Melding My Empathic Consciousness With A Canine

[Bill Walker]

This happened probably thirty years ago but the memory of this incident is still very strong.

     My folks owned a house in the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside of Winchester Virginia. It was my special place to hide when life became more stressful than I was willing to handle. I ended up living there for almost six years at one point, but that's another story.

     One weekend I was coming back from my mountain retreat well rested from my two days of natures bliss. I know that the radio was on but my mind was pretty clear of everything else as I traveled along a country road in West Virginia. I don't remember exactly how fast I was going but it was probably around sixty miles an hour as these roads are usually not that busy.

     At one point I was coming up onto a farm house and barn to my left and a fairly deep road ditch running along side the road on my right. As I was rapidly approaching the farm I noticed a movement in the grass and weeds that were growing out of the ditch. It was a dog coming up through the brush in the ditch right along the edge of the road. He looked up at my car and for one instant we locked eyes. In that instant our consciousness merged so completely that I knew he was going to run across the road to get to the farm.

     And in that instant as well I slammed on my brakes. It was still a close call, but if our minds hadn't synchronized exactly at that moment the dog would have died. That split second was his only chance at living to bark another day.

     Even to this day it's hard to describe how that one second felt. The closest I can come is to say for that split second only two things were real in the universe and they combined to become just one consciousness. In that moment we were one combined entity and nothing else in the universe existed!