Barking Mad

So what do you do when the Moon howls back?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/9/05
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

Anyone who has ever owned a Samoyed dog knows they are loveable cement heads. They are friendly, loyal, intelligent, and gentle. But, with the possible exception of the basset hound, they are the most stubborn dogs on this green earth.

Case in point: on the weekends, I often mow the lawn in the early evening. The mountain air cools quickly as the sun goes down, making the chore comfortable, and of course, you want to water the lawn after mowing, and it just makes sense to do it in the evening, when the evaporation rate is much lower and the sun’s rays don’t burn the fragile short bottom grass.

But today it was sticky, muggy, mung, flat-lander type weather, and on days like this, if it gets hot, it stays hot until 9, sometimes 10 at night. In a place where it reliably drops below 60 degrees (15C) every night, having temperatures near 80 (26C) at sunset is pretty miserable. Yes, we’re spoiled rotten. It makes up for the four meter snowfalls we sometimes get in the winter.

So I mowed the lawn at 9am instead of 7pm. Moon, my elderly female Sam, watched this with a faint air of resigned disapproval. She realizes that I am a hairless ape, and thus prone to a certain emotional fecklessness that leads to acts of wild abandon, such as mowing the lawn when any idiot can see the sun is on THAT side of the house.

The location of the sun is germane to this discussion. Not so much its actual physical location along the spiral arm of the Milky Way, or its role in the heliocentric nature of the solar system, but the fact that it was in the eastern sky, which meant that at 10 am, Moon likes to go out into our front yard, shaded by the house and a sequoia, and take a nap.

I finished mowing the front yard about 9:45, turned on the front yard sprinklers, and went around to mow the back. I got sidetracked by my neighbor Bobby, who wanted to shoot the breeze about politics. Bobby regards my politics in much the same way that Moon regards my lawn-mowing propensities; a bit strange, but I have redeeming features. We got to talking long enough that my tabby-siamese mix, Big Mack, jumped up on my shoulders and took a nap. (I don’t move around much or gesticulate wildly while talking, which Mack sees as one of those redeeming features I mentioned.)

After that, I mowed the back yard, set the sprinklers, and went in to play around on the computer and finish reading the paper.

When all was said and done, it was probably about 11:30 before I realized the front yard sprinklers were still on, and that this was probably a case of overkill, especially since it had clouded up. So I went to turn them off.

And there was Moon, curled up in the front yard in her normal location, sound asleep.

Directly in the path of one of the sprinklers.

Which had been on for nearly two hours.

And she had doubtlessly curled up in the jet of water and dozed off about 9:50 or so. As soon as that noisy, annoying lawn mower was gone.

Moon sleeps in a particular spot at a particular time, and neither the chugging of the pulse sprinkler nor being hit by jets of water every 20 seconds or so was going to deter her from taking that nap.

It was the natural order of things.

And it’s very very important to observe the natural order of things.

Let me tell you: that dog was WET. It’ll be Labor Day before she dries out completely.

Now, Sams are arctic dogs. There isn’t much the local weather can toss at them that fazes them much. Once I left our male out back during a snowstorm, and when I realized what I had done, I was horror-struck. Three feet had fallen, enough to be life threatening to a dog. Not this guy; he just curled up, slapped his tail over his nose, and went to sleep, unconcernedly letting the snow bury him. He was fine. Hadn’t even worked up an appetite yet.

Oddly enough, they do well in hot weather, too. Their thick white coats are double layered for insulation, and, being white, reflect most of the sun. Like any dog, they need lots of shade and water for comfort, but they do just fine on a 90 degree day, lolling under the apple tree and occasionally going over and standing in the wading pool we set up for them to cool their paws. (Sams, like all dogs, sweat through their paws only, and that, along with panting, is how they cool off).

We learned, early on, that if you leave a Sam out in the rain and snow, he doesn’t mind. In fact, he thoroughly enjoys it. Behavior like this with most other types of dogs would be at the very least abusive, and possibly slop over into animal cruelty, and since we had two other canids, a wolf hybrid and a cocker spaniel mix, we never did take it for granted that it was ok to leave a dog out in blinding snow or pouring cold rain. But it’s ok to do that with Sams. They not only don’t suffer; they enjoy it. Unless they get hungry, they aren’t real anxious to come in unless it’s getting dark out. Dark, apparently, is boring to a Sam. Otherwise, they’ll come in, somewhat reluctantly, and a bit puzzled that we would think we would want them to be warm and dry and in our company, instead of out in the sleet and cold mud.

But rain and snow are one thing; jets of water are another. We learned early that neither of the Sams liked being squirted with the hose, and the pulsating sprinklers, a recent addition, seemed to bother Moon. Her ears would flick irritably at the tchik-tchik-tchik-burrrt noise.

But that spot of lawn was her place, and it was her time to take a nap, and by hell and high water, she was going to do so. So she lay down in the sprinkler, and by sheer stubborn will, she SLEPT under the sprinkler for two hours.

Time to wrap this up. Moon just walked into the computer room and barked at me. It’s three minutes to six, you see.