Riley, our grumpy old mutt of questionable heritage, used to be the only friend and unquestioned leader of Echo, our goofy white Labrador. But when we confined him to the fenced-in backyard for life, and after installing an electric fence to keep Echo from breaking in to be with him, she finally had no choice but to settle in to her new life without him.
When they were out and about together, he was not just her friend; he was her chief influence, the leader of their two-dog gang. And thus it was that our slobbery, happy Labrador actually took on his grumpy, stay-on-the-porch-and-growl personality. It did not suit her at all, and yet she became more and more like him as the days went on.
And then one day a new dog showed up, the neighbor’s dog, a beautiful, boundless-energy type of dog, with a zest for life and a disdain for propriety. The river? Yeah, let’s get out in that. The muddy creek? Oh, yes, definitely that too. This dog would dive head first into a dumpster, I think, and enjoy every second of it.
Contributed Photo from Bo Wagner / Echo shows the results of sticking her head where it didn’t belong.I suppose it should not have been a surprise, then, when we came home to find that Echo had a “head issue.” By that I mean that we were completely taken aback when, as we came home, we saw a white dog with a completely black head, and realized that it was ours.
Honesty, I cannot even begin to fathom how she did it. Even the mud by the creek, in its most boggy spots, is not that black and horrid. But somehow, somewhere, that dog stuck her head in something and came out with a rank, putrid, totally black head still mounted atop her white body.