Murphy the Vigilant, sits up straight, squarely on his haunches, ready to spring into action.
A Great Pyrenees (a.k.a Pyrenees Mountain Dog) would not be my choice for an easy dog to own. I know my style. I like the easy-going, tractable gentle giants that need regular exercise in the form of long walks but spend most of their time impersonating lumpy rugs.
This week has held a mixture of both good and bad for me.
My leg hurts. Licking it isn’t helping. The pain seems to come and go, but when it’s on, it really hurts.
Yesterday, I felt so awful that I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything more than my chicken ball. I never turn away from food – well, not since I had blasto. So Elizabeth took me in to see my friends at the Kenora Veterinary Clinic.
Dr. Celia had a good look at me. She couldn’t find anything wrong with my leg. But I had a fever, and I was looking pretty miserable. She thinks maybe I have blasto again, and kept me with her all day to do some testing.
I could tell Elizabeth was really upset by what Dr. Celia had to say. Blastomycosis is pretty intense, especially in the early stages, and she has to keep bringing me back to the vets’ for tests and for pictures of my insides and really expensive blasto-killing pills…. It takes about eight months to treat.
We’ll know next week what the test results are.
When we went home, I did my best to make her feel better. I went straight to my food and ate it all up. The effect on Elizabeth was amazing. You’d have thought she was the one who hadn’t eaten all day the way she perked up! I didn’t feel all that much better for eating, myself. But the food gave me the energy I needed to jump up onto Elizabeth’s bed to cuddle with her for a while as she read (she’s reading about growing two-legger food, these days – the results of reading such books smell much better than the books themselves do).
When time came round for my evening chicken ball and bedtime treats, I really didn’t want to leave her bed. I gave my best “Oh, I feel too awful to move, please let me stay…” look. I even let my head fall over the edge of the bed and hang – the “I think I’m maybe already dead” look. Neither worked too well. Elizabeth seems to think she needs more space on her bed than she has when I’m there. Especially if she’s planning to sleep. And, she says, I snore.
But there was good news waiting for us outside! And even more of it when I woke up this morning! I got Elizabeth to take some pictures this morning so we could share it with you… Isn’t it wonderful? The snow came back! ~:oD=
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Today, I thought I’d share something with you from my first year on the Campbell Estate. My run at that time was beside an older area of the forest, and there are lots of old, decaying logs on the forest floor – all covered with soft green piles of green stuff that feels really good under my paws. The Silly Flappers like to go there in the Spring, and sometimes the young ones start practicing in the falling leaf time, too!
I was a puppy when I first heard the boy Silly Flappers showing off to their girlfriends. They kept me up all night. It wasn’t just the ones close to me. The sound carries through the woods for a mile or more. Sometimes you aren’t really sure you’re hearing it – it’s more of a sense of the air kind of throbbing around you. Elizabeth found a really good clip online for me to share with those of you who don’t live in the Boreal Forest so you can hear what it sounds like. The two-leggers who recorded this must have been really close, ’cause you can hear the whoosh of the feathers in the recording, which makes the drumming sound softer. I’ve never heard that before. The drumming I’ve heard is always just the thump that gets faster and faster.
By the time I find a drumming Silly Flapper, he has already stopped. I can get much closer to them than other Silly Flappers before they flap furiously away on me. They’re very unsociable. Most flappers are, I guess. They don’t seem to like me much, anyway. Even the Long-necked Flappers who call me all the time don’t let me come close to say hello back.
Elizabeth says that the reason the Silly Flapper drummer boys are easier to get close to is because they’re so full of something called hormones, and they have so much energy invested in showing off that, even though they’re scared by me (!) they haven’t got the juice to switch into flee mode. She says people who have approached a male peacock (she showed me a tail feather of one that she has hanging on her wall – very pretty, and very long!) will understand. The boy peacock with a fanned tail has a very hard time fleeing an enemy!
Imagine a flapper thinking of me as an enemy! Absurd! But Elizabeth says that’s exactly how they see me…. Come to think of it, though, I did try once to make friends with a little swimming flapper once when I was little, too. It went limp and quit peeping at me. Elizabeth says the flappers don’t realise that I don’t mean to hurt them, and there are other dog-like animals in the forest who eat them if they catch them. So I guess I understand a bit now why they don’t like me much…. -:o(=
Anyway, Elizabeth wrote this one Spring morning after I first heard the Silly Flapper drummer boys from my run the night before:
Okay, I’ll admit that I’m a bit nuts about my dog. Most dog owners will understand.
I sing to her. I noticed my last dog really liked it, so I tried it with Stella, too – well actually, the habit just sort of carried over. I’ll take a tune I know and add lyrics just for Stella.
Yes, I’m afraid I might be a little … touched?
Last night I woke up to Stella’s barking. She barked for some time. I’ve never heard her bark at night before.
This morning, as we were eating breakfast (mom and I), Stella put her head on the leg of the table and fell asleep. She began to snore. She got up, followed me into the kitchen and, while I made my hot chocolate, she flopped onto the floor and looked with exhausted puppy eyes at me. I began to sing. Appalachian mountain man kind of droning tune:
Ho, little Stella
Snorin’ on the floor.
Listened to the ruffed grouse
drummin’ all night.
Barked at the ruffed grouse
all night long -
Woof, woof, woof.
Stupid ol’ bird.
Woof, woof, woof.
Wanna go to sleep.
Barkin’ at the ruffed grouse
and howlin’ at the moon
all night long -
Aaaah woooooh!
Woof, woof, Whoooooh!
All night long!
Now she’s snorin’ on the floor -
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Snorin’ on the floor!Hope you enjoy it as much as she did. She thumped her tail in time to the words.
Cheers! I think I’m going to have a nap, too!
Hmmph. You’d think she’d been up barking at them all night!
