A benevolent bitch speaks her truth

Doggedly maintaining perspective on the everyday party called life.

(This my best spontaneous effort at channeling my Doberman Pinscher mix Rosie’s thoughts and impressions during or after a typical run. She’s been living with me for two and a half years now, a little less than 40 percent of her life. I figure one way to get into a better groove is to emulate the mindset of someone incapable of maintaining or even imagining a “bad mood.”

Any apparent mistranslations or examples of projection are solely the responsibility of the reader and the dog.)

Up we are by the crack of nine, usually. I just wait for the babbling to begin. This usually means we’ll be on the move shortly. This makes me happy. Really, the only times anyone should be inside are during thunderstorms or other high-wind events. But we can’t get going until he drinks some astonishingly foul brown liquid (and this is coming from someone who eats things off the pavement).

Our first run of the day is usually done entirely inside our yard. Let me show you a map of most of it.

It may not be clear from the graphic, but our yard includes a great many enclaves of “outside” land on which have been installed houses and, often, dogs. These are fenced off from our yard in a series of modest squares, like the one at the center of our own vast estate. When we run on paths that pass these places, many dogs will race up to their side of our internal property fence and insist on asserting their authority. In general, they seem nice enough. I have yet to figure out the human fascination with fences and boundaries, but, given their manifest importance, I am a roving and attentive steward of our sovereign land.

First, on the running thing…although I don’t really have the tools to describe what my life was like before June 30, 2018, I made it clear that I had never been walked consistently on a leash before, much less been formally exercised while tethered to one. The word about town is that I was a dragger whose one-the-move heft seemed to greatly exceed her 48 pounds. Skinny, but “strong af.” So before long, I was fitted with a Gentle Leader, but within months had become so intuitive and cooperative about running with various humans that I was back on a regular leash, nimble as can be and easily cajoled in the next right direction by simple commands of “left” and “other left.”

Our morning runs have a character unto their own thanks to the feeding habits of squirrels. There are at least five in just the dozen or so square miles of our yard, and presumably more throughout the rest of the city. I know this because I have seen them all in a loose group, though more often they travel in pairs or even solo. I usually chase one or two up a tree near the eastern reaches of the astronomy campus, only to see them materialize by Nevin Platt Middle School later in the day or even in the same run. I suspect that we do not always take the most direct route to whatever remote corner of the yard we eventually reach before turning for home, because the squirrels are always waiting for us, never the reverse.

Evening runs, in contrast, are dominated by the rabbit. These vexatious playthings are like cats in that they appear completely disinterested in my looming presence until I commit to a fetching leap at them, at which point they spring expertly out of reach in a random direction. Again, there must be six, even eight scattered throughout the yard. They lack the basic ambition to even climb trees, yet they are clearly survivors.

We have also noticed a number of enclaves along the recreation paths of homeless animals known as prairie dogs. This is a misnomer, because they are clearly some sort of land otter. Groups of them have been digging holes to stay in as the nights grow chilly, and when we run by their camps, they often emerge from these makeshift bunkers to form a double wall of chittering protest, as if they’re not squatters in the first place. Sorry to disturb your nap, fellas! They are as harmless as the other aforementioned pranksters, although noisy and easily spooked by the sight of construction vehicles.

Finally there are the geese. I mean this in the nicest way, but these may be the most vile and insipid of our visitors. We have a sizable pond out near our weightlifting center toward the unbuildable protected space yonder, and to the best of my observational powers, these alleged birds while away their days defecating, shedding, honking, and fouling the water with their avian effluvia. Birds have only one excretion hole for everything! Same with the goose variant, and it’s a big one because some of their leavings become fall hazards — ahem, not for me — when they freeze to the paths like sullen little logs.

My ideal temperature, about 20 degrees American and -6 otherwhere, will not consistently arrive for a while, he says. My person says to be careful what you wish for. At the same time, the need to jump in one of the creeks every ten minutes seems to have disappeared for a while. My summertime runs are really more like ambitious hiking ventures, with the sun turning my shiny dark coat into the casing of a furnace. Okay, I don’t even know what that means! But at present, I do about 40 miles each week, plus some walking.

In a perfect world, it would rarely stop snowing. But this one is quite nice as it is. The overwhelming majority of travelers through the yard are human-dog pairs, though most are just ambling, and they are very polite and respectful. Almost all of them pick up their poop, perhaps because of the cameras.

So stay cute, and perhaps you’ll get that extra half-cup of kibble you always wanted. And maybe we’ll even see you in our yard sometime.