Rudy Sees a Seal Ghost? Senses a Great White?

Yesterday was a gorgeous, fabulous day. The sort of day that makes you feel like spinning around Julie Andrews "The Sound of Music" style, shouting out about how grand life is and laughing gleefully like you have not got a care in the world. Yeah... it was that nice. SO we decided to hop on down to the beach here in Sconset to hang out, soak up some sun and let Rudy peel out for awhile. Rudy loves to spend the afternoon on the beach. If there aren't any other people around we can just let him wander around to his hearts content sniffing, digging and lavishing his fur with pungent odors in the patented stink roll as seen here...


He can usually keep himself occupied for hours. Every now and then he will come back to us and dig a bunker next to one of our chairs and crawl in to watch for birds to ambush. No worries for the birds. They always get away. As an aside let me just tell you that last week we were walking him off leash down the beach and he spied a seagull up ahead and took off after it. I watched in horror as I realized that the gull could not fly or even run away for that matter because it was injured. It was sort of washing back and forth in the surf at the waters edge. I started screaming at Rudy to "Leave It!" (this is what we say if we need him to drop some gnarly crap he is snacking on found on the ground, etc.) but he rushed right up to the thing and my mind was swirling with images of him ripping the thing up while it jabbed at his eyeballs with it's pointy seagull beak. So he ran up to it and then stopped a foot or so away and just stood there looking at it. He followed it as it washed up and down in the surf and sort of just puzzled at it. Billy made it to them first and he gently led Rudy away telling him what a "good boy" he was for leaving the seagull be. Every day since then of course Billy has scoffed at Rudy saying things like "You think you're a tough guy? You can't even kill a sick seagull!" This is their relationship. Billy and Rudy try to one up each other and make the other one look bad all the time. Like brothers. Like boys. Anyway... back to the original story.

We were sitting on the beach reading and sort of gazing out at the water watching a couple of fishing boats that were tooling around way out by the sandbar (there were no other people on the beach for at least a quarter of a mile on either side of us) and Rudy was laying in his bunker next to my chair facing the ocean. All the sudden he exploded up out of his hole barking and snarling. All the hair was up on his back and he was really, really on the defense. We both whirled around to see what was coming or who was around and.... nothing. There was nothing. Rudy continued to slowly advance toward the water barking like he was getting ready to fight for his life or defend ours. It was nuts how freaked out he was. And there was NOTHING out there. We tried to distract him and bring him back to our seats but he was in full blown attack mode. This went on for a good 3 to 4 minutes until Billy finally dragged him away and made him sit facing away from the water. Rudy still tried to turn his head to look back and was whining and crying in worry. Eventually we calmed him down and went back to reading for a couple minutes when he suddenly went off again. This time we ended up having to leave because he would not cool his jets. Ok. Sooooo WTF, right? Either we have a delusional, neurotic terrier or there was an 18 foot great white trolling for seals twenty feet off the beach? Or perhaps Moby Dick's evil cousin was communicating telepathically with Rudy from the briny deep? It really makes ya wonder. It was a sunny, calm day with nothing going on. Either this dog has a wicked imagination and is a great play actor or some creepy shit was slinkin' around in the water not too far off. We will never know. It's not the first time The Rudester has faced off against the mighty Atlantic with a bit of an attitude. When hurricane Earl was peelin' through he was downright surly about it. Please do click through on this photo to see the look on his face.




What a majestic beast, right? I'll let ya know if we end up having to get him set up on anti psychotic drugs. Or if Sconset gets wiped out by a giant sea monster.