Critters

Today, boys and girls, I went to the zoo.

Not literally, but I had enough interaction with a variety of animals that it seemed that way. It started this morning at our campground in Connersville. I left the RV to take out the garbage, and was startled to see a pair of rabbits waiting expectantly at the bottom of the steps. In my experience, rabbits are inclined to run at the first whiff of humanity, but not these two. I went back up the steps and into the RV and took a tray of vegetables that had outlived their usefulness from the refrigerator. When I went back outside, the rabbits were still there, so I took a carrot from the tray and held it out. One of the rabbits came up and took it right out of my hand, which appeared to embolden the other one, and he came up and greedily ripped some cauliflower from my grasp. No sooner had I dumped the entire tray on the ground than at least a half a dozen more rabbits appeared from nowhere to join the feast, and none of them were fazed as I stood right in the middle of the group while they enjoyed breakfast.

The guy who runs the place told me that several years ago one of his campers bought his young daughter a pair of rabbits for Easter, and when the girls inevitably tired of the rabbits, the guy brought them back to the campground and let them loose. They apparently mated with the wild rabbits in the campground, and this was the result. The campground owner also said that he had a tame chicken around, and claimed that said chicken laid an egg a day, lived with this guy’s mother, and sat outside the campground office during the day and cavorted with any children that came by. I would have liked to have seen that, but had to hit the road and left not sure whether or not to believe him.

That was my pleasant experience with animals. A few hours later, I persevered through an adventure that only reinforced my antipathy towards dogs. I was about three hours into the morning leg of my trip, maybe a mile north of Laurel, when I heard the frantic barking of multiple dogs. I could see a yard two or three football fields up the road and could make out the vague shapes of two dogs. Now, I don’t like dogs. Never have, ever since we had a beagle when I was a kid. To my way of thinking, dogs make too much noise, smell bad, demand too much affection, and crap on the ground. I’d take an elephant for a pet before I’d take a dog; the mess that needs to be cleaned up might be bigger, but at least an elephant wouldn’t jump all over me, and I’d have something to ride.

Anyway, as I got closer the barking got louder and more menacing. I wasn’t worried, though, because even though they weren’t fenced in they appeared to be satisfied to stay in their yard and I figured they must be confined by one of those electric fences.

Wrong.

As soon as I drew even with them, they both came running across the road directly at me. The first one I pegged as loud but harmless, but the second one had his fangs bared, with saliva flying out of his mouth, and – at least to my eyes – looked like a cross between a pit bull and the shark from Jaws. Armed with nothing buy an empty Gatorade bottle (Cherry flavored G2 for those keeping score) I danced around to keep the predators at bay. I briefly considered trying to lure them across the road and into oncoming traffic, but quickly concluded that such a tactic was at least as likely to get me killed as it was to result in their demise.  And to compound my dilemma, out of nowhere a third beast came racing into the mix. While not as menacing as his pit bull/Jaws colleague, he looked more than capable of ripping my head off just for the enjoyment it might provide him.

What to do? No weapon available (except for the G2 bottle, which I figured had very limited capabilities), three against one, and out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help and nowhere to hide. I think I mentioned a few days ago that I was a catcher in high school, and that while I couldn’t hit a beach ball with a boat oar, I did have a magnificent arm. My arm may not be what it was in the halcyon days of my youth, and it may not be big league caliber, but it was enough today. I backed up to the edge of the road, keeping my cool as these deranged mutant beasts panted and snarled mere feet away, and calmly filled the bottle with dirt and gravel. Once it had enough heft, I put the cap back on and heaved it as far as I could back up the road. These dogs may have been fierce, but they weren’t too bright, and they immediately gave chase. I, being a full blooded coward with pretty good speed, set sail in the opposite direction. By the time the dogs realized the bottle was a decoy and stopped fighting over it, I was far enough away that they were no longer interested, though they did muster enough energy to give half hearted chase for a bit before retreating to base to await their next opportunity to terrorize an unsuspecting citizen. I wonder if the local law enforcement types will track me down and cite me for littering.

The final: Mark 1, Stupid Worthless Dogs 0.

Friday’s Journey: Metamora to Batesville

Mileage: 14.2 (or 176.4 pre-steroid Barry Bonds home runs)

On the iPod: The Essential Teddy Pendergrass CD, The O’Reilly Factor, The Rachel Maddow Show

P.S.: The Internet is very shaky out here, so because of technical issues I was only able to post two photos to my Facebook page (Mark Joseph Boyle). Hoping for better results tomorrow.