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Traveller on the MoveAugust 10, 2008 Puppy Traveller is most definitely growing up. Sometimes when I look at him I see an adult dog -- then he wakes up, or grabs the leash with his teeth, or gives me an unmistakably puppyish look. He turned five months old at the end of July. Around that time he started lifting his leg to pee, a sign of sexual maturity. He still squats at least a third of the time, but I've also noticed him peeing on trees that another dog just peed on. He is, need I say, a very handsome guy. He came with me to my father's memorial service, meaning he spent most of the day in the truck, with occasional breaks. True, he did demolish the coffee cup I got at McDonalds; apparently he drank the two or three fingers' worth remaining because though I found soggy bits of paper cup on the floor I didn't find any puddles. Trav is not destructive. Trav, however, does like to remind me that my belongings are at his mercy, and that it's only through his goodwill that I have any socks or boots left. My various boots and the day's pair of socks rest on a plastic tray next to the door. Trav will occasionally pluck up a sock, or occasionally a hiking boot (which have nice long laces, the better to pull it around with), and remove it to the kitchen rug a few feet away. He doesn't chew on it; he just wants to make sure I'm paying attention. At the barn he lifts brushes and towels from grooming boxes, all of which are on the tackroom floor, and saunters out of the barn with them. If I can't figure out which box he swiped the item from, I leave it on the counter by the boombox. His favorite barn chewie is the cats' double-bowl feed dish. The hard green plastic is remarkably sturdy: Travvy's teeth marks are barely noticeable. Dis Kitty and Dat Kitty don't seem to mind eating from a dish that the resident puppy (of whom they remain suspicious) has gnawed and slobbered on. Trav also likes playing with Pernod's red and white Jolly Ball. He drags it around by the handle, chases it when I kick it, and uses his whole body to roll it this way and that. When he gets bored, he goes to visit Tilly the Labradoodle, who lives on the other side of the Lobdells'. It seems he can't hear me over there when I yell "Where's Travvy?" I have to climb the hill and cross the Lobdells' lawn. Then he can hear me, and usually he'll come crashing through the bushes right away, often with Tilly trailing behind. I'm thinking of teaching him to come to a whistle. Its sound will carry farther than my yelling. Almost from the beginning he's been coming along with Allie and me. At first he'd toddle along up the barn driveway and back. Then he graduated to circling the boat barn and the construction site nearby. Toward the end of June he made his first trip around what we call "the triangle," a trail through the woods that we use for warming up the horses when we're planning to ride in the ring. At first he needed some coaxing to follow along: I'd look back from 20 yards ahead and he'd be sitting at attention, waiting for my command. I hadn't told him to sit, and we hadn't done any work on "stay" at that point. When I turned in the saddle, called him, and made the appropriate hand signals, he'd come scampering to catch up. I still don't know how he got the idea that he was supposed to sit and stay -- quite possibly he figured out that if he sits and stays, then comes when I call, he'll get a cookie. Once in the woods he keeps up, and he's got better and better about not getting in Allie's way. He trots along behind, or sometimes alongside or in front. Sometimes he'll pause to sniff leaves along the trail, or crash through the brush in vain pursuit of a rabbit or squirrel. Yesterday afternoon I decided it was time for a longer ride, a real trail ride. So instead of making the circuit around "the triangle," we struck off from its furthest point, continued around George Fisher's field and followed the trails and dirt roads through the woods to the Old Holmes Hole Road, a rough but mostly drivable dirt road that runs along the back of the M.V. Land Bank's Tisbury Meadow property. A left fork off that road winds through the woods a ways and eventually reconnects with our triangle. Trav was great. Allie mostly power-walked, but we did some trotting. Trav kept up. I thought maybe I'd worn him out, then as we were getting close to home territory he took off after a rustling in the underbrush. I called and called, and after a minute or two I was having visions of phoning Animal Control to put out an APB for a large missing puppy. But he came back, bounding over the scrub and looking quite pleased with himself. Out in the woods with a horse and a dog -- it doesn't get much better than that.
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