Hearing a skitter on the gravel road behind me, thinking in a flash, "Dogs," fearing a nip the next instant at my Achilles heel, I whirled, meeting an unlooked-for trio of fellow travelers.

Goats.

The encounter unfolded late in the fall about a year and a half ago at the beginning of the fifth mile of an eight-mile run through the country. A chill wind blew from the northwest. Colored leaves shot across the damp road to lodge among fallen walnuts on the shoulder. The goats, amiable as puppies, each bigger than all but the biggest of dogs, jostled each other to get to me.

I'd passed the adjacent farm many times without seeing a sign of goats.

I urged the trio to go home. They nudged me as if to send me off to lead the pack in a race. Their eyes, looking like alien, melted substances, made me think of cliches about devilment. I ordered them home. When they retreated the way they'd come, I set off again along the road, only to hear the skitter of cloven hooves once again as the trio gave chase. Turning, ordering them home again, I punctuated the I-mean-business tone of my voice by firing walnuts at the turf at their tails.

Maybe I put the fear of a god of runners into them. They fled at breakneck speed across a pasture to a stock shed, three meteors bound for a planet of sanctuary in the region of Capricorn the Goat.

I've never again seen a sign of goats in the dozens of times I've passed the farm. The encounter might have been a bewitchment.

If I've logged 17,000 miles of running, I'd guess I've logged 15,000 miles along trails and country roads. I could hardly do anything else from my home at the edge of a village. I've run through many a passage of wonder, disgust, pleasure, or fear in my rustic world over the past two-and-a-half decades.

I've collected many a memory of Close Running Encounters of the Third Kind ...

Not the racing kind.

Not the city kind.

The country kind.

People

As a car slowed beside me, its driver leveled alluring, dark, doubtful eyes on me.

"Can we give you a ride?"

The encounter unfolded along a lonely stretch of gravel road 33 years ago. My high-school basketball coach expected his hoopsters to play a fall sport for conditioning. Because I disliked the militarism of football, I opted for cross-country, and because I disliked the demands of distance running, I hung out with the team's slackers. When our coach sent us on a six-mile jaunt, we detoured through a cornfield, cut through woods, ambled down a railroad to the far side of the village, and sprinted one at a time the half-mile back to the high school.

One day I decided for reasons I can't recall to run the six miles. The car slowed at my side as I labored in the third mile. At least as shy and polite as the three Hispanic girls inside, I rejected the driver's offer with my usual eloquence.

"No. Thanks."

As the adorable girl eased her car up the road ahead, little did I know I'd never again get such an offer. I still run that stretch of road, now paved and lined with houses, but women pass in cars with nary a glance. Young women need only their feet to outdistance me.

The last time a car stopped, I found myself giving directions to four lost men, German vacationers bound for the Gilmore Classic Car Museum, miles and miles away in Richland.

Unlike young women, teenage boys now and then pay me attention. Their horns blare and their voices shower me with obscenities from the safety of speeding cars. Sometimes they make me wince in spite of my fortitude to press on without reacting.

Some years ago, while I exited the village along the shoulder of a paved road, I heard a harsh shout of a teenage boy from a car bearing down from behind.

"Sucker!"

The compact car sped down the slope, swung around at a junction a quarter-mile ahead, and sped back up the slope. I heard the whoop of boys' voices all the way. As the car passed, the boy in the front passenger seat favored me with a glimpse of his bare backside in the open window. The moon, like an oversized cloven hoof from the region of Capricorn, waxed to the full so near I could have stung it with a flick of my right hand.

I regret that I lacked the presence of mind or the courage to risk my fingers to a speeding car.

Traffic

In July a year ago, as I waded through heat radiating from macadam east of the village, I observed an odd relative motion of two vehicles approaching at highway speed. Like a comet crossing the orbit of an asteroid, a trailing pickup drifted to the left behind a leading van. The eclipse of the pickup from my perspective seemed a mirage in the swimming air over the pavement ... until I realized the pickup had pulled out to pass the van.

My part in the set of moving bodies became all too real and vulnerable. I stifled a desire to make some gesture of anger or disgust toward the pickup, warning myself not to distract either driver.

If I'd represented a finish line, the van would have nipped the pickup by a nose.

Until that moment, in 24 years of running, I'd never been passed by passing traffic. The phenomenon repeated six more times in the next eight months. Twice the passing traffic came from behind me. The startlement of having a speeding car miss me by two or three yards, when I can't see it coming, reminds me of why I face the oncoming lane.

Along paved roads in the country, where juggernauts rush at a minimum of 55 mph, buffeting me with winds, I see drivers' faces. While a majority drift toward the middle at least a little to create a margin of safety, many show no sign of ever having seen me. A few will force a runner into a ditch rather than move over into an empty lane.

Three or four times over the years my fortitude never to give drivers the satisfaction of getting a reaction has been tested by drivers playing chicken by steering toward me along the shoulder.

On one occasion I had to bound over a curb and weave between a newspaper box and utility pole to evade headlights blazing brighter by the second on my right knee. On another occasion I had to leap onto a snow bank to avoid spinning around in the air blast of a double-bottom farm truck hauling grain to market.

I doubt whether most drivers have any real concept of the mass and kinetic energy of even a compact car in motion. I'm no mathematician, but according to my theory, a car's mass and kinetic energy, like the red shift of a fast-moving star in the heavens, double when approaching a person on foot.

Thank goodness for the occasional salute from a driver to a runner. Thank goodness for my neighbor who, having so often driven past me, conferred on me the nickname of the Running Man. Thank goodness for an acquaintance who complimented me on my toughness after watching from a warm car as I trudged through a winter snowstorm.

I can't say I even mind very much the little shock that comes with a honk of a car horn, so long as I know it's a greeting from a comrade.

Wildlife

On a pleasant spring day many years ago, as I wended my way along a utility right-of-way between two fields just greening with crops, a whitetail doe came out of a patch of brush on the left beside my course ahead. She trotted about 100 yards in front of me along the two-track trail for almost a quarter-mile with never a sign of skittishness.

Remembering from a few months earlier the alien velocity of a buck, powered as if by fusion rockets across an open field after I flushed him from a copse, I marveled at the doe's calm. Her pace exactly matched mine. I wondered when she'd detect me with her hyper-alert, herbivorous senses. Finally she slipped out of sight without haste among brush on the right.

I doubt she ever knew of her admiring follower.

Near the spot where the doe first appeared, on another occasion, a creature leaped for the air from beside the two-track with a squawk, a rattle of weeds, and a thunder of wings. The bird taking flight bulked huge and menacing from a few feet away. I dismissed my initial thought, "Eagle," as too small and insignificant a bird to explain the monster rising before my eyes. It had to be a Roc from ancient mythology.

As the bird fled into a clear blue sky, as if heading for the region of Capricorn the Goat, I recognized the figure of a vulture.

Two summers ago I had a second opportunity to note up close the size and powerful flight of the carrion crew. While running along a little-frequented gravel road a mile north of the village, climbing out of a low, swampy section, I flushed a pair of vultures from dense foliage beside a farmer's lane at the edge of a hay field.

A mystery plot took form in my head as I ran the day's last mile-and-a-half. I'd return later, curious, to the point where the birds took off. I'd find a human body, half submerged in the swamp, dead of a gunshot wound. I'd summon the police, only to become a prime suspect in a murder case. I'd clear my name by ferreting out the hunter who cagily shot down a hated rival.

Once in my years of running I witnessed what I took to be an illegal act by hunters. Late one summer many years ago, over a period of several weeks, I crossed paths time and time again, up and down the right-of-way, with a pair of furtive young men in a rusty car. Vehicles parked along the two-track in hunting season always gave me a mild case of nerves, because I knew men toted guns nearby and looked for moving game; motorcycles and four-wheelers ridden by teenagers climbing the hills and racing the two-track gave me a distinct case of nerves, because I knew they congregated in careless gangs.

But rusty cars carrying furtive young men in out-of-the-way places nudged a case of nerves toward real fear, because I envisioned stumbling on a secret drug deal.

One day, seeing the rusty car standing in the two-track ahead, seeing a rifle barrel leveled toward a thicket from the passenger window, I pulled to a full stop. The young man, ignoring a farmhouse 100 yards away in his line of fire, touched off a round. He leaped from the car into the thicket and emerged with a limp and bloody rabbit to leap back into the passenger seat. I waited for the rusty car to vanish around a distance bend in the two-track before resuming my workout.

Maybe they knew I'd witnessed their act, because I never saw them again.

Phenomena

Hearing a full-throated sound at some remove behind me as I ran along a mile of gravel road - a sound like a giant exhalation - I glanced back in spite of my better judgment.

Wrong again. No car coming.

It was only a gust of wind in the leaves of trees lining the road a quarter of a mile or more away.

The incident has no particular date. It's happened again and again during the spring and summer of year after year. Unable to distinguish at a distance between the sounds of wind in leaves and tires on gravel, I remind myself it doesn't matter, there's no immediate threat, I don't need to glance back ... but I glance back.

Another effect of rustic workouts on my psyche took shape as soon as I took to the dirt trails and gravel roads when I started running. A shadow across an uneven surface on a bright day obscures ankle-twisting objects such as loose stones or small branches.

Stepping over shadows on trails became an imperative for me with almost the pitch of a superstition.

The one thing in trails most worthy of leaping over - snakes - lie in the sun rather than in shadows. But I've leaped over a few more branches, twisted weeds, and fan belts than actual snakes.

As each year gets old and chilly, I modify my running courses. Snow on the ground eliminates the trails from my schedule. I run on gravel roads right through the winter as long as I can do so in daylight.

One October about four years ago, on the first wintry day of the cold season, I discovered the error of running along a gravel road after nightfall. As the snow melted when it hit the ground, the road became a single, linear, water-filled pothole. Though I carried a flashlight I splashed through a frigid, bitter stretch of two miles.

After that I gave in to winter by logging more miles after dark in the village among buildings that cut the wind and along streets that light my footing.

Later during the season of the pothole run, as I jogged through the village after dark, light and motion drew my gaze toward the heavens to the southwest. I thought for an instant I saw the running lights of a jet. But the object blazed too brightly and its path, originating high in the atmosphere, as if born of the firmament, suggested a motion straight down to the ground. Right away I recognized my unlooked-for fellow traveler.

A meteor.

Without breaking stride, I watched for 20 or 30 seconds as the fireball tore through the upper atmosphere. Its apparent plunge toward a fiery landfall resolved into an optical illusion caused by the arc of Earth's atmosphere. As it crossed high in the air in front of me, retreating toward the firmament to the southeast, the shooting star fragmented into a constellation of burning pieces.

I have no idea whether the meteor entered the atmosphere from the zodiacal figure of Capricorn the Goat, but the fragments fled the sky like amiable kids in a hurry to find the sanctuary of celestial pastures. MR