Amy and I eloped a week after meeting Seamus. Out on a frozen beach on the northwest corner of Michigan's lower peninsula, Benzie county, the sand capital of the United States (my designation, and I'll swear to it.) Thirty degrees, forty MPH gusts, Seamus a dutiful witness along with a half dozen hearty souls. We left him in the car during the small celebration at the brew pub, and he endured it like a champ.
Seamus is, first and foremost, an athlete. He gets up every morning and does his yoga stretches, a classic downward and upward dog. We fenced in our back yard for him, and if spends a day without enough exercise, he will sprint figure-eights in our fifty-foot back yard. If I need the workout, I'll go out and try and simply tag him on the way by. He throws head fakes and body feints to elude me. I remain in awe of his muscularity and fine muscle body control. Seamus likes taking tennis balls and jamming them into his back molars. He gnaws repeatedly until he splits the ball. Good jaw exercise, and fights plaque as well. We've been given "unbreakable" dog gifts that requires Seamus half a day before the bacl lawn is littered with synthetic stuffing. He can hold his bladder for 12 hours at a time, and when he does pee, it's often while surveys the terrain, in full pointer mode. As a guy who's spent much of my life covering athletes, I recognize physical greatness, and he's it.
So out in Benzie county, Amy and I take Wonderdog for a walk to Lake Michigan through half a mile of scrubby woods, the highlight of our one-day honeymoon. Seamus is behaving well; there are no other dogs in sight, so we let him off the leash. The experiment works splendidly, at least in the early stages. Seamus runs 100 feet off the trail, and then circles back to the masters who feed him. Then as we approach the rolling dunes a couple hundred yards from the surf, Seamus catches a scent...and bolts!
All the shouting in the world won't bring him back—he's lost in the hunt; being in the company of humans is not terribly high on his priority list. Amy and I go back to the last place we saw him, and find a fresh paw print in the snow. We are now tracking a dog tracking a deer, long odds for us humans, but what choice do we have? After scrambling in the brush for ten minutes, the deer must have veered back toward us, because we saw a flash of white and brown. There was Seamus on full throttle. His big chest and his powerful strides convince us that there is Greyhound in his bountiful gene pool. We surround him and finally clamp on his leash, wondering if he is ultimately destined to return to the wild. He adapts, however, and joins us on the beach, chasing sticks like a normal dog, as we relax inside the triangle of our new nuclear family.
After returning later that day to civilized Traverse City, I noticed something odd while on poop patrol in the back yard. His evacuations were laden with animal fur for the next few days. It doesn't take a house call from the CSI team to solve this case; at some point during Seamus' hiatus off the leash he took advantage of his 00 moniker...license to kill.
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| Southern gent adapts to ice n snow |
So out in Benzie county, Amy and I take Wonderdog for a walk to Lake Michigan through half a mile of scrubby woods, the highlight of our one-day honeymoon. Seamus is behaving well; there are no other dogs in sight, so we let him off the leash. The experiment works splendidly, at least in the early stages. Seamus runs 100 feet off the trail, and then circles back to the masters who feed him. Then as we approach the rolling dunes a couple hundred yards from the surf, Seamus catches a scent...and bolts!
All the shouting in the world won't bring him back—he's lost in the hunt; being in the company of humans is not terribly high on his priority list. Amy and I go back to the last place we saw him, and find a fresh paw print in the snow. We are now tracking a dog tracking a deer, long odds for us humans, but what choice do we have? After scrambling in the brush for ten minutes, the deer must have veered back toward us, because we saw a flash of white and brown. There was Seamus on full throttle. His big chest and his powerful strides convince us that there is Greyhound in his bountiful gene pool. We surround him and finally clamp on his leash, wondering if he is ultimately destined to return to the wild. He adapts, however, and joins us on the beach, chasing sticks like a normal dog, as we relax inside the triangle of our new nuclear family.
The New Nuclear Family, What Could go Wrong?
After returning later that day to civilized Traverse City, I noticed something odd while on poop patrol in the back yard. His evacuations were laden with animal fur for the next few days. It doesn't take a house call from the CSI team to solve this case; at some point during Seamus' hiatus off the leash he took advantage of his 00 moniker...license to kill.
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