For thirteen and a half years, I thought my dog just slept between walks. I thought of her as a companion animal whose only real work was as my personal trainer, the pet who lived impatiently from walk to walk.
Only when the intervals between walks dragged on too long did I see her out in the field, digging for rodents, or rolling in malodorous stuff.
This last trick was a sore point between us. I know she thought acquiring the odor of some dead varmint was analogous to me daubing perfume behind my ears.
I think she thought the odor of rotten meat was like an olfactory invisibility cloak when in fact it made her a canine non grata in the house. In her youth, my dog resisted the bath required to erase her brief triumph.
As she aged, she’d return home stinking of something ripe, lower her head, and climb into the tub on her own volition, as if submitting to the foibles of her humans was just one more of our unreasonable demands.
That this dog was a working dog didn’t really sink in until her health declined and she died last August.
Since then, I’ve learned that she wasn’t just entertaining herself as she walked the perimeter of our acreage, and she wasn’t just sleeping by the back door, waiting for her next walk. It turns out, she was a working dog, and she was on patrol, protecting her turf.
I know this for certain, because in the few months since she’s been gone, we’ve had a fox in the hen house, deer in the garden, and a bear in the bees.
The fox attacked my laying flock, which used to roam across the landscape, doing double duty fertilizing and debugging the lawn. We lost eight hens and lived without eggs for a few months. Fortunately, the fox didn’t find the pullets fenced in the orchard, but until we find and train a new dog, they’re cooped up.
The deer didn’t find much to their liking in the garden, but seeing their heart-shaped hoof prints was a shock. All these years, I figured our patch was deer free because it wasn’t directly on their way from the woods to the river, as our neighbor’s is. They’ve always had a deer problem, despite an elaborate fence. Now I suspect our dog was our fence. If we don’t find a new dog, all my spinach is at risk.
Only one hive survived last winter, and it thrived right up until one night in November, when a bear destroyed it. I depend on my honey crop for holiday gifts. Too late, I learned that I had my dog to thank for that.
I’m not sure what I’ll do without honey for gifts, but I’m absolutely certain what I’ll do without a dog: find a new one, and fall in love again.
