Sand Dogs.

The sand dogs muck through the lapping tide, rising up and biting at the whitewater crests of waves as they roll towards the shore. The dogs move like dolphins, breaking up out of the saturated sand beneath the water that acts as their home and material, gnashing and gushing their garbled barks, crashing back down through the roiling lake surface, assimilating their forms into the black, wet sands of the shore. They continue moving beneath, the ridges of their backs, vertebrae of wet grainy soil shoving forwards like subsurface eels, until two hillocks of hipbone rise, signalling their next leap into the water.

They're a pack of maybe six, maybe seven. Lightning flickers somewhere to the east, but despite the clouds and wind, rain has not started falling here, yet, in this forgotten cove, dark and shadowless in the sunless swell of antecedent storm.

The fragility of their construction doesn't seem to bother them, each chomp at the waves caving the wet sand of their teeth and snouts into sogged, crumbling statue facades. Their clumsy flops, their re-entries into the liquefied soil is restorative, and their next vault proves them whole again.

The few minutes of the pack's play remain unwitnessed except by the fish and seabirds, barely noticing the leaping creatures as they prepare themselves for the incoming deluge in their own, private, instinctual rituals, and where the sand dogs go when the rain finally starts to barrage the surface of the lake, taking a few more eager, farewell bites at the waves before slipping completely under the grainy surface of the subaqueous soil, only they know.