Canter Bridge

Despite the best efforts our über-athletic Rhodesian Ridgeback Rosie and her erstwhile companion Dear Departed Tucker, the fact remains: our yard is full of squirrels. The day-to-day canine v. rodent skirmish over those green square yards ends with an unchanging outcome whose monotony seems somehow not to dampen the participants’ enthusiasm: squirrel safe again!

Enter Sammy, our newly adopted blind Rhodesian Ridgeback. The threat level, squirrels everywhere might reasonably have concluded, has decreased with the arrival of this helpless, unseeing, gentle dog.

Sammy would not smile upon such a verdict.

His sad, mistreated little life has not given Sammy much reason for enthusiasm. But squirrels do.

Just yesterday—Day Two in our home, where time now seems to have begun on The Day That Sammy Arrived—he was skulking about in our backyard, mapping out with nose and toes his new environs. When a pair of noisy squirrels dashed frantically across a low-hanging branch, not one but two canines responded in the accustomed manner. Rosie of course was on Enforcer Behavior in the usual millisecond it takes for her to respond, dashing across the grass with loud canine cries to position herself right where the squirrels might one day fall when they act like this. It won’t happen, of course, but Rosie’s zeal is not deterred by statistics or probabilities or other indications of human dementia.

Enter Sammy. For one brief shining moment, he was a seeing, lethal arrow of a dog, racing seven or eight steps in the direction of the chaos with every intention of tearing those damned squirrels apart at the joints.

Sammy’s tail even wagged. Only three or four times during our short days with the Samsters have I seen the emergence of dog joy in this way.

There’s a real Rhodesian Ridgeback in there, waiting to emerge when he becomes convinced the world is not as bad a place as he’s been led to believe.