Ben no longer writes for us, but he left us this publication to remember.
This time, last year, Elise and I were titled to a bar (remember them?) In Montana, speaking of what couples of dogs without children generally speak: our pet. We had the kit, or had it had us? – For a year and change at that time, and we had taught him the basics: sit, stay, shake, tweet with Lindsey Graham. As a waiter, a woman dressed in flannel who seemed to kill an alce with a look, we fill our cold smoke, we agreed to the conversation. “What should we teach our dog below?” I asked.
She spilled some foam and considered. Then she said: “Do.”
Unfortunately, we said, kit was not exactly the type of hunt. An amalgam of thirty pounds on Terrier, Pug and Gerbil squats, loves nothing more than sofas and hugs, ideally savored at the same time. Although she is a lush squirrel hunter, the only time she managed to capture a rodent, an unfortunate stop, she simply stirred the poor man like a sweet sucking and spitting unharmed. We explain more an ornamental dog, as frivolously entertaining as a Christmas tree.
No more, however, we can dismiss the kit as a Maladroit vanity pet. We recently discovered, to our astonishment, that she has a unique and unique talent. Immediately, the Eggdog saga.
One night last month, we met around a fire in the backyard of our neighbors, our main source of social interaction in these last nine months. Our neighbors, Nick and Alicia, perform a kind of peri -urban permaculture operation, which includes a flock of chickens that are limited to wild. The chickens spend their days wandering through the neighborhood, mainly in our courtyard, pecking the grass and kicking the mulch. We often return home to find them by moving around our plague, like Jehovah’s Witnesses who expect someone to answer the door.
The peripatetic habits of the flock, unfortunately, hinder the collection of eggs. Lately, Nick told us, they had stopped going to the chicken coop. Where exactly they were However, bedtime was an open question, since its habitat covers a full city block. In the absence of eggs, he complained, the chickens were just a lot of free loaders, demanding food and refuge and expensive antibiotic ointments that must throw their throats like chocolate syrup. Chickens were no longer intentional work animals; Instead, they had emigrated to the softer creature category to which our dog belongs: they had become adorable parasites known as pets.
While we discussed chickens and eggs, the kit, our own adorable parasite, entering and leaving the light of fire, weaving between our legs like a slalomer. Every few minutes we listen to her whispering in the recesses turned off from her patio, reaching any hidden mischief that the dogs are the privacy of darkness. The conversation went ahead; Time passed; The beers were open and swallowed. And then, after a while, Elise looked at his boots, to find an elegant, uninterrupted and perfect egg.
Mistified, we discuss its origin. Had he been sitting there all the time, unnoticed? Or had something, or someoneSilly delivered it –
And then the kit was accompanied again in the brightness of the fire, its kind jaws wrapped around a cream ovoid. She knelt in an elegant game forest, lowered her head and deposited with love another egg at our feet.
We are all speechless. The kit turned, his tail arched on his back like that of a scorpion, and jogged towards black beyond the fire ring. We saw his attenuated Silhouette silhouette army under a growl of brambles that no human could penetrate. We listen to her root, looking at her snout through the leaf litter like a wild boar. We hope, a minute, maybe two. And then he left, another egg was put in his jaws, which he delivered to us, as proud as a girl who made her first pinch boat in a summer camp art class.
We bathe her of praise, scratch the ears and then send it back to the secret nest to do it again. That she did. And he did, and he did, and he did.
Reader, at the end of the night, the kit had excavated eleven Eggs of that bush. We expected that she found a dozen even, but obviously she had taken advantage of the chickens. However, in later visits, it has unearthed five more, taking its total to 16. It has become as reliable as a truffle.
It seems, then, I owe an apology. During the thirty months that he has been in our lives, I have belittled the senses of kit: how many times does an squirrel slide over only meters of his snoot during our walks, just for her to remain fixed (stubbornly, you could say) on the sidewalk under her legs? Despite the fact that he had lived in Mean streets at some point in his past, a feat of survival that I could never achieve, I admit that I considered it adorable but fundamentally incompetent.
However, his adventures in the search for eggs have given me a new appreciation for their abilities. “Explosive detection dogs smell as little as a picogram, a billionth of one gram, TNT or another explosive,” said the dog cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz. Once, it seemed unfathomable that Kit shared DNA with such acute canine; Now, I suspect you have latent potential reservations waiting to be beaten.
And yet, it was not the acuity of the sniffer of kit that impressed me the most. Rather, it was the tenderness with which each egg presented us, this small and fragile object, tight with such caution in its strong terrier jaws, as if trying its precious delicacy, as if I knew that your gift moved us. She knew, somehow, she had some value. And us wereus were Touched: for eggs, yes, but also for this unexpected sample of aptitude, realizing that our family so familiar was still able to surprise us with its soft skill.
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