We are travelling with a medium-sized hound named Felix and tonight I learned something uncanny about him. There is a bowl of walnuts on the low coffee table by the horde of tealight candles, santa-shaped geegaws, and slinky Christmas lights. The adult son of the house picked up a walnut. “Now watch,” he instructed, and gave it to the dog. Felix stretched himself under grandma’s chair and propped his two paws out in front of him. Delicately he turned his head first left then right, cracking the walnut shell from either end with his long white teeth. The turns of his head on the floor looked so adoring, he held the nut between his two hairy paws. Having dispersed the shell he spent a few juicy-sounding minutes extracting for himself the slivers of meat and scarfing them down ecstatically. I’ve never seen a dog behave like that. When I cracked a walnut for myself – with a nutcracker – he came and sat beside me and gazed with reproachful intensity at every movement. They told me how Felix climbs on the couch and puts one paw up on the coffee table so he can reach the bowl.
The other discovery I made this evening is that if you crack a walnut open cleanly enough, the halved nut with its blade of faintly gleaming wood still attached down the centre can be made to flutter through the air and resembles a tiny butterfly.
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