spiegelman:

Alright, a little background. Copper kept acting like a bully at the dog park so I stopped taking him there. He still needed a large area to run around, off leash, so I’ve been taking him to various local parks, after dark, when there are no other dogs around. One of our favorites is the park with the Mulholland Fountain. But we go there a lot and last night I thought maybe let’s try Elysian Park, specifically Bishop Canyon, which is up on one of the hills there and where they do Little League. I take Copper there during the day sometimes. It has a really great view of Chavez Ravine.

So we drive up there. It’s not late, barely eight o’clock, but it’s plenty dark and the park is empty and unlit. Copper is off-leash, running around. He won’t let himself get more than sixty feet away from me, and when he finds himself slightly too far he shoots back like a comet, running to me at top speed, then around my legs, and then off in some other direction just as fast, out to the edge of his comfortable distance. I wonder if it’s possible to hide from him. It isn’t. No matter how far away he is, the moment I try to sneak off he picks up on it and does his little comet thing to make sure I’m nearby. At one point I manage to dart up a little hill undetected, but Copper is part hound and has a nose like a psychic and he found me in a heartbeat.

I tried this little hiding game a couple dozen times to no avail. This one time I managed to sneak around the back of the same little hill and when I turned the corner there was a girl. She was standing a ways away, at the other end of the hill, almost as far as Copper’s safe comet-distance. She had on a white, almost nightgown-like shirt, tied at the waist. I couldn’t see her face, and I squinted a little to try and make it out. And then I’m not sure what happened. My eyes focused in and out, trying to get a good look, and when they came back into focus there wasn’t a girl there at all. There was a wolf. A white wolf.

Just at that moment Copper came roaring around the base of the hill. When I looked back up the girl or the wolf or whatever was gone. Immediately my skin broke out in goosebumps. I was so distracted that I forgot Copper’s leash on a picnic table and had to buy a new one for him this morning. We came home, I tried not to think about it, watched the Occupy Wall Street livestream for a while and then went to bed.