Heather

When I was growing up, our dogs were always beagles, because my dad loved to hunt. I should correct that to say that the very first dog we had, after moving into the only barn in the county with a bathroom in the hayloft, was a mutt from the dog pound that we affectionately named Nosy. She was a wonderful mutt, though, loved by all who knew her. And she liked to hunt, too.

But, after Nosy, it was beagles all the way. I'm probably forgetting some, but I remember Sparky, Rusty, Fritz, and Beany.

Fritz was with us the longest, about 13 years. He moved with us twice. After the second move, though, he disappeared. We had heard about dogs trying to find their way home, so we looked everywhere we could think to look between the old house and the new house; but we never found any trace of him. The same week that we moved into the new house, my dad had to have emergency gall bladder surgery. That may have added to Fritz' stress level and contributed to his disappearance. Or, someone may have stolen him. He didn't look his age, and someone might have thought he'd make a good hunting dog. Whatever happened, we never learned; and his disappearance added to our own stress level.

After things settled down at the new house, though, we got another beagle. This one came from the research farm owned by the company for which I worked at the time. They made animal feed and kept animals at the research farm to test the food. The main business of this company was soy bean products. Thus, the new beagle was named Beany.

By then, we were living on the farm where I was raising horses. Beany didn't do well with the horses. He wanted to chase them, and they didn't like that idea. Beany suffered a nasty kick to the head one day that I thought would kill him. It didn't. He recovered, but I convinced my folks that Beany would be happier in a different home.

I may have had an ulterior motive for placing Beany in another home. I had always wanted a collie. After all, I had grown up watching Lassie on television. And so Heather joined our family.

Heather was a tri-colored collie with such a sweet disposition that she would rather have died than displease us. She came to us as a puppy, an adorable little ball of fluff.

My dad loved to garden, and he had several gardens planted around the three acres or so of the farm that weren't used for growing crops or for pasturing horses. (When asked why he had multiple gardens, instead of one big one, he replied that he didn't like long rows.)

One day, when Mom, Dad, and I were all in one of the gardens, puppy Heather joined us. Not wanting her to get in the habit of going into the gardens, we spoke a firm NO, then took her out and placed her on the grass at the edge of the garden. She came into the garden again, and we did the same thing. And we never had to do it again. She got it. In fact, she got it so well that, years later, when Dad had quit gardening and had reseeded the gardens into lawn, Heather would always go around the places where the gardens had been.

Then came the day when a friend gave me two kittens, Starsky and Hutch. I always fed Heather in the barn, as I was taking care of the horses. The first time that the kittens approached her food bowl, Heather growled and snapped at them. I severely reprimanded her for that, and she never did it again. She would lie with her food bowl protectively placed between her front legs, obviously trying to keep the kittens away. But Starsky and Hutch had no fear and would approach the bowl anyway. Heather would look at me pleadingly, but she never again growled or showed any aggression toward the kittens. In fact, they became great friends.

 

 

We had a neighboring farmer whose border collie always rode on the back of the tractor with him, the sight of which always excited Heather. She recognized the sound of that approaching tractor before anyone else was even aware that it was coming, and we could tell by watching her that Ralph would soon be coming by.

Once Heather understood her boundaries, she never went off our property. The only times that she might fail in that obedience were when she was chasing birds in flight or hot air balloons. Then, with her nose in the air watching the object of her chase, she wasn't looking at boundaries. But a sensor seemed to go off with the first step into forbidden territory, and she would give up the chase and return to the yard.

She would tree a squirrel, then lie patiently at the base of the tree, confident that the squirrel would have to come down sometime. Meanwhile, the squirrel had long since jumped to another tree and was long gone. Okay, so she was sweet but possibly not really bright.

She drank water by putting her head into a bucket, water up to her eyes, then chomping her jaws together. I think she splashed more water out of the bucket than she actually drank.

Heather and my dad became best buds. She was a lot of comfort to him after my mom died. When Dad decided to sell the farm and move into an apartment, Heather went to live with me in my new house in town, where she and Dad could continue to see each other.

Dogs add so much to our lives, and we were blessed to share a part of our lives with Heather.