Deaths by Drowning
My friend Rob had a very old black cocker spaniel named Belle. Belle had been Rob's mother's dog. Belle seemed mostly both blind and deaf, and when Rob moved back to the old house he started having trouble with her wandering off. She also became pretty incontinent, so Rob started leaving her penned into a patio behind the house with a low wall all around it.
Last Thursday she got out somehow. Rob was in a class in Pittsboro and got a call on his cell phone from a neighbor. The neighbor had found Belle in a pond on his property. She had drowned.
I had a koi carp in a ten-gallon tank. It was about four years old. I had always heard that fish will constrict to the space they have to live in and not get too big. This fish kept growing until it could barely turn around in the tank. There was talk of building a pond for it, but nothing materialised.
I went down and stayed at Rob's for the weekend. When I got back to my apartment Sunday evening, I noticed that the cover to my aquarium was askew. I thought, "Oh, no," and went over to look closer. The fish was on the floor, and it had been long enough that I could not help the poor creature. It had a rather surprised expression on its face.