Benji's Game

Benji belongs to the owner of the Café at Slea Head, in the far corner of the Dingle Peninsula.

Benji’s job is to teach Benji’s game to the visitors at the tables outside.

Once he decides who he wants to teach his game to, he’ll bark at you, walk up to you, and drop his tennis ball at your feet. When you reach for the ball he picks it up and runs to the corner of the building. Your trick at this point is to follow him to the corner of the building. When you get there he plays hard to get with the ball for a minute, then drops the ball in front of you and runs out into the field. Your next trick  is to pick up the ball and throw it so Benji can find it in the tall grass. When he finds it,  he comes back to the corner of the  building, plays hard to get, drops the ball in front of you, and he’s off again.

This is a pretty complex game, and it took Marty and I a while to learn it. But once we picked up the nuances, Benji let us play it with him for as long as he wanted.. When we got tired, and after Benji tried enticements like dropping the ball really really close to our feet, he just moved on to the next table.