Rockin' & Rollin'

Driving home from work at Possum Kingdom Lake one evening about four and a half decades ago, I had the radio tuned into a favorite FM rock station and turned up loud as I was maintaining my vehicle speed at about five miles per hour above the posted limit, keeping a sharp eye out for whitetail deer prone to leaping out of side brush into the middle of the highway. Thus, I missed the small gray creature nosing about on the centerline and recognized what it was a mere microsecond before driving directly over it. Knowing the animal's behavior pattern when startled after having captured several with bare hands over prior years, it was another microsecond before I heard the dull thump from the undercarriage when it did what it always did when startled and jumped hard straight upward.

Wincing, I braked and looked in the rearview mirror, expecting to see a mangled, splattered mess. Instead, I saw a gray ball rolling along at slight angle away from centerline to the right. Stopping, I watched the ball gradually stop, then it slowly, tentatively opened up and walked away from the scene of the accident, across the shallow bar ditch, and disappeared into the Jamaican Swamp sawgrass growing un-mown at the verge of the fenceline beyond the ditch.

Chuckling at the armadillo's good fortune, and very glad it survived, I drove happily onward.