Tilde's Revenge And The Return Of The Seal

This is how it started:

That moment when you find out what she is dragging along turns out to be a decomposing seal, you first thought is "PLEASE don't roll in it!" just before she does.... #toolate #bathtime #yuk #gross #hovawart #shitbag

A post shared by Tilde and Leo (@leoschelt) on Mar 15, 2017 at 8:20am PDT

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRqeAc4hOv9/

The story could have ended right there and then with the aforementioned bath but with Tilde sometimes endings need to be rewritten.

In the next couple of days after her discovery of the seal she even found more game. Not the usual dried out crab shells and whelk egg containers, neither the occasional fish, seal or small cetacean that washed ashore for that matter.

At first she found squid, but luckily labelled it as not-eatable. She also found her first-ever salmon, which she tried to claim from a large group of seagulls and a crow pair, making it even more precious to her.

As the days passed, the seal carcass had disappeared, no doubt cleaned up by the beach's scavengers. I let my guard down when we passed by the part of the beach where she had found it one week earlier and eventually, distracted by all her - by now almost daily - new finds, I forgot about it.

Tilde did not.

Suddenly she made a run towards the dunes while we were walking down the shoreline and moved quickly forward from there. She was soon on 50 meters, then 100 meters of distance, until she stopped as abruptly as she went off, buried her nose down into the sand for a moment and immediately started digging like a professional excavator. Within seconds she pulled something out of the hole she dug. It was too far away for me to see what it was but I could make a pretty good guess.

I took a sprint to close the gap as soon as possible before I could recognize it was the seal. She was chewing on what resembled a spine. Someone or some animal had tried to hide what was left of it, mostly bones, under the sand. Now Tilde had found it again.

"Leave it!" I said, well aware of my own naivety to even bother to ask. Tilde looked at me. She had that look I know so well, in which every mischievous fiber in her body seem to express itself through her eyes. She had no intention of "Leaving it" whatsoever! Instead, she started a victory dance running in circles around me with the spine playfully dangling from her mouth.

After I cheated her out from the same seal earlier, making her give up a salmon and numerous crab too, I knew any further attempts to end their reunion would be futile. Tilde had her victory. Bon appétit.