Transitions

The other day on a walk, we saw a muskrat swimming along the banks of a creek as we walked over the bridge. We’d never seen a muskrat there before and stopped to watch it for a while. It swam under the bridge we stood on and then pulled up to the bank and started nosing around, looking for… something? It wasn’t obvious. 

Anyway, Cody (a fantastic name supplied by my wife) slipped back into the water and swam upstream a bit more, then back onto the bank, then back into the water and toward us again. Cody seemed equally at home in the water and on land. There was no hesitation or preparatory movements for making the transitions, even though it naturally required a change in posture and head tilt to go between swimming and walking. The forces on her legs and body are very different in the two environments (if they are in fact distinct) as are the movements themselves. But Cody gave no indication that anything changed—she simply entered and exited the water with the same ease with which we walked from the bike path onto the bridge.

After a while, Cody found and decisively nibbled a tall plant into shorter lengths, discarding the stem sections and taking the longest, leafiest part with her back downstream and onto another part of the bank where we couldn’t see her any longer. The leaves could have been for dinner or a house project. It wasn’t obvious.