The trail cam project outside my backyard (in a common area) grew to be a bit more than my friend, Ricky, and I had anticipated. We collected short videos of coyotes, javelina, skunks, ground squirrels, ravens, a bobcat, and even a flood of water after a hard rain.
But, nothing compared to the video we missed.
When we first put the trail cam outside, we noted that there was a big soaking wet unsightly pillow in the camera frame. It had been dragged into the area by one of the floods that had come through the area. Ricky tried to pick it up (as he did anytime he saw trash about), but it was so heavy we decided to leave it to dry out. The next morning we were thrilled to see lots of coyote tracks everywhere. The pillow had been moved and torn up a bit, and we were certain we caught a wonderful video of playful coyotes throwing the pillow around.
Alas, we forgot to turn the camera on.
After reading up a bit about coyotes and their playfulness, we couldn’t help but buy the little Superman dog toy that we saw at the pet food store as an offering in hopes that we might catch some future frolicking coyote action. We mounted Superman to a stick, mindful that we didn’t want it to become more trash in the environment, but perhaps provide just enough interest to lure the coyotes into action.
Unfortunately, the coyotes seemed to have moved deep into the desert for the season. But, what we caught instead had us laughing. A woman and her off leash dog came into the frame. The dog sniffed Superman and jumped back when it seemed to move a bit. Looking back at his mom with an impish grin, the dog grabbed Superman off the stick, shaking it mercilessly, and joyfully ran away out of the frame.
In the next video (triggered by the dog’s movement as he ran furiously with Superman still clenched in his jaw), his mom managed, with incredible patience and finesse, to get Superman away from him by simply picking up a very long stick and making a move as if she was going to play fetch with him. She raised the enticing stick and the dog promptly dropped Superman and grabbed it and gallumped his way out of the frame. The woman calmly picked up Superman, and very sweetly reattached him to the stick, gently brushing off the dirt that had accumulated on him.
I smiled as I realized that the stick that she had used as an offering for her dog was one that my granddaughter had carried on our walk a month prior. My granddaughter had used it to draw a funny face in the dirt, and then unceremoniously threw it on the ground as we went back into the house. It landed in just the right place for the woman to use it for her dog.
The interconnectedness of life was made brilliantly clear as I watched that fetching moment on the video. We never know how our actions today might affect someone a month, years, or centuries from now.
God moves in mysterious ways. Even through a little girl, a woman and her dog.
