The weather was gorgeous this afternoon, and our cupboards were decidedly bare, so I decided to swing by the grocery store on my way to pick Brynja up from pre-school. When I was about halfway across the bridge — the selfsame bridge from which I took the picture in my previous post — I saw two women standing on the walking path by the river. One of them had a dog, a little black-and-white mutt that was rolling around on the newly-exposed grass beside the path.

As I got closer I couldn’t help thinking it was a weird sort of dog, both in manner and appearance, so I stopped walking and stepped over to the bridge railing to get a better look. I honestly thought my eyes were deceiving me when I realized the animal wasn’t a dog, but a baby seal! I know that there are seals in the area, but I hadn’t ever seen one and for sure wasn’t expecting to see one in the river.

I noticed that one of the women had a municipality windbreaker on, so I figured the situation was in hand and continued on to the store. Funnily enough, the other woman I’d seen ended up behind me in the check-out line, so I asked her what was going to happen to the seal. She told me that the police had been called and that they would come to take it back out to sea. When she mentioned that she’d taken a picture of it with her phone, I started kicking myself for not having my own phone with me.

I decided to go home for my camera before getting Brynja and when I came inside I saw that Tage and Petra had come home from school. I told them to take my camera and hurry over to the bridge, where a little crowd had gathered, to see the seal and take some pictures, and I rushed off to the pre-school. Unfortunately (for us, probably fortunately for the seal), just before they arrived, the little guy dove back into the water and swam away and my kids didn’t get even a glimpse.

Lucky for all of us, though, happenings like this are big news in small towns, and the event made the paper: