I am not ashamed to say I wasn’t all on board with getting a second Wirehaired Pointing Griffon. I liked Murphy, our first one, but he challenged me. We got off on the wrong foot when my husband left me for a weekend and my right foot was in a cast (see what I did there?). I couldn’t manage the dog, a crutch, and a teenager who was afraid of the puppy. Griffs are mouthy and Murphy had puppy sharp teeth. You can tell a kid what to do, but the kid has to *do* it and this child couldn’t bring herself to assert her dominance. Me, I researched how to assert dominance. For the rest of his life, I asserted dominance with him. He was stubborn, loving, funny, and loyal to a fault – to my husband. I was always second fiddle, and he knew it.
But the sadness in my husband’s heart after the loss of his beloved bird dog was more than I could bear so we saved pennies until we had news of a new litter on the way.
That litter failed. We were put on a waiting list for the next time the breeder had a bitch ready to deliver puppies. The wait was excruciating but on September 24th, 2020, we received news that the pups had been born. My husband had first pick, but we would have to travel to eastern Idaho in November to pick the pup up. Oh, Joy.
That’s a trip over several mountain passes. Winter is not kind in eastern Oregon and all of Idaho. And wouldn’t you know? It snowed the morning we headed out of La Grande (we spent the night with a relative there as a halfway point between Portland and Bonner’s Ferry). We pulled onto the freeway as the snowplows began their ascent up Ladd Canyon. I made my husband drive. He made me drive all the way back home.
Oh, the puppies! I can’t remember how many there were but most of t hem were male. I think we had nine puppies to choose from, all males. There was this one pup that just did its own thing, wandering off by itself. And there was this other pup that just wanted to crawl up in our laps, stub of a tail wagging, and pushing all of his siblings aside to get to us. He was hardly the size of an adult Chihuahua (but chubbier). We brought him home.
He has been different from his predecessor from the get-go. He’s mouthy, but not in a nippy way. I don’t tolerate it so he doesn’t chew on me. He has wreaked havoc in my flower beds. He picks flowers because I pick flowers. He “talks” to me the way my mother’s Mini Schnauzer used to “talk” to her. He’ll talk to my husband, but he prefers to have his “conversations” with me. He looks so sad when he gets chastised. He needs to be touching members of his pack all the time.
His pack includes friends of ours who come over and spoil him. When our grandson visited this past summer, it took only a couple nights before Ruger decided he needed a teenage boy in his life.
Ruger chases butterflies. You can say the word, “Squirrel” and he stops everything he is doing to look. He just set his head on my keyboard because he has an insatiable need to “help”. He pulls weeds. He lays down in front of me when I am weeding, smashing my flowers. He steals weeds out of my weed basket and throws them around the yard. He takes care of his stuffed animals. He knows them by name: Sloth, Moose, Baby Puppy, Wolfie, Donkey, Giraffe, Lambchops,Tiger, Flat Rabbit and he knows where he last left them.
He has wormed his way into my heart.
He barks at things he doesn’t understand. A tarp that is rustled by the wind. His toy swimming pool when it is empty and rolls across the yard in the wind. A teenager coming out of the house in the night looking for all the world (to Ruger) like a ghost. But once he understands, he no longer barks. And he slept on top of that teenager for a week.
And today, he provided the best entertainment. He found something he didn’t understand, and he started barking. His tail tucked between his legs and his back legs quivering. No, his hackles don’t rise: it’s just something he doesn’t understand. Something off. But he was insistent that something was “wrong”.
My husband and I followed him to the source of his angst.
A leaf dangled from a spider web, inches from the side of the house, seemingly suspended in the air by a mysterious and invisible source.
We’re terrible parents. We laughed. And laughed. We didn’t offer to show him it was harmless. We just laughed at him as he inched closer to the mystery, his haunches taut and shaking in fear. He moved his nose forward, trying to get a fix on this mystery, then the wind would shift, and he would jump back, barking at the Thing in the Air. He would inch even closer, his hind end shivering and his tail down (not tucked, just down). Jump back. Bark. Adults laugh.
He finally got his nose on the leaf and realized he’d been tricked. He took a bite out of the leaf and dropped it on the ground. He looked at us, proud of his ability to discern, explore, and dispose of a mystery threat.
He’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot.
SQUIRREL.
Jaci Dawn 