Early this morning with the sun already up, I went on a quick solo hiking trip. Mainly to please my grand, expensive day hiking backpack I bought recently. It was looking all too disparagingly at me for not using it as much as I planned when I bought it a month ago.
At just after eight I crossed a bridge over a major highway here. Traffic was light. On my right, four lanes afar, I suddenly spotted movement. Two dark gray animals popped up. They looked like squirrels, but bigger, so I was pretty sure they were something else. Have never seen all-gray, and that dark, squirrels. And their heads looked different too, and they were slightly larger than I know most squirrels are. Maybe plattepoesies? (Platypuses.) Will have to ask around. (UPDATE: Google to the rescue, I found out a bit later they were two mongoose, or is the plural for that mongeese?)
As suddenly as they appeared, their heads both swiped right, then left, then right, checking for oncoming traffic. Clearly city animals, knowing the rules. One never knows when a bush pirate - my term for traffic cops - may pop up from behind another well-trimmed bush to hand out a ticket for breaking some red tape annoyance.
No traffic, so they both ran in unison across the four lanes, almost straight towards me. Shocked that I'm about to get myself some rabies, I stopped dead in my tracks. But that brave me will tell nobody, everyone is to know that I stopped only not to disturb them and see what they're up to.
Turns out, there was a kick-ass boxing rink two meters in front of me. I'd call it an imaginary rink, but not to those two alien carriers of long tails. Not sooner than they got to that, right in front of me, they tackled each other with an eye-stretching level of violence. They must've had a beef to pick with each other, and it must have been the size of an ox. I've never seen such a vicious fight - and that in such a deadly, assassin-style silence - right in front of me.
The two were about to draw blood in frozen moments in time. Death would follow seconds later. But then I stepped up and disturbed the laws of nature.
I simply yelled: “Hey, WTF man! Do you want me to donder both of you?!” Which, translated from Afrikaans to English, simply means “Do you want me to teach both of you that violence is not the answer to solving problems by using violence in the form of some bitch slaps?”
Startled, as suddenly as they started attacking each other with dust still swirling around them, they froze like in an animation show on TV, and looked all surprised at me. It is rumored that my voice can flatten ocean waves in a stormy sea but that has never been proven.
It took the two rabies spreaders a brief moment only to decide that neither my voice nor the 'I am so disappointed in you two' attitude of my finger pointing sternly at them appeals to them. Both almost fell over their feet to get away, and… they jumped over the bridge railing. Trues bob, cross my eyes and hope to die if it ain't true.
To console all animal lovers, including myself and lovers of animals from outer space, the bridge have a gradual slope, and they landed 2 meters down on some shrubbery. Both very alive and still not convinced that I won't jump myself, so they sprinted at a speed worthy of an Olympic item.
By the time I got my binoculars out of my backpack they were hundreds of meters away, one running after the other around a hundred meters apart. To me it was evident they'll continue the fight somewhere else, that the two enemies merely wanted to get away from the human on the bridge first.
What happened next? Wish I knew.
