When we first started courting, we’d drive to VT on weekends in the bumpy truck, every weekend, and back to NYC on Sunday nights for work work work. One such weekend, we decided to spend a day fishing from the fold-up canoe. She Doggie wasn’t a natural swimmer by any means, but if we were in the water, She’d jump right in after us, nervously swimming circles around us with this little whine entreating us to get back to dry land. Herding instinct. Not yet understanding the intensity of that instinct then (because as cityfolk I’d largely been free of swimming with her), we, on this day, put together the canoe and left the dog at shore while paddling out, thinking She’d happily frolic and chase squirrels and watch us and wave with her non-opposable digits. We got pretty far into the reservoir before looking behind us to find the dog padding in after us, quite a distance for a creature for whom swimming wasn’t natural. We stopped and waited for her, and pulled her into the canoe with us, which only made her more nervous and her whines more desperate, because the waters were shaky and nylon canoes feel weird against paw pads, I suppose. We paddled back to shore and put her in the truck, then tried again.
Several minutes later, one of us made the dreadful mistake of turning a head to find her again paddling out toward us. Again we grabbed her, hauled her soppy self into our rig, and towed her back, where we found she had used her nose to pry open the back window of the pickup, from which she squeezed, hopped off, and bounded. So we put her back in the truck once again, tied the free end of her lead to the steering wheel, and resumed our romantic day of fly fishing and sweet talking, or whatever. (Sweet talk amongst fly fishermen involves such terms of endearment as “if we wait for the evening hatch, these dry flies won’t be totally useless” and “my tippet is just a little too old for me to cast into that pool, and I KNOW there’s a hungry rainbow in that pool.” It is very sexy.) Again we paddled to that sweet spot just beneath the dam when again we turned to find the fucking dog swimming right toward us, with twelve inches of chewed-through leash floating behind her.
The fishing leg of our date thus aborted, it was time to drive to the local sporting goods store, probably for new tippet. And not two minutes were we in the shop before the dog followed us in, having now mastered the operation of the back window escape hatch. The owner was thrilled, one of the few few people ever to identify her by breed. “They’re so smart, English Shepherds,” he nodded with the wild-eyed enthusiasm generally reserved for bobble-heads, as we relayed the details of our day. “Will do anything to protect their herd. I had one who lived to be twelve, a long time for them, who once ate an entire wheel of Muenster cheese I’d deliberately hidden from her inside the busted-up seat of my old Volvo. I have no idea how she got it from there, because I put it way up there, but she didn’t shit for four days after that. They’re smart dogs. Brilliant.”
And after this, of course, I knew mine was more brilliant than the rest. Mine would pace herself. Or at least She’d never gorge on anything -quite- so gut-wrenching. She only gorged herself on us.
(September 11, 2001 – September 17, 2014. Two shit-ass awful days sandwiching 13 years of salmon snatching, plate cleaning, woodchuck-hunting, and Bitsy-training, amongst other virtues.)