The Eyes Didn't Have It

The Eyes Didn’t Have It

I can remember when I taught English as a Second Language, and I had to explain to my surprised students that we have an expression in English: “I see what you’re saying.” I told them in Canada, when the weather is very cold, we can see someone’s breath when they are speaking in the great outdoors. Some of the students took me seriously.

I was reminded of this one day recently, when my eyes were very far from ‘seeing’ what I was experiencing, but another sense told me without speaking a word something that I really needed to know. 

My wife Dorothy and I were checking out a cottage beside a lake up north. I was retired as of May, end of the semester.  She had another few months to endure before she retired too. We decided that I should spend a day or two at the cottage to see whether it would be a good buy for us. We had only seen pictures of the cottage before, and heard the realtor’s praise. If it was a great place, we might even move to live there full time.

My first impression was that it looked quite cozy. But the impression of another sense was what really caught my attention. When I opened one of the windows, I could smell something that I could not identify. Was it from an animal? I looked outside through the open window and saw nothing to confirm my impression. But my sniffer kept telling me that I was sensing an animal nearby. And I really trust my sniffer. When I first met Dorothy, I wasn’t just attracted to her good looks and personality. She smelled great. I took a chance and told her so. At first she gave me a strange look, but then she turned on her smile, one of the things that has always charmed me about her. It was love at first sniff.

I  walked outside, and looked around in every direction and still there was no animal in sight. And I could not hear one either, even when I stopped walking and closed my eyes. My lesser senses had failed me in my search. My wife has sometimes accused me of having a smell-imagination, smelling what isn’t there. That has happened a few times, when I was sure that she was cooking one dish, but it turned out that we were having something quite different for dinner. Maybe I was smelling something that I really wanted to eat, more so that what we were going to eat. It is possible.

But when I went inside the cottage, I could still sense the smell. I believed that I wasn’t smelling a lie. It was getting dark, and I was tired from the long drive, so I thought that I would sleep the night, and then see, actually smell, what the source of the distinctive odour was.

I dreamt that night, and of course, I smelled in my dreaming what I believed was a bear and then a wolf, but neither was the smell that I detected when I was awake. I had smelled those two animals before in zoos, so I knew what I was sensing.  This new smell was something else again, a mystery. I hoped that I would wake to it in the morning.

The next day I awoke to the smell. It was definitely still there, and I believed that it was neither bear, nor wolf, but was something else altogether. I was determined to find it. But I needed to eat first. The old stove that we were told was there still worked. So I made some of the kind of instant coffee that I am more or less addicted to. The smell of it was magnificent, and it went well with the pound or so of dried mango strips that were another nasal addiction of mine.  A strong sense of smell and very active taste buds are definitely related. 

Having dined in a way, but still carrying a few dried mango strips with me for snacking, I went outside. Nothing was going to stop me from discovering the source of the smell now. I began my sniff-searching while walking around the cottage several times slowly. The animal might have been close the day before I got there, that being why I did not see it yesterday and today. Maybe it was mating season for whatever it was, and he or she wanted everyone of her or his species to know that he or she was available. I early suspected on our first meeting that that was what Dorothy had done with her variety of perfumes. 

The message of the animal might have been passed by urine, explaining why I did not see the creature as I walked around and around the cottage. I have a particular sensitivity when it comes to the smell of urine. My brother Bob knew that and would sometimes deliberately neglect to flush the toilet after a pee just to literally pee me off. 

The smell became stronger when I walked to the north. It was particularly strong when I approached what I saw was an old tent that looked like it had been there a few seasons without occupants. Could the animal be inside? I began to walk straight towards the tent. As I did so, the smell grew even more powerful, something that I hadn’t thought was even possible when I first went outside. The source of the smell was definitely in there. I wonder what the olfactory equivalent of ‘a sight for sour eyes’ would be, ‘a smell for clogged nostrils’? I’ll have to use that expression when Dorothy arrives at the cottage on the weekend. I know that she will not be surprised by it. Hopefully she will appreciate it.

I lifted up the front flap of the tent slowly, carefully, and virtually soundlessly. I was surprised by what I saw. It was a mother deer, a doe, and two of her babies, her fawns. I had read in the local newspapers that the local does give birth in late May (which it is now). She assumed a position that I would suppose would be as close to aggressive as she had in her repertoire. I crouched down carefully, and put a few dried mango strips in front of her. After a few seconds sniffing what she had been given, she picked up one with her teeth and began chewing. I then backed away, leaving a few more mango strips before her and along the ground in front of the tent. I would have to get a few more pounds of them before Dorothy arrived. With a little luck we could both feed her. I think that this is a good sign that we will be moving in. Thanks to my keen sense of smell, we have already made a fair-fragrance friend.