Stavanger Bay you don't own me

“Ahoy there, mate! Nice decorations ye’ve got there!”

The “decorations” in question popped to attention like twin exclamation points as Coelacanth cupped her ears to capture the exuberant, roughhewn greeting. Ahoy there, mate! she thought to herself, wholly intrigued by Maude’s rollicking manner of speech. Ahoy there! The feathered length of her tail began to wave, propelled by a tenuous current of answering enthusiasm; a bashful dip of the girl’s muzzle greeted the owl-eyed pirate’s disarming smile.

Carefully turning her attention toward Stitch — the sheepdog cross could not remain impervious to the tensing of lithe muscles or the wide-eyed way her arrival had been regarded — Coelacanth lowered herself into a sphinx-like position and fixed her seablue gaze on the faraway horizon. She was eloquently disinterested in the female’s meal and said so with her patently distracted body language. Lowering her slender muzzle, she dug a small trench to tuck her paws in, then covered them up with small tosses of coarse sand. Sand dappled the bridge of her nose when she finished her play, begging a soft, soundless sneeze that cleared her nostrils of the pesky granules.