Annie the dog found a box turtle yesterday while she was outside with Steve. I'm sure she viewed it as an interactive toy, but then it did what terrapins do - it went inside, slammed the doors and windows shut and refused to come back out. Not to be deterred, Annie nosed it and rolled it and tossed it about until it was locked up tight, not to be budged.
I distracted Annie for a second, caught her by the collar, and picked up the turtle. Fairly decent sized yard turtle it was, a little smaller than half a cantaloupe. I walked it over to a spot closer to the garden, set it down, and insisted Annie come in with me. Annie, like most dogs, is fairly easy to distract most of the time ("Squirrel!"), but there are other times that, for all her apparent flightiness, she is amazingly focused. Or maybe just obsessive.
We'd been inside for a little bit when she became restless and made it quite clear that she wanted to go outside. Needed to go out! She was so insistent I thought maybe she had some unfinished business (having been so preoccupied with the turtle maybe she forgot to potty before). I clicked the lead on her collar and out we went. I was headed out to the place where she usually does her personal business, but she ran the line all the way out trying to go over to the garden where I had freed her captive earlier.
"No, come on over here. Don't you need to potty?" But it seems her elaborate dance to go outside was for nothing more than to go find her reticent and unwilling new acquaintance. She honed right in on the exact spot where I had set the turtle earlier. It was gone now, and Annie wanted like anything to go into the garden and find it. She ran this way and that, ears cocked, triangulating in on subtle movement in the underbrush where her terrapin had most likely headed. Annie can be amazingly strong for an under-forty-pound dog, but I was able to wrangle her back into the house.
I let her out this afternoon for a little while. By and by I heard barking. I asked Steve if that was a TV dog or Annie barking. I went to the front door to look, and it was Annie barking. Her back was up in a ridge and she was giving holy heck to something I couldn't see.
"What're you barking at, girl?"
She glanced back at me when I spoke to her and when she did, I saw the unmistakable white flag tail - two deer - and as Annie turned and took off after them, both deer ran left into the woods in front of the house.
Oh, brother, I thought, please don't go onto the woods and she didn't - she ran right past where they turned into the woods, and out into the field. Some strategy I don't understand? I don't know, but maybe the deer circled through the woods because the next thing I saw was one of the deer loping across the field and, just like a slow motion movie scene, flying over the fence like it wasn't even there. Amazing thing to see. And then there was Annie, barreling toward the fence.
Fortunately Annie seems to have a little bit of sense about where and how to go through the fence. It's a three-strand barbed wire fence in a state of deferred maintenance. It wouldn't hold a determined heifer (which is one reason we don't have one). Not at all impassable, but challenging. Annie ran back and forth until she found a place she could get through without injury and she was off across the big field going after the deer. There is no catching her when she runs like that, and she becomes determinedly deaf. You can holler yourself hoarse, but she'll come back when she's jolly well good and ready, so just save your voice and your sanity and go find something else to do until then. Which is what I did.
I went in the house and got the leash. I thought at some point she would come back and come close enough to me to snag her, but I also knew that, Annie being Annie, if she saw the leash, it'd be a big game of "You can't catch me!" Very annoying. So I tucked the leash into the back of my britches and walked out toward where she'd gone through the fence. Before I got there, she came back through, but she wasn't ready to settle down yet, and took off through our field, away from me and the house, little stinker. I walked out that way, too, trying not to look like I was following her (yeah, good luck with that) and about the time I was almost there, here she came bounding back, tongue hanging down to here. That's usually an indication she'll be agreeable to going in the house, but it has to be her idea.
She led me back toward the house, and sure enough, before we got there, darned if she didn't take out through the fence and across the big field again. That was a short trip and when she came back she was ready to come in. Led me to the front door, waited for me to open it, and trotted right in like she was the boss or something. As usual, she went over and crashed on the floor in front of the air conditioning vent, and I didn't hear a peep out of her for a good long while.
I must say, the Universe was having a good day when it called Central Casting and ordered Annie the Dog for us.
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