footprints

Last night a light dusting of snow covered just enough ground to record footprints, the visible signs that several different creatures were in the yard when we weren't looking. The squirrels' feet etch the ground with a curiously graceful print of tiny, tiny paws and spider-thin toes. Elsewhere, a cluster of three prints suggests rabbits, mostly up and around the apple trees. Who knows what the others are? Maybe foxes-- I've seen a mother and two kits making figure eights in the snow, and once a larger fox munching calmly on some cereal I'd thrown out for the birds. Raccoons are always disappearing down nearby storm drains and, occasionally, dismantling our garbage can.

For the dogs, the new snow lies atop the crusty remains of the existing snow, where their own footprints have worn grooves that now make walking a series of navigations. Their feet fall through the crust in one place, wobble along an established trail in another. In other words, it's no fun walking in the yard today. Pearl rushes for the ball, but quickly finds that running is even harder than walking.I throw the ball against the fence, but even the bounce is dulled as it lands with a thud in the hard--but not quite hard enough--snow. Pearl makes a game effort to find this barely bouncing ball challenging, but pretty quickly we both know that no real play is likely to be. . . afoot. In a desperate move, I throw the ball hard--right over the fence and into the alley, now inaccessible because I can't get out the side gate for the pile of snow on the other side. Pearl looks puzzled. "Let's take a break," I say, with a sigh of resignation.

Probably as well, though, because I don't want to occasion another sliced carpal pad like she got at Christmas while chasing a frisbee in icy snow. Just in the last couple of weeks the pad has finally closed up, the hair grown densely back. And just in the last week, she seems to be able to run indefinitely without suddenly stopping, dropping the ball, and looking at me. "Does your foot hurt?" I've learned ask. She holds it up: yes. Game over, we go inside.

So now, game over, we go inside, feet mercifully intact, making wet prints into the house and across the kitchen floor. Interminable winter.

Name That Pet

I don’t have a knack for pet names and frequently find myself embarrassed in retrospect by the names I choose. My first dog came ready-named in the days when I didn’t understand that you can change a dog’s name. Jody. Then I named the puppy I adopted when Jody died for a mawkish reason related to Jody. Then we adopted Josie and kept her name because I thought, mawkishly, that her name uncannily combined both of my previous dogs’ names. I don’t remember how we came up with Lucy, but considering that at least 100,000 people in our neighborhood alone would also have dogs named Lucy, I’m assuming the name was just somehow in the air.

Kosmo is a dog who could have many different names. In fact, at least once a week, we say something like, “You know, we should have named him Bongo,” or recently, I wish we’d named him Mouse. We waited to find an essence, but when so many appeared, we named him Kosmo. The SPCA called him Jeffrey, which seems kind of inappropriate for a dog, but Kosmo being Kosmo, it would have been workable. In fact, he looks a little like a Jeffrey.

Nancy (behaviorist) said we might want to consider renaming Pearl since “Pearl” for her now has a mix of associations, only some of which are good. And thus began the
Name-That-Dog conversation that thus far has come up empty.

The second time Pearl tried to bite Nancy, Nancy said “Why you little snapper!” And I thought, “Hmm. Snapper. That’s pretty good.” An essence, maybe. Patrick liked it, too, and it remains his favorite among about 1,000 names I’ve offered. The name can’t be serious, so try as I might to find, say, a Native American word that would catch her essence, everything possible is too somber. Lately I like Sparky because I think of the word “sparky” not as a name, but as a comment one of my favorite people in the world wrote in the margins of a student's essay. The idea was, she wrote, “really sparky!” a sentiment otherwise hard to express and one I agreed with completely. And lest “Sparky” seem like a boy’s name, I’m prepared to make it short for “Sparkle,” which I think is kind of a funny name—in a sparky sort of way. But Patrick isn’t going for it.

lost in translation

If Pearl were a public figure, she'd be said to be "polarizing." In the private world in which we skulk, I occupy both poles all by myself, rising high one day and falling low the next, arguing both positions fervently, feeling protective of Pearl who is under assault by. . . me.

Having a really reactive dog puts a strain on my interpretive abilities: is she good or bad? is she nice or nasty?One reason I'm not an intuitive dog trainer is that I really do misunderstand dogs. I don't entirely misunderstand cats, though, and I think the big difference is that allow cats their wildness, concede that on a very profound level, they are going to remain inviolate, locked in their own very separate consciousness. Just moments ago, Squeex the Cat seemed to want to be brushed, so I started brushing her very, very gently because brushing is not something she's always tolerated. In no time at all, she got annoyed and tried to bite me. Now I'm not crazy about this reaction, but I know that she's doing what she's doing because she doesn't like what I'm doing and is letting me know. Not all cats do the same things, of course. But I've had cats who were absolutely devoted companions who might, nevertheless (except for Gilly, who never did) bite if bugged enough or at the wrong moment. Nervous cats hiss at me, and I don't mind a bit, and, in fact, I get really annoyed with people who take cats' behavior personally. Cats are great. Cats are cats.They aren't like you and me, at least not ultimately, not importantly--which is part of what makes them interesting.

But dogs. Whereas I know that Pearl keeps tormenting the long-suffering Kosmo because she's got crazy energy to burn, sometimes when she's yanking on his collar, I think, "Now that's just plain mean." And whereas I know that she's likely to spook in an instant, when she tries to bite the well-meaning pet store person who just gave her a treat, I'm mortified and horrified all at once, and I can't help thinking that Pearl just isn't nice. And my heart sinks, but not before it goes hard as a stone. I understand the problem here, I really do, but I can't always talk myself out of my emotions as they rocket around. So Pearl is a dog. There's wildness there. She's not a wolf anymore, but she's not a person, either.

what is that man doing?

Today Pearl is recovering from her sudden and unexpected apprehension that Patrick is imminently dangerous when he does a little sideways dance in the kitchen. There we were: Patrick, me, and several furry Others; Patrick was illustrating something in what we both thought—in that briefest of moments when we were young and happy—was a funny manner. Then Pearl did her best leap and lunge, nipping Patrick’s arm. I grabbed her by her head-collar-with-short-rope-attached and asked her to sit. Bucking ensued. And now she appears hung over and not quite sure if Patrick is someone she should take her eyes off. You can see her thinking, “Will he do that dance again?” I’d like to say, as I might once have done, “Well, Snarly, you never know.” But in truth, after the fracas, Patrick said, “Geez, I wish I hadn’t made that move.”

the turbo-driven life

Ok. The snow can go away now. Instead, the 8 foot piles of dirty gray snow are going to melt very, very slowly. It's still February,after all, and there's a lot of snow around. Both dogs are sort of done: Kosmo wants desperately to get to the end of the yard, and Pearl needs more ways to burn off her turbo charged energy. In fact, if we weren't in the midst of the new regime, where we never say "no," but do a variety of diversionary things instead, we'd be saying no all day. No! Leave Kosmo's collar alone! No! Get down off the counters! No! Stop pacing and lie down. And so on. We all took a walk ("When Pearl pulls, take one step back") and Pearl pulled, I took a step back, Pearl pulled, I took a step back, and Pearl pulled, and I took a step back, and then, at long last, the walk was over. We have been playing lots of ball in the snow. For the first time, Pearl is willing to use her nose to find a ball that she can't see. She's really a lot of fun doing rabbit-hops into the deeper snow, digging around, looking to me to see if I'm still going to say "Keep looking." I make a huge fuss when she finds a particularly buried ball, and she seems enormously pleased.

snow

We are absolutely crushed under the snow, which has flattened trees and bushes and weighed down power lines. On the first day of it, Kosmo decides that he’s not leaving the porch, but Pearl keeps launching herself into a bank of snow, trying to find purchase. As always, I have to admire her spirit and the way she seems hardly to notice that since the last time she came outside, 30 inches of something white and wet has covered everything familiar and turned the ground into, well, into something white and wet and deeper than she is tall. But it doesn’t trouble her, doesn’t even merit a second look. She doesn’t love it, and she doesn’t hate it. She appears to regard it with complete equanimity, much as you’d think she’d regard, say, the teapot, except that she’s afraid of the teapot, or the broom, except she’s terrified of the broom. So I suppose this is what it means to be a little feral: if you find yourself in 30 inches of snow, you just look for shelter and curl into a tight, warm ball, preferably with a member of your pack if you have one. Nobody remarks upon the weather. But if a teapot shows up, it’s every pup for herself.