Alanis meets Miro

Alanis came home from the kennel looking like a fuzzy bear after they washed and put conditioner on her coat. Then they brushed her out so that all her fur stood on end. Very fluffy and cute.

In the back yard, the big monster sniffed at Miro. He turned and ran to the back door, then came dashing out again.

This is the way he handles anything scary--run to a safe distance, then come roaring back to meet the Big Scary Thing. Alanis was very happy to find a playmate. She wagged her tail and sniffed him all over. She wants to pounce and wrestle the way she would with a grown dog but it's clear that she holds back.

When Miro Monkey-butt is too obnoxious, she makes a rumbly lion noise and he backs off. When Alanis is too rough, the puppy rolls onto his back in submission, and sometimes she rolls him over a few more times.


It's impossible to get good photos of the two in action because my camera is too slow. Between the time that I hit the button and the shutter clicks, the dogs are halfway across the yard and all I get is a blur like this:


Oh, well.

Alanis and the big rain

Alanis is settling in, though she still won't drink the water unless it's mixed with her food. This morning she spent some time sitting at the edge of the patio, looking out over the lower yard where the chickens live and where she goes to the fence to bark at the Great Dane next door. It was such a "guarding my yard" thing to do that I grabbed the camera to take a picture.

And as soon as I returned to the kitchen window, she had moved. Of course.

We were happy not to get any flooding here (though there are some suspicious damp spots in the garage) but on the night with the hardest rain, Alanis didn't want to go out in it to potty or anything else. I stepped outside and walked out a little ways with her following. Then she stopped, went, "This is yucky," and returned to the shelter near the back door with her tail firmly tucked under. It wasn't even that bad a downpour, just very constant. She's definitely not a water dog.

Fetching Alanis, day one

I walked her into the house and showed her the bed. She sniffed at it. She stood looking at me, dark brown eyes rounded and ears close to her head. Abashed? Frightened? Easy to assume, impossible to know because the only lense through which we can view a dog is a human one.

That morning she had been put into a crate, loaded into the cargo hold of an airplane, taken out in a strange place with roaring noises overhead, put in a van for a bumpy ride to a parking lot and finally put in a car to ride several hours to this strange house with a person she had met only a few days before. She stood frozen in place, not knowing what was expected of her or what was permitted. I walked her around the living room before squatting and patting the dog bed, inviting her to sniff it, which she did in that delicate way of being ready to leap back if it proved dangerous. She turned away.

To me, her action said, “That’s another dog’s bed.” But the dog had not slept in that bed for two weeks. The familiar feeling opened in my chest, part hollowness, part raked with claws, part a feeling of swirling into unending emptiness. Grief. I began to cry. Again. The dog who had slept here was never coming back. I did not expect this one to take his place or make everything better. I brought her home because life without an Airedale was unthinkable. I brought her home to have someone to wake up to in the morning, to fuss over, to be silly with.

This dog was a retired show champion who had had two litters and was recently spayed. She had lived as an indoor dog for only one of her nearly eight years of life. I wondered if she would learn how to play with a person or if she would always have the air of subdued gravity I had seen over the previous days.

CH Terrydale HK No Doubt moves to the States

Now retired from showing and mothering, Alanis has come to live at my house. She gets a place where she can be fussed over as Head Dog and I get a much-needed Airedale companion.