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Travvy Meets the PuppyhorseJune 05, 2008 Fellow Traveller is turning out to be quite the horse-sitter's companion. In the last week or so I've helped out at no fewer than three barns other than the one where Allie lives. At each place, Trav jumps down from the seat (or squeezes out from the back of the cab), surveys the scene, and starts settling in. All three barns have dogs in residence. At Carole's barn, two Springer spaniels and a Cairn terrier are part of the job. First I give Beeber the pony his lunch -- a flake of hay -- then I pick out his paddock, then the dogs, Trav, and I go for a walk in the woods. Pip, the terrier, is a nine-pound pistol. I've seen her flying along behind Carole's carriage: her paws never touch the ground and she can keep up with a smartly trotting Fjord pony for miles. Trav is totally smitten with Pip, whom he outweighs by almost 20 pounds already. In size he's catching up with Jake, the younger Springer, but it's still easy to tell which one's the puppy. By the second day, however, the puppy was pretty clearly the leader of the four-dog pack. When we got back to the house, he got first crack at the water bowl and no one else came close till he was done. A couple of those days it was pretty warm at midday, so I put out extra bowls for the others. Night before last one of my regular clients had emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix, so Trav and I have been doing morning and evening chores for two young Dales geldings, Sterling and Cole, and Rhodry's old nemesis, Contessa the puppyhorse. The puppyhorse PDQ took care of any notion Trav might have had about smaller being sweeter. Whenever he draws close to the post-and-rail paddock fence, she fixes him with a warning look. He backs off. Sometimes he barks -- tentatively. This morning he jumped over the low bottom rail when he thought Contessa was occupied with her hay. Rhodry could have told him that Contessa has eyes in the back of her head. She gave chase, worried puppy skedaddled into the stall, and I went around to open the inside door in case worried puppy needed an exit strategy. He did. The puppyhorse returned to her hay. This barn also has three cats, two grays who are large and furry enough to be part Maine Coon and a smaller, much lither ginger cat. Trav hasn't had much success yet in trying to get cats to play with him; they mostly think he wants to eat them. Still he trots after them, looking for all the world like the tag-along little brother who wants to play ball with the big guys -- even though these big guys are all smaller than he is. The cats' food bowl is on a shelf about four feet above the tack and grain room floor. Trav can already recognize a possible food source at 20 paces, and it didn't take him long to zero in on this one. He climbed up on one of the two Adirondack chairs under the shelf. After trying without success to reach the bowl, he jumped down from that chair and climbed up on the other one, which was a little closer. Not close enough, it turned out, but the Pupster's problem-solving ability is developing nicely. Since I was just up the road, I stopped by the Scottish Bakehouse (completely rebuilt since its founder, the late and very Scots Isabella White, presided over it) for something gooey. Experienced some sticker shock at the $2.75 muffins -- last I looked, muffins went for around $1.50, but it's been a while and these may be high-end. Settled on an almond crossant, which turned out to be worth the $3 I paid for it. It was quite a bustling place at that hour -- between 8:15 and 8:30 -- with continual traffic in and out. Break out of your usual schedule, hang out at a different place at a different time of day, and you see a whole new slice of the island.
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