Swimming with tigers

My Person and I broke our stride today and tried something different. We deserted our familiar routine and visited one of the city's urban lakes. We picked the one with the most enviable zip code and set off showing those fancy lake dwellers how we rustic riparian types like to enjoy ourselves. I was the only one swimming in the whole darned lake, or so I thought.

After a few laps my Person hauled me out and we stopped to read a nearby sign. It read "This lake contains muskellunge."

I was swimming with tiger muskies! Can you believe it - ferocious stripey fellows with uncountable numbers of sharp teeth. One could have nipped off part of this little red dog! I probably look pretty tasty paddling around through the weeds.

After this close shave we retired to the familiar shores of the Mississippi River and I attended a beach party for dogs. There was a puggle and a doodle and a poodle and shepgle or maybe it was a beaglard or maybe it was just called a shepard beagle but it was a funny fellow regardless of its name. And we jumped in the waves and my Person tried to make us "Sit!" in the deep water but we are all too smart for that. It was a real summer day and even my favorite princess Tasha is now cleaning out the sand from between her toes!

Hummingbird

This little bird has captured my Person's attention. It is trying to get some nectar from a flower that hasn't opened up yet.

I know how it feels. I look about like that, only larger and red, when my Person hasn't opened the cupboard where my food is stored, when she hasn't put that food in my dish and when she hasn't given me the high sign that I can start eating.

The little bird was pretty amazing to watch as it went on to find a meal at nearly every kind of flowering plant my Person has been planting since before I arrived on the scene. There is even a special garden she calls the prairie garden and I like that garden a lot. After all, I am a prairie sort of dog from Prairie du Chien. That is mainly where this little bird was hovering and sipping, in the garden I mean, not in Wisconsin, lifting suddenly and swooping out of sight and back again before you could count to three and occasionally sitting down on a little branch, still and crisp and not its usual so-fast-it-is-blurry self.

I sat with my Person and watched the little bird eating until at last it flew away for the evening, and I think we both were thinking how wonderful it might be to fly like that, and while we were busy imagining, the light grew dimmer and the evening grew quieter and all the other birds went to their roosting places for the evening and so did my Person and so did I.

Doggone clean

Nothing like a good scrub up.

This is how we dogs get clean - we jump in the river and then roll in the sand and before you know it we are sparkling clean and smelling fresh and don't need any bathing at home. Ever.

It is funny how many products people seem to need to keep in good order - shampoos and soaps and lotions and gels and sprays and scents and sun screens. All you really need is a good tossing of river sand in your fur and you are set for at least a week.

Prissy Pants Pico doesn't clean up this way. He is always licking himself and the other two cats and they lick him in return. I find this behavior disgusting. I'd rather be covered with good clean sand than spit any old day. Everyone knows spit is for cleaning shoes and Pico doesn't wear any. And neither do I!

That darned cat

Most of you know I have some dramatic aspirations. I have answered a few audition calls in my time. I imagine plenty of other farm boys, listening to crickets on hazy summer evenings, dream of trodding the planks, a rapt audience agog as they do their full routine of "Sit!" and "Wait!" and "Leave it!" (This last met with thunderous applause.) Well, that's me all over - if you happen to have some treats on you.

Well the agent called, and to my ever-lasting astonishment, wanted a cat and not me!! Off went Pico and his companion Adric and left me home! That Pico couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. His ability to dissemble is nonexistent. He is incapable of rouse. And he can't even cock his head cutely when you ask him a question. I am a master of all of the above.

Pico isn't a scholarship student in outdoor obedience - as I just happen to be - and the only command he obeys is "Go take a nap on a comfy chair for 18 hours."

LIfe is so disappointing sometimes, and though it is mean to wish failure on others, I am struggling to heed the call of my nobler side. Good thing I am a dog, as you know what side will prevail...but if I were a cat...well, I guess I would have slept through all of this!

Finally

I have been getting nagged to write a bit about life but it just has been an endless slog of chores. Laundry, classes, harvesting (I am by origin a farm dog), herding cats. The usual summer fare. I even did a little Tom Sawyer routine and helped paint the fence with my chin and ears but more of the time I kept the chipmunks from leaving pawprints in the fresh paint while my human cousins labored under my Person's stern eye.

But finally, today, I had an adventure worth telling about. We were on our way home from the usual Monday bluebird trail inspection and what did we see ahead of us as we trudged on the bridge, high over the Mississippi? Ducklings! On the foot path, along the busy car traffic!

I was pretty surprised and excited. My Person was pretty surprised and full of stupid life-saving ideas. We tried herding the ducklings along, hoping to get them off the bridge, but at the foot of the bridge is a busy intersection! The ducklings kept veering toward the edge of the bridge, peering under the railing at the water 60 feet below. Then my Person hailed a passing cyclist and he stopped to help us try to gather the ducklings. I was tethered to the railing as my Person thought my happy barks were "not helping the situation." She told me as much. The cyclist tried to block the ducklings from running into the street. My Person frantically grabbed at them. She caught one and bundled it up in her shirt. Another jumped off the bridge - horrors! The others swirled and beeped and peeped. I barked and howled (I admit a little loss of self control). The ducklings surged. My Person grabbed another and then another. One ran along the bridge and then jumped down from the bridge into a tree top on the river edge. The cyclist stuffed the captured ducklings into his backpack and then we all walked along until we got nearer to the river and let the ducklings off in the weedy ground where they continued to swirl and beep and run into each other. Believe it or not, the tree-top duckling made it there too having fallen out of the tree and followed his siblings' calls.

Hopefully the ducklings have made their way to the river and haven't gone bridge climbing again. For myself, I am exhausted and need to rest in the shade. Until I have another chore to do that is.

On the trail

Those of you who know me well know that I am officially an unofficial bluebird trail monitor. My Person is officially official but she couldn't monitor the trail without me. She eyes the stuff up high and I keep my nose to the ground and between us we do a good job.

Today we saw newly hatched bluebirds in their nest box and also a tree swallow who was so devoted to its egg clutch it refused to leave when we peered in the nest box. Such brave creatures birds are!

On the way home we walked across the Mississippi River, using a helpful bridge of course, and looked down over the riverside tree canopy stretching out below us. A cowbird, that much maligned songbird (look it up, you can start with the westward movement and the slaughter of the plains buffalo herds and you end up with this little bird living in my city, humans are the problem as usual) was perched on the bridge railing, calling in distress and looking out at the trees as well. Suddenly a cooper's hawk lifted up out of the trees, a bird in its talons.

I guess we saw it all this morning: a homeland lost for one species and regained for another and the cycle of life and death played out before us by our fellow creatures.

Contemplation

A summery day is just the perfect time to lie in the grass and meditate. Or fall asleep. My Best Friend always falls asleep when he mediates so maybe it is all the same thing.

I have been pondering a bit between snores, getting in touch with my inner self. My inner chicken, my Person says. That is just because I ate an entire chicken carcass a few days ago, and so far no remains of it have, well, emerged. She thinks I am plugged up, but I think I am really a wolf in Red Dog clothing and can eat a lot of bones without ill effect.

But my inner chicken isn't limited to my diet. It also includes my feelings: feelings about conflict and the rough and tumble life of dogs, how some dogs are friendly and some are not, some playful and some want to fight, what people expect from dogs and what dogs expect from each other. My Person signed me up for an outdoor advanced obedience class and I get just a little scared of all the things we have to do and the other dogs in the class, all the direction and correction going on. It all makes me feel a little chicken.

Maybe I would like to be a simpler sort of fellow, not a dog signed up for advanced classes. Maybe I would like to be a rural rustic and lie on my side in the shade with a grass blade between my teeth, a bird singing over my head.

Of course if the bird is a chicken, I'll just have to eat it.