EVEN THOUGH EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF OUR LIVES

Even though every single moment of our lives we are seeing something we have never seen before, you'll never guess what today I never saw before, after a morning and afternoon of splitting oak which, after a time, particularly extensively solo up on a mountainside in an oriental country not ones birthplace can leave one somewhat hallucinatory, especially as compounded by a fine late afternoon with an ex post facto Chardonnay or two out on the deck where I saw what I saw but actually didn't see what I saw, if you see what I mean. Needless to say, if you know me, this is going somewhere.

To get to the point it was across the big cleared piece of land the vast tribe of monkeys had stampeded over upmountain as posted a few weeks ago. At first it was just a shadowy movement that caught the corner of my eye as eyes are anciently meant to be caught, over there where I knew no one was distantly home and they have no dog, but nevertheless there was a large dark dog weaving back and forth behind their fence yet no it wasn't a dog my eyes told me somehow that they knew. I got the binoculars and looked, it was an inoshishi (talk about coopted google links) trapped inside the fence, which borders the ravine of one of the mountain streams up here.

The creature was tall for an inoshishi though, and much darker, black in fact, had longer, hairier legs - life gets complicated at such moments - and a brown face, plus it didn't walk like a pig, it walked like a goat (differences I hadn't known I knew)! It was this creature. Never saw or heard of one around here. I thought they were rare, or nearly extinct even.

Guess later it found its way beyond the fence, the way I hope we do...