, and secondarily with the wicked and contagious smell in the air, emanating from the dogs and being ingested through mouth and nostrils and ears and pores by us all. And the dogs had stopped their yelping, because they knew instinctually that the situation was out of their hands now, their paws, it was beyond them, and they were not the wild animals they thought they were, they were highly domesticated pets with collars and nicknames and stuffed toys and food in their bowls every morning and every night.
We doused them with water, we washed Maple’s eye out, we cleaned them thoroughly with concoctions of vinegar and baking soda and dish soap, and whatever else the internet said to do, we did what the internet told us, and that gave us some comfort. And the dogs, shivering, humbled, were deemed clean enough to be brought indoors for further spraying and rinsing in the bath. And we took their collars off to clean all their fur, and they looked so strange without their collars, they were such animals. And we were such humans, cleaning our pets against the porcelain of our bathroom with the vigor of a family who cared deeply about their pets and also, ultimately, did not want their living room to smell bad.
I slept in the next morning. Curtains closed, eye mask, ear plugs. I was awoken by a blaring alarm hours after the sun had risen.
I watched the morning news. I watched the Weather Channel, which owns the weather, and is a subsidiary of The Weather Company, which is owned by a private equity firm, which acquired it from IBM.
The dogs followed me downstairs. They were okay now, dry and rested, with all eyes functioning as intended. There was coffee being brewed.
The dogs sat by the back door, politely waiting to be let out into the backyard, for a morning run, as is tradition. I had no choice but to open the door for them.