Dog Soul Mate

I met my dog soul mate in Bolinas today! I walked out of Bo Tierra garden on my way to nowhere and a juniper hedge was barking at me. I wrote a haiku about it in my spiral bound reporter's notebook and continued walking. Bush barking at me/ smells like shit there; it's a dog/ not the President. A little white spotted terrier with brown and black patches on her face came tearing out from behind the hedge and sprinted out in front of me. I followed her along Kale road. I walked around the bluff over Agate beach and she followed me, racing back and forth, pissing on everything and tearing up the ground with her paws. We walked to the beach. Suddenly she went up into Jack's creek and returned with a tennis ball. She dropped it at my feet. I threw it down the beach over and over and she ran after it and back, kicking up an explosion of sand with each catch. Sometimes she didn't drop the ball and instead held it in her mouth, repeatedly squeezing it. Sometimes she held the ball so tenaciously that I could lift her entirely off the ground by it, and she hung there growling. I growled back at her. Then I found it was more fun to throw the ball up the cliff so she could catch it as it bounced erratically down. She was in a frenzy. Then I found it was even more fun to throw it out over Duxbury reef so that she would run over the tide pools, sliding out on the seaweed, and dive into the waves after it. She came back panting frantically and running around me in circles, tearing up the whole beach. Every time she returned with the ball she dropped it at my feet and shook dog-smelling saltwater all over my pants. We had wonderful fun together, but eventually I was tired of throwing. She ran up Jack's creek again and I followed her. She dropped the tennis ball off a ledge into a fetid pool and stood looking down at it despondently. Then she bounded off the ledge, stepped gingerly into the pool, retrieved the ball, placed the now-stinky ball at my feet and begged me to throw it more. I went back to the beach and started walking up the trail. She passed me, ran way up the trail, and dropped the ball so that it rolled pathetically down to the ends of my toes. At last I threw the ball into a giant thicket of fennel. The game is up, I thought. She tore into the fennel, ransacked it, and emerged with the ball. She rolled around in the grass and wood chips at the trails edge, snorting. She was all wet and dirty and crazy. I kept throwing the ball for her over and over as we walked up Kale road. Finally, she hid the ball in someone's yard. A dog suitor distracted her near the garden and she went to flirt with him and smell his ass, and we parted rather nonchalantly. Best dog ever! We'll be in love forever...