Dog Days
My, but it’s hot. It’s the height of summer. When it’s dry, as it was all of June, it is stunning. When it rains, as it has in July, the air in the morning is as hot and wet as the breath of a huge beast.
Mrs. Raangh stayed away, and there were no more accidents in the house. I was guiding Weegie through the novice exercises pretty well, and Margaret said, “What would happen if you let the lead go slack?”
So I am trying not to handle her so much with the leash. I am looking for slack on the Figure-8, using voice only on the recall and luring the finish. It’s fun, and it’s beginning to work.
The eskie's inbred tendency to bark has emerged in the last month or so, and I have only been able to quash a fraction of it so far.
She finds just so many little reasons for yapping, and I have to extinguish them one by one. She no longer barks at the chihuahua who barks at her from the west fenceline, for example. She regards him with silent curiosity. "He's your neighbor," I remind her. "You know who he is."
But for every hard-earned No-Bark, there are three eruptions. She barks when she is excited or anxious, and she barks at everything new.
Most recently, it's the kitchen sponge that makes her bark, of all things. When I wipe the counters, Weegie lets loose a pandemonium of piercing AR-ARs. Why?
Early in the morning I mix up a little peanutbutter cookie dough made of a powdered vitamin supplement and a teaspoon of The Missing Link. I tell her, "Sit!" She does, and gets a bite. She loves this stuff.
Slowly, I reach for the sink. Weegie snaps to alert. "Ah-ah!" I say. "No bark!" She looks at me, and gets another taste.
Oh, so carefully, I pick up the sponge. Weegie's eyes bulge, but she contains herself as I remind her to be quiet. She gets another bite.
And so it goes. I put the sponge on the counter, warn, treat, slowly wipe, admonish, treat, and praise.
When the cookies are gone, the counter is clean, and Craig is still asleep. We have worked our way through it, and there's one less thing to bark about.
Last year, for my birthday, all I wanted in the world was to still have Wily with me. I knew her time was coming.
I got my wish, and Wily lived through the summer. In fact, the weekend of my birthday in late August was her last good weekend.
This year, for my birthday, what I want is a nice little dog. Maybe I will get that wish, too. We'll see. We've got a month to go.
Early Morning