The pup caught sight of me and Luke, and hopeful curiosity perked up his floppy ears.  We were in the middle of a big grassy field and I was throwing Luke small bits of dog food, which he would have to run and sniff out of the grass.  Luke loves this game.  The guy kept jogging, his leash about 2 and a half feet long and held tightly in his right hand.  The pup kept looking back at Luke as his jogger-owner ran on down the path.

Luke and I cut through some woods on another path made by, no doubt, non-runners like me.  Luke sniffed a bunch of things:  holes in the ground, urine-marks made by other dogs, endless wildlife scents, who knows.  We made our way back to where the paved trail begins again.  As we started back to complete the curcuit on the paved path again, who showed up but the same jogger and puppy.  With the same determination, the runner was trying to keep his puppy running alongside him.  I have no way of knowing this, but he probably watches episode after episode of The Dog Whisperer and thinks this is what you do to become "the pack leader."  I trotted Luke off the trail a bit, him willing to follow; I'd been playing games with the treat-toss thing a lot on this walk, and he thought it was a pretty good deal for him.  So as not to torment the jogger-pup, I had Luke face me and sit and wait.  As the guy tried to pass us, his pup was so clearly yearning to sniff something, if not meet Luke, straining and looking, that his owner got annoyed and lightly kicked the back of his pup's butt, and said, "let's go."

The pup wasn't having any more, and started bucking and fighting against his tight leash.  The owner stopped and rubbed the sweat off his brow with his arm.

I couldn't help but say, "He looks like he's having such a great time."  This could have started a small battle of words, I realize.  Or it could have ended with the guy changing his technique.

The runner just looked at me.  Didn't say a word.  Gathered up his resolve, and started running again.

For anyone who would like to know a better way to begin running with a dog -- from a health standpoint (vets recommend that dogs should be at least 18 months before you start seriously running with them) to a behavior standpoint (puppies have more important agendas than jogging -- namely, exploring their environments and socializing), I highly recommend this wonderful article I found on the topic, just tonight.  It was an easy Google search.

Here it is:

http://www.dogsincanada.com/running-with-dogs-seven-steps-for-safe-jogging

Dakota, the spoiled-rotten Lab, did not take well to this at all.  For maybe a month, she tested the gate, ramming it with her chocolate nose, whining her disapproval, and generally disrupting restfulness in the inner sanctum.  But after a spell, she resigned herself to the spare bedroom and plentiful dog beds, bedtime Kongs stuffed with yummy food, and the other highlights of her exciting life, and gave up on bedroom snuggling.  Forrest was resigned, and Lily always slept in a crate, so that was simply moved out of the bedroom, no fuss.

Ah, it was heaven!  The one room in the house where one could go without dog hair, ticks, dander, dog drool...I could go a month without vacuuming and no one would ever suspect!

In June, I began traveling to DC to work for 2 weeks out of every three, leaving Steve, my dog-loving and long-suffering guy, alone with two of the three dogs.  The bedroom remained pristine until two weeks ago.  "It was 45 degrees last night," he told me sheepishly when trying to break the news.  "Forrest and Dakota really needed some warmth."  Yeah, right!  The house is heated by a wood stove, you see, and it warrants temperatures much more extreme than 45 degrees to build a big fire.  Needless to say, it was Steve who needed the warmth of a two-dog, if not a three-dog night.

I came back for my weeklong visit this past week, and brought along my new foster dog, Luke.  Snuggling with anyone, human or canine, is Luke's great pleasure.  Steve accepted the little 25-pound guy and the 85 million tiny white hairs that magically fall off the dog in an 8-hour span of lounging.  All over our pillows.  Luke is special, you see:  he spent three months in a shelter without one night of bed-snuggling, and he is trying to catch up.  He spent the past week wedged between me and Steve, and forget getting your pillow back if you get up to visit the bathrom in the middle of the night -- he takes your spot and has to be lifted away and deposited back down to the foot of the bed.  Of course, he creeps back up to wedge himself against any living being soon after.

By the end of the week, first Forrest, then Dakota and Forrest, wormed their way back into the bedroom.  Last night, I could not move my legs due to any one of three immobile sleeping canines pressing its weight upon me.  At 3 a.m. I declared enough was enough.  The two big ones had to go back to the spare room!  All it took was a few dog snacks from the kitchen (the dogs are trained with food, after all) and they settled back down.  And so did I.  Luke seemed so comfy in his 25 pound suit.

I am sure Steve is, right now, sleeping in the queen-sized bed with two hairy, possibly swampy, possibly ticky 60-pounders, and I'll have to deal with that when I get back.  How can I complain?  It's cold up in Connecticut.  I am here in Takoma Park with Luke, and he's not swampy but he's snuggly.  Lily, the odd-dog-out, is in her crate, as she chooses.  I'll clean up the dog hair later. 

Cattledogs are always popping up in these kinds of news items.  Just in the past couple of years, I've seen stories of ACDs saving their owners from alligators in Florida, angry stray pigs in Georgia, and bee stings in North Carolina.  Maybe it's a southern thing ... I'm not sure.

"Look at this," I say proudly, either by email or by waving the printed-out version of the story in front of anyone I run into that day.  "Another amazing cattledog!"  I do this partially because I have two ACDs.  Mine have never saved me from anything except the menace of leisure time and extra money, and just the other day I wondered if Forrest would intervene even if I was held at gunpoint.  He's a mush with people.

Lily, on the other hand, will erupt in a barking frenzy if any two people hug within her zip code.  She's closer to what the breed is "supposed" to be -- suspicious of anything she doesn't think should be happening, and quick to tell you her opinion.  But really, her reaction is over the top, while Forrest seems to never have received his official Handbook of Standard ACD Conduct.

Forrest and Lily have their quirks, but breed-wise they are pretty much What You See Is What You Get.  A little reading before I adopted them and I knew I was in for possible aggression to people and other dogs (check), territorial behavior (yup), relentless energy (uh-huh), intelligence (ditto) and loyalty (absolutely). A few surprises along the way, but that's because they aren't robots -- they're dogs.

People look at me funny when I tell them I wanted this particular breed so much that, when the dogs were younger and wilder and I lived in an apartment, I resorted to walking them to an empty basketball court every night and throwing them their dinner one kibble at a time across the court -- a nice, practical game of fetch -- to help wear them out.  (These dogs were bred to work 14 hour days on a ranch, you see.  And did I mention they can swim 5 miles and survive on feral baby goats)?

Lately, I have met more than a few people who have the notion that dogs are all somehow destined, through predetermined dogness, to be the reincarnation of Lassie.  I now dread hearing "none of my other dogs did this" (barked, chewed things up, failed to come when called) and "Petunia only took one hour to housetrain."  No matter the breed, age, or previous history, some people sincerely expect their new dog to become the reincarnation of previous saintly pooches, simply by virtue of moving in with them.  If that fails, they honestly expect ten minutes of training will do the trick.  I have people ask me with a straight face: "Can you teach Bosco not to sniff everything when we're on walks?"  Bosco is 4 months old and began walking in the big wide world, with all its tantalizing odors, last week.  And he's a beagle mix.  "Our old greyhound, Zenith, never sniffed like this..."   I'll remind folks that the dozens of TV Lassies received thousands of hours of training to make them who they were (or rather, who they appeared to be).  And left on their own they would sniff and bark and, like most dogs, probably not save Timmy from the well.  (Unless, as we have seen, they happened to be cattledogs).

I, too, have been lucky enough to share my home with one or two effortless, saintly, Lassie-like, now-deceased dogs.  They moved in and I never had to lift a finger. A few were foster dogs from the shelter. They came when called, were housetrained, and never barked at people who hugged.  They never fought with other dogs.  Actually, as I recall, Omar and Yuri were the only two dogs I ever had who were that perfect.  Come to think of it, only Yuri.  He was a golden retriever mix I adopted when he was nine.  And now that I remember, he didn't come when called until I discovered the secret of carrying a pocketful of cheese on walks.  That was the extent of the training I ever did with him.

The reason I became interested in -- and needed to learn  -- dog behavior and training was that I finally adopted a couple of  "normal" dogs.  That is, dogs who come into the world acting more or less the way they are "supposed" to.  And it wasn't pretty.

Even without the alligator wrestling and baby goat eating.

Before our Big Move to the small town of Chaplin, CT, my dogs, Forrest and Lily and I trekked daily along the streets of Takoma Park, MD -- we cherished our small stream valley park, Sligo Creek.  Always on leash, too -- it is a narrow park, following a winding road ("parkway") for much of the route.  Amazingly, yellow-crowned night herons nested in one spot along this little suburban stream, just a few miles outside of Washington, DC.  Sometimes the rattling buzz of kingfishers would be heard. The only bones my dogs ever had access to along this walk were those scattered KFC wings, sucked free of most of their meat and tossed from cars.  I could usually spot them before Lily and Forrest did, or use a "drop it" signal and reward them with a piece of hot dog when they surrendured their prize.

We can now walk out our door to 75 acres of meandering trails, some cut by loggers of long ago, some by Steve, my fiance' and some by me, just walking on them every day for the last year.  There are no leashes.  There are birds, and coyote sign, and deer sign, and voles, mice, red and grey squirrels, foxes, a groundhog or two. There are lots of bones.  Mostly old or not so old deer femurs.  The dogs are running, snuffling into piles of debris from fallen trees, hollow rotted logs, thickets of barberry and bittersweet and multiflora rose (invasives that Steve continues to attempt demolishing).  But the bones!

The first year, 2008, I would routinely spot one of the dogs reclined in the leaf litter, chomping away, oblivious to anything I might have to say.  Scratching my way through a maze of tangled sticker-bushes, I'd get my sought-after "drop it" and inspect the bone in question.  A fresh, unsplintered deer femur was given right back to the drooling, happy dog.  The old, brittle and broken ones were confiscated and a yummy tidbit or three was bestowed on the willing pup.  But, what to do with these nasty old bones?

Along the trail today, if you look up at arm level, you'll spot dozens of fragmented old bones hanging from tree limbs (if the bone has a handy "keyhole"), or wedged into tree crotches, or tucked high into old New England rock walls.  I have no idea how many dangerous splintered bones have been consumed by my doggies when I wasn't there to "rescue" them, but I can say I've had no midnight emergency vet visits due to bone ingestion in the past year.  In Takoma Park, an untimely rotten pizza inexplicably dumped in a gutter on Christmas Eve netted an emergency clinic a cool $900 fee for 24 hours' worth of care for pancreatitis.  Lily scored that one.

There is a lot of beauty and an awful lot of death in these woods, and the dogs are keen on the trail to unveil the death portion to me, a squeamish hands-over-the-eyes observer.  Along the eastern edge trail of our hike, in its final resting place in a skinny birch tree, hangs a 7-inch long shred of raccoon skin and sinew whose disposal had me stymied for months.  It was first discovered by Lily, who came across it in a small groundwater seep during an early spring semi-thaw in February.  The warmer water of the seep kept it relatively unfrozen all winter, apparently -- it had a generous supply of putrefied slime to coat her lovely red back and neck as she rolled ecstatically for a few minutes before I came upon the scene in horror.

Using a big stick to lift the decaying creature from its boggy grave, I noted briefly its remaining features -- entire skin/coat, legs/feet, head, and decidely yucky interior. I wondered why in the world crows or coyotes had not disposed of this sad package already.  I guess there is a lot to eat around here.

Lacking a large plastic trash bag (something I dim-wittedly to this day do not carry on these daily forays),  I faced the dilemma of what to do with the carrion.  OK, a tree, obviously.  With as much precision as I could muster without looking directly at it or inhaling a breath, I managed, using the stick, to hang it from the tallest tree branch I could find that looked sturdy enough. Whew!

In the following months, that raccoon was gleefully rediscovered by Lily at least a dozen times, having been knocked out of every tree I kept sticking it in.  I am sure Lily managed to ingest some feet and legs, for they slowly vanished upon each new discovery of her settled down with the carcass as her chew-toy. At one point, the now naked skull detached from the body and Lily was found crunching away -- I lodged the skull into an old fence-post and it stayed there, at last.  The rest of the body did not.  It worked its way up the slope of the trail 50 yards until finally, I managed to loop its diminished and deflated length (just a ratty smidgen of coat and some skin at this point), using a trusty stick, twice around a tree limb.  It's been there for at least 5 months now, and hopefully will be there until it turns to dust.

One day in early June, I was whistling a happy tune on my hike and enjoying the blue sky and 70-degree temps when trotting toward me came Forrest, with something long and sticklike in his mouth.  Forrest does not pick up sticks, and this thing did not look like a bone. Why he came right up to show off his find is beyond me (unless he was expecting a reward, of course).  He got his handful of cheese bits as he dumped -- oh God -- a fresh looking fawn leg at my feet.  The leg was only a foot or so long, severed at the shoulder, and had bright red blood on the end. I freaked out.  The thought of Forrest killing some bedded-down baby deer was too much.  I ran, carrying the little leg, with its perfect little black hoof, back home to Steve, and said we had to go find the rest of the fawn. I imagined it waiting for its mother to return, with its three legs, bleeding to death.  Maybe we could save it and take it to a wildlife rehabber!?

Steve patiently walked with his hysterical companion back to the last known area where the leg was found, pretended to check around, and when I calmed down, explained to me that the fawn had probably been killed by coyotes and that Forrest had just been lucky enough to find a leg.  After I thought about it, I realized that Forrie had only been out of my sight for about 4 minutes; surely not enough time to kill a fawn, rip its leg off, and return to my side.  I put the fawn's leg high up in the wide, rotting crotch of a dead oak tree and never saw it again.

The dogs expose some life and death drama I'd never get a glimpse of on my own. When the snow covers the forest floor, I get to see the evidence of all the wildlife comings and goings via tracks criss-crossing all over.  But the dogs' noses point to more than my feeble human eyes can see.  Last February, the tracks of a fisher-cat (a weasel, actually, and a ruthless hunter of squirrels) led me and the dogs to a large old fallen log, which the pups sniffed even more excitedly than usual.  Close inspection uncovered a few drops of blood on the white snow, and a few tufts of squirrel fur and skin.  A fisher den was not far off. 

In early January of this year, a newly fallen foot of snow made the daily stroll a snowshoe expedition.  The dogs usually stay fairly close by, allowing me to investigate much of what they deem worth taking a second sniff at.  As dusk approached, Steve and I noticed the dogs intently circling and sniffing a patch of ground 20 feet off the last stretch of trail toward home.  We can tell now, by the dog's behavior, what is truly something worth checking out, following their lead.  When we reached the dead fox, the dogs had pawed around it a bit, and Forrest was covering it by scooping small nosefuls of earth and leaves from beneath the frosty layer above.  The fox was gorgeous -- red and grey and intact except for some blood coming from its mouth and from a scrape on its chest.  Steve picked it up by the tail and carried it home to inspect for a possible cause of death.  The dogs followed, trying to sniff its body as they walked behind Steve.

In the cold of the woodshop, we laid the fox on a work bench and were careful not to touch any of the blood (the rare case of rabies has been confirmed in the area, but this fox was a healthy-looking female not more than a year old).  If she had lived, she may have had a litter of kits this spring somewhere in our woods.  Steve decided she'd been hit by a car along the lonely stretch of road behind our southern property line, a victim of bad timing.  One of her rear legs hung uselessly, probably dislocated on impact, and the scrape along her chest was from the drag of the vehicle.  She had managed to make her way 300 yards from the road into the woods, where she bedded down to die under a hemlock tree.  We saved her body to place out for crows, who would appreciate an easy meal in the harsh snow-covered landscape. But we mourned her death.

A couple of weeks later, Forrest was dawdling upon the return home from the walk.  I saw him set something down in the front garden and hang over it possessively.  "Drop it" netted him a handful of treats and me, a fairly fresh but frozen chewed-up rabbit hindquarter with foot attached.  Probably killed by a hawk or coyote.  I stored it for the crow banquet.

We have two bird feeders, lively with all manner of winter meal-seekers -- sparrows, juncos, mourning doves, titmice, blue jays, woodpeckers, cardinals, chickadees.  This convergance of bird life has attracted a sharp-shinned hawk, first spotted by Steve a few mornings ago.  Dakota, our silly Lab, has decided that the bird feeders are squirrel dispensers -- each morning she plants herself by the big French doors leading to the front deck, where the main feeder hosts a riot of bird (and squirrel) diners.  She bursts out the door, chases the grey squirrel out to the apple trees, and comes back to investigate the feeder.  She is sure there will be another squirrel popping out at any moment.  As we watched her with amusement the other morning, the hawk swooped down and grabbed some poor bird in a blur, making off with it before we could even tell what exactly it was.  Dakota looked up at the sky in amazement -- then went back to check the feeder.  Hoping to score a cull of her own.