Instinct

I always said it and I will repeat it again: my sense of direction is ridiculously bad, almost nonexistent. Send me out of a bar alone and I will surely go into the opposite direction of where the metro is that I came from just three hours ago. Even with navigation turned on I take wrong turns while driving. It’s almost a tradition now to not find my way home on the first try. It’s like I want to get lost and it has always been this way. Just like that one time I went on one of many walks with my dog as a kid and decided to go deeper into the forest than usual. It was bound to happen and it happened. I got lost in the woods…

Her name was Sindy and she wasn’t really our dog, but my stepmother’s. But I liked her nonetheless, of course I did. How can you not like a dog? Especially as a kid. Kids and dogs are a surefire recipe for a chaotic but boundless friendship! Mens best friend. Womens, too! And kids even more, as I just said. Dogs have noses that are not just cute but can also smell field-mouse pinkies through a meter of heavy earth. I have seen it! And they have ears that can differentiate between your steps and your neighbors long before you even see your garden fence. We all have seen it! And their paws smell like corn chips. How weird is that?!

But now, where was I? See, I get lost so easily…

Ah yes, a small girl, a small dog and an actually really small forest, too, as it turned out much later…

It was a beautiful summer's day, and not a dramatic rainy one, but the sun was already starting to hover dangerously low above the horizon when I turned around my own axis a couple of times in said forest. And then it hit me: I didn’t know which direction I actually had come from. If you aren’t a hunter or a lumberjack or at least just someone with a smartphone for that matter trees suddenly can look surprisingly alike. At least it did so to me at that point and I was devastated because of it. No survival instinct whatsoever. But I mean, come on, I was 9 or so. Well, maybe 12…

Until that point Sindy had walked behind me, just following me wherever I wanted to go. Such a sweet soul, letting me lead us straight into the mysterious thicket of unsolved mysteries. I had that terrible mannerism of looking mostly down to the ground instead of straight forward at eye level while walking. My older cousin always tried to talk me out of it. “It’s not befitting for a princess to look down”, she would say, and I should have listened. But I didn’t. I didn’t listen to a lot of things. Plus, I’m not a princess, so…

So… I was lost. And Sindy had followed me right into it and she caught up with me and started sniffing around among the trees that she obviously could distinguish much better than me from one another. And that was when our roles got newly arranged and it was magical! She waited while I was contemplating my limited options but at some point she seemed to notice that I was not stopping to marvel at nature, but that I was instead nearing a breaking point. I once read that dogs can smell fear. It must have been one of those situations then. So Sindy went from obedient lapdog to the formidable tracking hound she was born to be. She was half Spitz, so she really was kind of born for tracking and hunting. You do not want me to tell you the whole story of those field-mouse pinkies I mentioned earlier. It was impressive, but also really gruesome…

Now, Sindy suddenly broke our formation and started to stride firmly in one direction, clearly knowing what she was doing. But at some point she stopped and looked back at me. At this point I have to admit that my childlike brain is probably remembering things a bit more epic. I imagine we all have these kinds of memories that, as a grown up, seem a bit too fantastic to be true. But nevertheless we remember them that way, so I’m just a slave of my synapses as everyone else is…

She waited for me to follow her, I swear she did. And so I followed. I didn’t know anything about edible mushrooms and how to build a stick tent, so following my dog -our dog; any dog really- was the next best thing. And we walked and you guessed it: we got out of the woods at roughly the spot we entered. Unharmed, untraumatized and not even hungry. It’s actually quite underwhelming when I retell it like that, I see that now…

Sure, it’s by far not the most heroic thing a dog can do, but till this day -and according to this version of my memory- I’m baffled by how she figured this out. She went back to lapdog immediately, but for me this fluffy barker reached a whole new level of awesomeness that day, even though it shows clearly that some memories are best stored in our hearts in all their glory instead of being run through the unforgiving disenchantment of some writing software…