Canter Bridge

The Rhodesian Ridgeback, an African canine breed that was once used to hunt lions, is normally not associated with the phrase ‘like a little deer’. But Rosie, our five-year-old Ridgeback looks just like that as she sleeps, curled up on the rug she’s wrestled into just the right mound of folds and wrinkles that make it her bona fide napping place, looks just like that.

She’s what Ridgeback aficionados call a light wheaten color. Her muscles are sinewy and very visible as she chases squirrels and backs the occasional meter-reader out of the yard. Ridgies are quintessential hunters and guardians. Our Rosie has an astonishing memory for who’s been here before and been welcomed into the family confidence and who has not. If she decides you look a bit too scruffy for these parts or otherwise fails to recognize you, she’ll be pretty difficult to persuade that you should come in.

Once you’ve been welcomed by one of the human members of our family, however, Rosie will always be glad to see you return.

Rodent hunters par excellence, the Ridgeback is very visual in its hunting tactics. Rosie will leap high in the air to find her prey and then pound down on it with massive paws. Alas, her haul of squirrels and chipmunks is still in single digits since we leave them lots of ground cover by which to evade Rosie’s protective instincts.

There was one memorable encounter with a racoon last winter. I had just arrived home in a suit from a business function and was catching up on the news dressed in what we shall delicately call the innermost layer of clothing. Suddenly, I heard the unmistakable sound of Rosie’s baying and knew she’d cornered something in the backyard. Fearing the worst, I put on my dress shoes, grapped the only weapon I could find—a six-inch plastic flashlight—and ran out to find Rosie nose-to-nose with a large-ish racoon.

Trying to distract her was useless. She was locked on and I—in my skivvies and dress shoes—tried desperately to maintain my footing in six inches of snow.

Rosie grabbed the thing and ran to the far side of the yard, where the two of them engaged a third warrior: the wooden fence separating our yard from our neighbor’s. I heard the sound of splintering wood, then found myself trying to separate Rosie and coon by beating on the head of the coon, which had now locked on with its teeth to Rosie’s head. She cried out in pain while the locked-on racoon looked up with wild eyes as though to say, ‘I didn’t sign up for this!’

Eventually, I got them detached from each other. The coon fled through the hole that Rosie and she had bashed into the fence. My wife spotted the coon’s carcass in the neighbor’s yard a day or two later. Rosie still bears the scar on her gorgeous forehead where the invading animal had found its temporary toothhold.

Looking at Rosie now, sleeping like a little deer at my feet, it seems impossible that she could prove lethal to anyone or anything. But dress little Bambi up like Rambo and anything can happen.