He was standing on the patio in the sun. He was staring into the back yard with great concentration.
This struck me as odd. He was neither relaxed nor was he in his hunting-the-wiley-squirrel pose. Those are pretty much the two positions he assumes back there, and this one was neither.
Something was up with the dog. So I stood at the window and watched.
I watched as he trotted off the patio out into the grass came to a stop. Then he trotted a bit further and stopped again. He was making a straight line toward the garden, toward the tomato plants.
When he got there, he lowered his head and sniffed around the edge of the garden bed: a quick, innocent survey. First the near end, then the left side, then around to the right. At first, he didn’t show any direct interest in the tomato plants themselves. Rather, he casually walked around the bed inspecting the periphery.
But then he looked up at them. Just a glance. And then it was back to checking out of the grass and sniffing the pine straw mulch. And then he looked up again. And then he stepped up on the edge of the garden bed to inspect the real object of his desire: a tomato ripening on the vine.
I opened the patio door.
“Hey!” I shouted, “What’s going on out there?”
He quickly hopped down and turned away from the tomatoes and trotted back along his little trail thru the grass to where I stood. And the look on his face was just as if nothing at all had happened.