Close Encounter

Each morning I wake up at pretty much the same time, around 5:45, mostly because the birds starting chirping outside the window of our condo at about 5:30, and soon after they begin there is one particularly loud bird that shows up without fail and begins a loud, insistent, repetitive declamation of his territorial rights. So each day he wakes me up, and then I wander into the living room to do my morning stretching. Since today was Sunday, after I was done stretching I grabbed my camera and went across the street for a walk around the campus. I found myself poking my camera into a lot of odd places, and came away with some interesting shots, some of which I later posted on flickr. But the picture that's going to stick in my head was a sort of accident, the result of an encounter with one of the semi-wild feral cats that live on campus. Next to Montague Hall there's a sort of elevated porch with a stairway leading up to it, and I decided to walk up to see what sort of an angle that would give me to take a picture of the nearby baseball field. On my way up, I saw a cat looking around the corner at me, and then as I continued to move toward him he started getting very anxious. I was coming at him, he was clearly a little panicked, and the only way to escape was to go past me down the stairs. There was this moment when he was poised, alert, trying to read my body language, and not understanding what I was doing pointing a camera at him.

Just after I snapped this picture, he moved back to his left, hugged the wall to my right, and then, as I took another step toward him, he darted to his right and past me down the stairs. An adrenaline-inducing moment for both of us.