Ty, you cloven-hooved idiot!

A little while ago, Jenn said that it felt weird to have outgrown some of our dogs  and I knew what she meant.  We have some dogs in our yard that, for various reasons, don’t make the starting lineup anymore.  They are either past their hard-working days and ready for their pension or they are not able to keep up with our team’s endurance or speed.  It was a hard decision to make, but it was a necessary one: we put some of our dogs up for adoption.  Of all the responses we had, one of them was from a new musher who is looking to start a team of dogs.  I wonder if, after visiting us, he has changed his mind.

He showed up to meet the dogs on Sunday afternoon and we thought it would be fun and benefitial to have him go out with me on the fourwheeler and run the dogs we were adopting out.  We introduced ourselves and headed to the dogyard.

I made sure that Ty was put away.  That bastard goat had already confronted one team of mine a few days earlier on the trail and I was not looking for a repeat performance.   Especially with company.  The fourwheeler was ready.  The dogs were ready.  Jenn was already hooking up some dogs and the commotion in the yard was at its pitch.  I had just hooked up Mouse when I turned around to see Ty, that friggin’ bastard goat, sauntering towards the middle row of dogs; all of which were losing their minds at this unexpected but definitely welcome meal headed their way.

Here was the dilemma: the goat had to go, but how to accomplish this?  I can’t walk up to him because he’ll just run away, knowing I’ll just put him back in his pen, but I can’t shoo him out, either, because he’s headed right for three dogs who are well-fed but willing to make room and I don’t have time to get on his other side.  I opted for the grab-n-go approach because necessity overruled trickery and finesse.   At this point, Jenn is holding out the line of dogs that are already hooked to the fourwheeler – they want in on the action – and so she can’t help me and our guest was probably wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

I position myself between the two rows of dogs and say, on the outside: ”C’mon Ty, it’ll be okay.  C’mon over here.”  But on the inside: ”I swear to God, you stupid goat, if I get my hands on you… how can you be so dense?” and “You cloven-hooved idiot!  Get over here before they kill you!”  He stopped and looked at me, unsure of what to do next.  Somewhere inside that wee little brain of his, a synapse flickered briefly and he realized he was amid ancestors of his ancestors predators.  While he let that thought sink in, I used that opportunity to grab him by the horns and try to drag him out of the run.  But Ty is as strong as he is dumb so it was not easy and Dekker, one of our new aquisitions from last year, managed to grab his ear.  In less than second, Dekker had the bottom two inches of Ty’s ear in his mouth, while I had Ty by the horns two dogs away.  Losing a third of his ear didn’t seem to phase Ty: he still fought and struggled against me as I dragged him out of the run.  He still didn’t want to co-operate once he was out, so I had to haul him all the way back to his pen, snorting and grunting.  I glanced quickly at his ear: it had stopped bleeding already but would have to wait for attention until I was done with the dogs (it got some antibiotic spray when all the commotion had died down.)  I ran back to the dogyard, continued hooking up the dogs with Jenn and then jumped on the fourwheeler with our guest and took off. 

It wasn’t our best run, but it was a good one and I’m glad it was good because the dogs that we gave away ended their time with us on a positive note.  I’m glad to have had them in our yard and I’d take them back in a second but they just didn’t fit with us anymore and they wouldn’t get the attention they would deserve from us if they stayed.

We offered four dogs that he could choose from  and in the end, he decided on Mouse, Lacey and Taiga.  I wonder if he’d have taken a goat, too?

Mouse

 

Taiga

 

Lacey