He doesn’t know it, but the canine who accompanies me on our daily wanders through the nearby woods is pretty great at finding Wood mice. He can smell ‘em, and probably hear ‘em. Unfortunately, he so far has not seen ‘em.
I, from my lofty perch about six feet above the forest floor, can easily see Bowie snuffling and digging away at front door, chewing the mice hideout into compost, or at least smaller piece of tree carcass and bark chunks, while I watch two tiny Wood mice escape out the back door.
In the light of my headlight, they are light gray, about two inches body length, not counting their tails, looking soft and cuddly. Almost babies, not really knowing where to go once they’d gained freedom from the log’s confines. One climbed a honeysuckle vine — that one I probably could have reached down and plucked up for a closer look. The other just bounced around trying to decide on a direction to go.
Finally, I moved around to the side so that when the pup came to me, he’d not have to come across the two rodents. I don’t know what he’d have done with them, but I watched him with a flying ant the other day; he snapped at it but didn’t really bite it. I’m guessing a mouse might have died of heart failure, but not been eaten. I just didn’t want to take the chance.
Next day we went out for our morning wander and Bowie led me in a straight line — not via the path we took out of the woods or the path we sometimes too that eventually would have led to the previous night’s mouse residence, but straight to the correct log, as though he had dropped a pin on a GPS map he carries in his head of our favorite forest. So much for “dumb animal.”
We humans like to think we’re top of the brain chain. I was raised believing that most everything an animal did was merely instinct. Grizzly bears, wolves and crows have been found to teach their offspring about where to find good food and what tactics are best employed to obtain it.
Another thing I have learned is the error of the rule about there being seven human years in a dog year. It turns out that formula was derive by dividing the average 70-year life expectancy of a human by the average 10-year life of a dog. It was a simple calculation — also wrong.
It turns out a medium-size dog such as Bowie, a little more than a year in the planet’s open air, is developmentally about 15 to 16 years old. Which makes wonderful sense. If he is going to be breathing only about 10 years, he better get to learning stuff in a hurry.
A dog such as Bowie, at a bit over a year old, is learning and trying some of the same things I watched our son learn and try when he was a teenager on the cusp of adult independence. For instance, when I call him and he looks up and then goes back to what he was investigating because it is more interesting than what I might have had in mind.
There is a clear difference between not understanding what he should do, and making a decision that a little disobedience will be more fun than doing what he knows I want.
This afternoon, he slipped by my leg and ran to the neighbor’s yard, then stood and looked back at me, daring me to try to catch him. He didn’t go far, staying just out of reach as I tried to approach him, clearly taunting me to “C’mon, try to catch me.” If I ignored him, he’d race toward me, then veer off at the last possible footfall — until finally I opened the car door and he jumped right into the vehicle, ready to go for a ride.
The dog is often a mirror of my own male child when he had become old enough to begin asserting his independence, when I and his mother would look at each other and wonder whether he, or we, would make it to his 15th birthday. He, and we, did and life has turned out really well for both of us.
Mark Twain is said to have reported, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
I bet the dog sometimes feels that way about me.
Text and Images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
