THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 4

`THE TANGENT ANIMAL STORIES'

CHAPTER 27

   The only thing harder to take than someone's boring vacation
photos, are someone's saccharin old faithful pet stories. But Old
Yeller and a couple of reasonable Disney movies at least make it a
case that interesting animal stories do exist. Lassssieeee come
hommmmeee bark bark what's that Lassie you're stuck it the well?

   On that basis, nature showed me one of its endless scopes of
colors regarding the animal kingdom one day in late spring of 1964
while I was prospecting in the woods up near Clearwater, BC.

   Clearwater BC was also home to one of the most intriguing and
informative pieces of natural ecology I ever experienced. The town
of Clearwater sits along the shore of a half-mile long little lake
called, of course, Clearwater Lake. Interestingly enough, the
Clearwater River which roared past the town in a thundering
torrent, had nothing to do with the lake. The town itself
consisted of a highway service station and a small lakeside
campsite and cabins where we were staying.

   As tiny as the lake was, it was teaming with big fat trout. No
one could catch one except for the wily local forest ranger.
Everyday at lunch he would row out and be back in fifteen minutes
with a nice fat trout for lunch. No one was able to figure out his
secret and he wasn't telling.

   Turns out the trout were big, fat, and not interested in lures
for a very good reason. I had been paddling around the lake in the
campsite canoe one day and discovered that the whole back end of
the lake was a sea of lily pads. Just like a thumbnail on a thumb.
The lily pads suddenly stopped a ways out from shore, as abrupt
the line of a cuticle. Probably because the lake bottom suddenly
dropped off underneath.

   The lily pads were home to probably one of the largest
communities of small bullfrogs in the world. They were everywhere,
and you can take that to any bank you want. The little area
contained thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them. The din
from the croaking was almost a white noise.

    So of course the water was absolutely black with tadpoles
living happily off the microorganisms which were thriving happily
around the lily pads. At the edge of the tadpole wall where the
lily pads suddenly ended, was a thriving community of dragon fly
larvae living happily off the tadpoles.

    I don't know it you have ever seen a dragon fly larvae in a
small pond. But you want to jump out of the water in one big leap
if you do. They're the undisputed Mafia of the water pond. They're
easily the meanest looking and most tenacious insect predators in
small waters. The bullfrogs of course were getting fat and happy
off the adult dragonflies flying around the lily pads in mass
profusion.

    Just outside the wall of the dragon fly larvae was a wall of
trout, happily getting fat off both the juicy dragon fly larvae
and the adult dragonflies, plus of course any frogs which suffered
the misfortune of swimming out past the safety of the lily pad
wall.

   Nature sure knows how to cook. I'm sure this was the neatest
little one stop ecology shop all wrapped within the busiest little
eight acre site going, anywhere on the planet. It was also a
perfect model of the principle of a food chain cycle, starting all
the way down at the lily pads growing profusely off the ever
raining effluence from the frogs, tadpoles, and insects.

   Then progressing steadily upward to the microorganisms growing
profusely around the lily pads to the tadpoles growing profusely
off the microorganisms. Then to the dragon fly larvae growing
profusely off the tadpoles, to the frogs growing profusely off the
dragonflies and the trout growing profusely off the dragonfly
larvae and frogs, to the stomach of the forest ranger growing
profusely from all the trout he was eating. Small wonder he was
playing it smart and not talking.

   While I was prospecting one day I stopped to have lunch on an
old log. I looked down right beside me where I sat, and noticed a
so called walking stick insect. They look a lot like a big preying
mantis with long thin legs, but are dusty brown like an old twig
and are a lot skinnier. As I watched the insect just sitting
there, I noticed an ant mandibled onto the stick's back foot
trying to drag it away.

   It was a bit like a mouse trying to drag off an elephant. The
ant's feet flew fast and furiously as it scurried back and forth
on the log at the end of the insect's leg trying to improve its
traction. It was of course completely oblivious to the odds. I
kept thinking about the song 'High Hopes'. You know the line 'what
makes an ant think it can move a rubber tree plant, High Hopes'.
Well there I was, watching the ant trying to make it happen.

   After about half a minute the insect raised it's foot and tried
to shake off the ant nuisance hanging on the end. The ant spun
like a perfect pinwheel around the foot. The faster the insect
shook its leg, the faster the ant pin wheeled around its foot. At
one it almost became just a blur. But it hung on.

   The insect dropped its foot, and the ant dug in again feet
flying furiously in all directions trying to get good traction
again. Up went the leg again and around like a pinwheel went the
ant again.

   Down went the leg again and up came a little cloud of dust from
the ant trying to get traction. I have no idea how long this had
been going on before I got there. But the ant obviously had no
intention of giving up and the stick obviously had every intention
of getting rid of the nuisance. It went on the same for about
another fifteen minutes. Then the flying stick suddenly took off
with the ant still gripped tenaciously to its foot.

   This was one of the few times in my life when I really wished
I'd had a video camera (movie camera in those days). Another was
in Edmonton Alberta in 1980. We were living in the South end of
Edmonton. Some very big high tension wires were passing about two
and a half blocks away from the house.

   Living close to high wires like that wasn't anybody's first
choice. In fact it wouldn't have been anyone's choice at all
except that the oil boom had made it almost impossible to find any
other house as suitable for our needs and also in the right price
range.

   The summer of 1980 was hot hot hot, and dry dry dry. Large
sectors of northern Alberta were going up in smoke, particularly
around Swan Hills about 150 miles north West of Edmonton. Smoke
had been hanging in the air like an acrid blanket over Edmonton
for days. Then in the middle of the night came a thunderstorm.

   I woke up thinking a war zone was going on outside the house.
Thunderclaps were cracking non stop. As soon as one crack sounded
a next would follow. I'm usually into good thunderstorms. But for
some reason this time I just thought it was interesting and rolled
over and tried to go back to sleep. The next day some of my
roommates told me I had missed the show of the century.

   The friction of the storm clouds moving though the smoke pall
had created a perfect environment for the creation of static
electricity in the clouds. When the storm started to pass over the
high tension towers, the static started to dump as lightning
strikes onto the towers.

   Apparently every tower in both directions as far as the eye
could see were taking lightning hits about every ten seconds
apart. No wonder it had been such a racket. It was apparently just
like a fantastic scene from a fantastic science fiction movie.
Likewise what a time for nobody to have a movie camera or video
around the house.

  The other show I regrettably missed in life was in the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado in 1973 on the way to Aspen. While I had
been in Denver for a while selling flowers, we had all decided in
the very early fall to drive to Aspen for a couple of days for a
holiday for a change.

   My glasses were broken. They had come apart sometime along the
way and we were still too hard pressed at the time for me to get a
new pair. So I was without. Besides, it didn't matter. I wasn't
driving at the time and you don't need to see well to sell
flowers.

   On the way from Denver to Aspen is a summit pass, 12,000 feet
high. Probably the highest summit pass in all of North America. We
hit the exact apex of the summit at exactly 12:00 Am midnight on
an absolutely breath taking crystal clear night on the apex of the
new moon. It was a remarkably coincidence of factors.

   To me without my glasses the sky was just a brilliantly painted
yellow swath of light. To everyone else it was the experience of a
lifetime. For them it was almost like looking at the Milky Way
through the full power of a full field telescope. It seems like
the really good things always come along at exactly the point when
you're in no position to enjoy to accept.

   One of my things to do in life is to someday get back to the
exact same pass, under the exact same conditions of crystal clear
night and no moon, and be wearing a brand new pair of glasses. The
odds are long, but I say with some conviction that some day I'm
actually going to do it.

   During my first three years in Ottawa, As you may recall, we
lived in a house on Holborn Ave, about fifteen minutes south of
Ottawa. Holborn Ave was one block off the main highway south, and
sat adjacent to the Rideau River (in fact on the shoreline) flowing
into Ottawa.

   The one thing about country living everyone appreciates is
the ever present smell of freshly outputted grass in the air.
Particularly in areas surrounded by dairy farms. On particularly
bountiful days, one or another of the farmers will treat one and
all in the vicinity by deciding to spread a little of the cheery
stuff around their farmland. The farmer near us used to sweeten up
his land on a regular basis. All 3.5 acres of it.

   Take it to the bank, there's absolutely nothing in the world
quite equal to the world famous scent of 'Ewww! De Bovine' wafting
ten miles or so down wind. Unless of course it's 'Ewww! De
Nitrogen.

   'Ewww! De Nitrogen' is a notorious enhancement of 'Ewww! De
Bovine". And comes from a clever scientific improvement of
outputted grass. Our neighborhood was privileged to be where the
scientific principle was being put into practice.

   Just over the highway, about an eight of a mile upwind, a
farmer had heard about an amazing new process from Denmark for
converting outputted grass into potent nitrogen compounds before
releasing the benefits to the ground and everyone else by
spreading it around.

   The process involved dumping the outputted grass into a
gigantic covered concrete pit and letting it stew in it's own
juices for a couple of months to mellow it up. The farmer would
then proudly spread it around his twenty five hundred acres or so,
running the economic benefits the process was promised to deliver
through his mind as he spread it far and wide.  It was called
'liquid fertilizer', liquid because it was liquid and when cooked
to stenchworthy perfection was periodically sprayed on pasteurland
with high pressure hoses. A baby's full diaper pail has something
of the oder but nowhere as blasto pungent as that sprayed onto the
nearby farmer's fields.

   Everybody else in the proximity would run for cover. The stuff
was so vile it was still detectable on the evening's waft over
fifty miles downstream.

   We were lucky. When winds blow over a waftable source, the
resulting waft typically spreads out slowly like a searchlight
beam aft of the source.  Simple physics. We were just a few
hundred yards south of the southern edge of the beam. So we were
usually spared the normal brunt.

   But if the wind shifted, even slightly which happened every
five days or so all summer, every window in the house would
automatically shut themselves instantly and self bolt.

   Not so lucky was a small resort and marina on the Rideau River
less than an eight of a mile North of us. It sat right it the middle
of the beam, forget the wind shift. When Greydie had first moved into
our place the resort was all boarded up and in a state of severe decay.
Kind of a shame because it looked like it might have been a pretty
snazzy little spot at one time.

   Sure enough, "used to be a playground of the rich", the landlord
told us. "But it kind of just fell out of fancy one year and slowly
went into decline". I don't think the landlord was telling the exact
truth, sparing us from the grim truth and evidently hoping we wouldn't
notice our own touch of the waft whenever it occurred.

   I have to believe the decline was a lot faster than gradual.
Like starting about a half hour after the first time the farmer
had decided to nitrogenate his land.

   The only comparable comparison I am told to the Ewww! De
Nitrogen is the downwind Ewww! from a pig farm. Which is why
property values go running for cover anytime a pig farm is
proposed for an area.

   In our case, everyone in the region had held hearings
relentlessly, and tried to find ways to have the authorities
legally force the nitrogen meister to desist. But the farming act
is the farming act. So the nitrogen tank stayed put.

   Fortunately by fall every year, the downwind wafting would have
subsided. The farmer would use the winter to rejuvenate the pit
with new raw material. So it never affected the influx of ducks to
our backyard flying south for the winter.

   You may recall that the house on Holborn backed onto the Rideau
River. The river was only about 100 to 150 feet across, but it was
very scenic and steeped in lore. The back yard of the property was
nicely mowed and slopped steeply down to the river about 150 feet
away.

   In the fall during the bird migration south, we noticed ducks
landing on the river from time to time for a breather. So by the
second fall we had the idea of spreading cracked corn down at the
shoreline to help them on their way.

   It was an instant and overwhelming success. Before long we were
going through whole 20 kilo bag of cracked corn or more, every day
or so. What was happening was that a wild flock would come in, gas
up, then head off going south and a next one would come in. This
would go on all day.

   Sometimes a number of flocks would wind up all feeding at the
same time, some of them large. These would be really amazing
adventures. The first fifteen feet or more up the bank would be a
seething mass of ducks. One day we even counted more than 300
ducks feeding at one time. Plus a few geese.

   We enjoyed watching them out the back patio door sometimes an
hour at a time. What was really interesting about all this was how
the ducks checked out the security of the scene before coming up
of the water onto shore. It was always exactly the same little
ceremony of precaution every time.

   Each new flock would land about 500 feet up the river. Then
after a while exactly one of them would suddenly cut loose from
the flock and start paddling lazily around looking for all the
world like it had absolutely nothing in particular to do all day.
But it would definitely, most definitely, be drifting slowly down
our way with the slow current.

   After a while it would be exactly parallel to our corn site,
but still out in the middle of the river, still nonchalantly
puttering around. After a while it would casually start swimming
in towards shore, then back out, then back in, gradually getting
closer and closer with each casual swoop. It was obviously testing
the waters so to speak to see if the coast was clear.

   If everything seemed OK, it would finally come in right to
shore before suddenly cruising back out. If the coast stayed
clear, it would eventually hop out of the water at the edge of the
corn.

  This was evidently the magic signal the rest of the flock had
been waiting for. Because as soon as its foot hit the land, the
others would suddenly cut loose and start to drift slowly
downstream in our direction with the current. Once they reached a
parallel with the site out in midstream, they would suddenly start
to veer in towards shore like they had all day. These were indeed
cool calm and collected little customers.

   But once they hit shore, it was a different matter. Evidently
presuming the coast was now clear, they would waist no time
getting up onto the banquet table and getting right at it. The
whole security episode would take about half an hour from the time
the flock first landed to the last one up on the feed deck.

   Likewise it would be exactly the same with every new flock that
came in. The same safety ritual would be performed whether there
were alone or another dozen flocks were already in. These were
definitely wild ducks and caution was their lifeline. In fact, if
either my brother or I even so much as appeared at the top of the
bank by the house, the flocks would be gone.

   We even tried moving the patch half way up the bank. But no one
would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Way too far from the
sanctuary of the water.

   What intrigued me most about this little `check out the territory
first' routine,  was who would be the first brave little soul to venture
out from the flock each time. Was it the token sacrificial lamb, or the
official flock Rambo. Or did they take turns. Or was it a specialist
from a trained team of swats.

   We never found out because each flock would come in, do their
stuff, and be off again never to be seen again. So we had no way
of determining whether it was the same duck every time, or what
the status might be.

   What we did learn for certainty was that if these particular
wild ducks didn't know who the hand that fed them was, under
different circumstances, wild ducks had no problem whatsoever
figuring where the hand was located.

   We picked up our cracked corn from a Berry Seed and Feed outlet
at the little town of Manotik about ten miles upstream where I
later delivered pizzas. The Rideau river splits just before
passing through town. The two branches run as gentile rapids
through town, and then join again just downstream. A couple of
dams sit on the rapids, plus an old mill site which founded the
town and is now a museum.

   Below the rapids and dams, the river stays open during the
winter because of the current. Some ducks had evidently checked it
out and decided that staying around all winter made a hell of a
lot more sense than knocking themselves out going south every
year.

   The Berry food store was a good two and a half blocks down the
street from a patch of open water. I was in the store one morning
buying some corn late in the fall. The snow had already come, but
not all the ducks were down out the north yet. Suddenly a huge
racket erupted outside the door of the feed store.

   "OOPS, sorry about that", said the clerk, as he quickly headed
to the door hauling a big bag of cracked corn. Just outside the
door was about 5 dozen ducks stomping and quacking indignantly
around as if they had just been told at a union dispute they were
all going to be fired.

   When the clerk got back he explained that about five or six
dozen ducks walk up to the store every morning from the river. If
someone forgot to put out the corn, the ducks would go ballistic
with indignation. No doubt about it. These birds knew where
exactly where the man who owned the corn was hanging out.

   As I was leaving the store, the clerk commented wryly. "In fact
ducks are one of the biggest food sucks on the planet". "Tell me
about it", I said, reminding myself about the dozens of bags of
corn we had already dispersed that fall.

   If nothing stays consistent in the world, at least you can
count on the appetite of ducks for corn. One early spring late
winter day in 1997, I had been coming back from downtown Ottawa,
crossing over one of the bridges on the Rideau River. It was well
into spring. But because of an inordinate amount of snow that
winter, thick snow still covered ground that should have been
growing grass by now. Just downstream from the bridge was long
stretch of partially open water with a very wide snow covered
shore on the downtown facing side.

   As I came up to the bridge I saw a little old lady on a
footpath along the top of the bank up from the river. She was
throwing seed out of a small paper bag to at least a couple of
dozen ducks and geese thronging around her feet. As I crossed over
the crown of the bridge, I saw what could easily have been another
thousand birds down on the shore and on the water.

   I couldn't resist. I wheeled around, sped to the nearest super
market, bought a big sack of birdseed with lots of cracked corn. I
wheeled back to the footpath. The old lady was gone but some of
the birds were still part way up the slope to the foot path
heading slowly back down to the river.

   I opened the sack and started throwing the seed around the snow
at the top of the bank. The ducks on the slope instantly
straightened to attention, then started hustling full tilt back up
to the grub. This instantly attracted the attention of some more
ducks and geese further down towards the river below, who
immediately started to hustle up the bank.

   This instantly caught the attention of the whole fleet hanging
down along the water, who suddenly all started to stand up on
their tip toes straining their necks to see what was going on up
on top of the bank. Suddenly the light bulb clicked and the whole
fleet suddenly started to surge up the slope as fast as they could
carry themselves like a gigantic moving carpet of feathers.

   In less than a minute I was completely surrounded by the
largest mass of beaks and feathers I'm sure I will ever see again.
There were very definitely very hungry little boys and girls these
guys. The fact that I was a people and these were all wild birds
didn't seem to matter in the slightest. Food is food and ever the
twain will meet.

   They all pushed in to get as close to the action as possible.
The most interesting part was that dozens of necks would pop
straight up and check me out at any given time. They would look
straight at me with an expression which I couldn't decipher as
something between, 'who on earth are you', thanks', and `why don't
you have feathers'.

   I emptied the sack as fast as I could, then departed to leave
them to their meal in peace. I never had a chance to get back
before the snow melted. Likewise I never told anyone about it
except my brother. I could have just reached down and grabbed any
one of at least a dozen birds within reach. Too many people out
there would have taken the advantage for a snack, and I just
couldn't bear the thought. So I just decided to leave well enough
alone, and left it alone.

   On the whole it seems that animals have no trouble knowing when
they have a good thing going. Our next door neighbor on Holborn
street had some nice gardens of flowers and vegetables of which he
was justly proud. The only problem was that a ground hog had
discovered his yard one day and had settled in for the duration.
Being a kindly sort, the neighbor bought a trap to catch the
critter planning to release him safely away from the yard.

   Sure enough, a couple of days later the groundhog was in the
cage. He pulled out the rowboat, rowed across the river, and
carefully let the groundhog out being careful not to hurt it.
About half way back he looked down and saw the groundhog stroking
by back to the original shore, going twice as fast as he was.

   By the time he got back to shore, the groundhog was already
long gone back up into the shrubbery by the house. So out came the
trap again, and into it went the groundhog again. This time he and
wife canoe-ed downstream about 1/2 kilometer and across a wider
swatch of water to let the groundhog go, carried well up into
fields covered with wildflowers. It took little onion less than a
day to resume nibbling the potatoes. Try three. Clang gottit. This
time he drove twenty miles upstream before letting it out. Happy
to tell us one day, he never saw the groundhog again.

   Greydie and I have also concluded that birds are a lot more
communal than just the simple fact of a flock that people normally
give them credit for. For example what are ducks and geese talking
about when they fly overhead every spring and fall.

   That's an awful lot of racket going on up there. So are they
just quacking and honking up a storm making positional threats. Or
are they yakking up a storm about the weather or how's the family.
We had a possible insight into that one year because of a Starling
roost which had set up across from the house on Holborn for the
summer and fall in 1982.

   Holborn was only a short one block long jog down to the
riverbank from off the 416 main Highway south from Ottawa. All the
houses on Holborn were on the riverside of street. The strip
between the street and the highway consisted of a couple of
hundred yards of bush and an assortment of high thickly branched
trees.

   A big clutch of thick trees sat right in front of our house
which became the roost. Apparently Starling are well known for a
particular habit. They would find a common roosting spot for the
season, then be gone somewhere else the next.

   Most of these roosts are rather small. Some can be extremely
large. Ours was huge. We figured about 10,000 birds at least would
be in the trees by the time the last ones came in every night. The
occasion was so phenomenal that CBC TV sent a crew down to film it
one day. But the cameraman wouldn't go anywhere near it. I think
he must have watched Alfred Hichcock's movie 'The Birds' one too
many times.

   About seven every night, we would start to see individual
flocks swooping in from all points of the compass. Apparently
these little, and sometimes not so little, flocks would forage as
far afield as a hundred miles in a day. Then return to the common
roost for the night. By about nine, the trees would be black with
nesting birds and the clamor would be incredible.

   Then just like 'lights out', it would suddenly shut down for
sleep for the night. Early the next morning you would see the
first flock heading back out in one direction, then the next going
out in another. Before long the trees would be as empty as ghosts
again until the evening.

   Greydie was given the official OK to approach the roost one
day. He used to go out in the yard to watch. If he crossed the
street, the whole roost would fall silent. If he ventured even
just a couple of feet into the trees from the road, the trees
would rustle as the birds started backing away.

   One evening he was observing from the yard and a solitary
starling came over and buzzed him about six feet overhead. It came
by again then went back up into the roost. Now he could go ten
feet into the trees across the road. But if he went eleven, the
racket would stop. If he went twelve, the trees would rustle as
they started backing away. But at least he had received some sort
of approval, which was nice.

   The roost stayed every night until well into the fall. Then one
day they were gone. Time to go south for the winter. The next year
they never returned, going instead to some other place the next
spring as was their custom. Fifteen years later the trees were
gone, victims of some inevitable real estate land re-optimization.

   But before the birds had left, more and more as the days passed
over the summer, the clamor every night took on the excited
overtones of chit chat at a gala museum opening or successful
cocktail party. We came to believe these birds were actually
coming into these enclaves every night to have a big yakup about
the days events.

   It was hard to imagine them wasting all that time and energy on
a simple "this is my spot, get lost". Now every time I hear a
flock of ducks or geese going by, I'm convinced I hear them
yakking about their kids or who won the game.

   Greydie used to talk all the time about communicating with
birds. Not like actual thoughts per se'. But they would tweet, he
would tweet back. Then they would tweet back like everyone was
saying hello. When Greydie first informed me about this, like
anyone else being given a proposition like that I would raise one
eyebrow and say something like, "how nice".

   But over the years I don't think there's any doubt about it.
I've heard, 'tweet tweet' from a bird for example sitting by the
feeder. Then a more assertive, 'tweet tweet tweet', Then a, 'hey',
kind of big 'tweet tweet tweet'. Then Greydie would suddenly tune
in out his muse at the computer and tweet back with his special
bird tweet hello.

   Then the bird would fly away happy. Just wanted to say hello.
For whatever it's worth, I never got the hang of it yet myself. If
I tweeted back, the bird would just keep on tweeting. Definitely
they were waiting for that funny looking guy's unique tweet.

   I used to envision two birds sitting up there and Greydie
tweeting away. One bird turns to the other and says, "nice guy,
but that's gotta be the worst accent I ever heard".

   On the whole, as far as the bird world is concerned on the
whole I figure Blue Jays are among the sharpest pencils in the
box. Not only do they know who owns the corn, but they can follow
hand directions as Greydie found out one day on the table in front
in our little trailer in Greeley.

   He had put out a new little clutch of seed on the picnic table
in front of the door of the little trailer where we had been
aboding. A blue jay came in but couldn't see the grub which was
partly screened behind a flowerpot on the table. Greydie pointed
his finger to the stash and made a bit of a commotion. The bird
turned it's sight to follow the pointed finger, spotted the stash,
and hopped straight over.

   This kind of very tuned in behavior is not surprising for a
blue jay. They also have a very fast learning curve. I watched a
'now you see it now you do it' performance by a Blue Jay just a
few months earlier at our previous house on Kingsdale street in
the south end of Ottawa.

   Greydie had been putting seed on the kitchen window ledge, and
also at a feeder near the back of the house for birds still too
skittish to come to the window ledge. Blackbirds and starlings
would nearly always go to the feeder and sometimes one or another
would check out the ledge. Blue Jays on the other hand would
nearly always come to the window ledge and sometimes check out the
feeder.

   The feeder sat on a two foot square platform on a pole. So
there was lots of room for even up to a half dozen different birds
in at one time. The platform was mostly to keep the scatter from
going all over the ground. Birds scatter seeds everywhere looking
for their particular preference and ignoring the rest. A blue jay
was on the platform one day picking around.

   Blue Jays feed by looking around, eyes beading down, then
pecking up what they see that they like. Some birds like
starling's rummage around by sticking their beaks sideways under
the seed to set up a scoop. They would then flick it in the air to
mix it up for a fresh new look.

   Despite the size of the platform, the ground around the feeder
was always littered with seed from the activities of these
rummages. Mourning doves and the occasional pigeons that came
would spend most of their time on the ground around the scatter.

   In a short time a starling landed on the platform and the blue
Jay hopped up onto the top of the feeder to wait. The starling
pecked and scooped for a few minutes. Seed sailed all over the
place in its wake. As soon as the starling left, the blue jay
hopped back down onto the platform. The very first thing it did
was to stick its beak into the seed and scoop a scoop high into
the air.

   Man, no shortage of feathers under these guy's caps. It had
obviously been watching the Starling. I couldn't help thinking
that with that kind of learning curve, in about a thousand years
or so every blue jay on the planet could be a super scooper.

   Blue jays also taught us another interesting thing about birds
not previously suspected. Most birds have their eyes on the side
of their heads, obviously for defense. But at least some can
swivel them around to the front for straight ahead forward vision
when they want.

   We often would see one of the blue jays on the window ledge
suddenly stretch up high onto it's toes, swivel it's eyes straight
to the front, then lean into the open window as far as it could
stretch and check out the house. Leaning forward stretched to the
limit like that it would look like something straight out of Alice
in Wonderland.

   But it made us recognize that many birds can likely bring their
eyes to the front when needed. Why not. It's just that you don't
often get a good chance to tell when they're flying by at forty
miles an hour.

   Blue jays had another interesting feature, the variety of their
calls. They had two loud calls obviously intended for
communicating over long distances. One was a very loud scree,
usually associated with jays. The other was an intriguing double
ping type sound, "pingping". It sounded exactly like a cross
between two submarine sonar pings delivered in rapid sequence, and
the sound the road runner always made just before leaving Wily
Coyote in the dust.

   This one must have been intended for communicating something of
great importance over a long distance because they really put out
when delivering the message. I watched a jay sitting on a small
branch one day, sending out the message. He would suddenly drop
right down onto his feet then push straight up to force out the
sound almost like bracing up a big sneeze. The branch would dip
down about four inches in an equal and opposite reaction to its
push. Quite a production.

   By the way, we found out one day that pigeons, at least, do
routes around the feeders in a neighborhood. Back at the Orleans
house in 1994, a flock of about a dozen or so pigeons would come
once a day or so. One of the pigeons in the flock was a very
distinctive brown and white.

   Greydie was picking up a new bag of seed at the local
supermarket one day and got talking with the clerk who also had a
feeder at home about ten blocks away. The discussion came around
to pigeons. "Say", said the clerk, "the flock doesn't have a
really distinctive looking brown and white one does it". The birds
apparently had the neighborhood wired.

   The feeder in Orleans was one of the other times in my life I
wish I'd had a camera. The first round of chicks were out in the
spring, and just recently airborne. Mom and Pop had brought them
to the feeder for a check out. On of the chicks landed on a branch
slightly to thin for it's weight because it slowly started to sag.

   The chick instantly grabbed another twig with one of it's feet
which slowly started to spread away. So the chick continued to
slowly sink going more spread eagled every second. When it was
spread eagled almost wide out like a gymnast, it mustered all it's
strength, did a hop, rotated 180 degrees in mid air and came back
down on the branch again. This time in the opposite direction, and
started to slowly sink again.

   This time it's rump was hard up against another thick branch.
So as it slowly sank it's tail slowly got pushed up perfectly
vertical from it's backside until it ended up totally wedged in
like a canary in Sylvester Pussycat's sandwich.

   It sat stuck like that for about a minute, no doubt frantically
trying to compute what the hell was going on. Then gave a big
shake and fluttered out of the sandwich. I have no doubt that this
is all part and parcel of their learning curve of how to gauge a
right size of branch to land on.

   A couple of days later which I was reloading the feeder I saw a
mottled youngster coming in from a distance flapping furiously
away looking for all the like a huge Sikorsky helicopter coming at
me in the distance. It just about made the tree where the feeder
was hung when it spotted me.

   It braked right up flat level flight like a helicopter, slowly
did a 180 degree turn in mid air like a helicopter. Then started
flapping off in the direction it has just come gaining speed with
every flap. Just like a helicopter. I have to believe that the
more subtle maneuver training like swerves and dips were slated
for the next week.

   Every day a couple of red winged Blackbirds would come swooping
in from various directions introducing themselves with ear
piercing pipes whistles. Then would signal their departure with
the same piercing pipe. One day in the middle of spring, Greydie
had been looking out the patio door. Spring was late and the
ground was still covered with a deep layer of snow.

   Suddenly from the distance Greydie saw a red winged blackbird
coming in from the distance peddling for all it was worth to the
feeder which was still empty from the winter. It took one look at
the barren repast and headed back off the way it had come piping
in probable dismay.

   Greydie felt his heart rend a little as he envisioned the poor
little guy pedaling for all it was worth from the deeps of South
America somewhere, straight to the feeder only to find it empty.
He filled it on the spot, obviously it was time.

   I also saw how bird vibes work one day. Cecil the hawk had
taken took up residence in the tree one afternoon, a branch up
from the feeder. He sat there looking around with the same vacant
look that cat's put on when trying to catch some motion out of the
corner of their eye.

   How he had figured out that the feeder was the place to be I'm
not sure. He had probably been casing the joint for a couple of
days from a distant rooftop.

   Cedric had been all set up in the tree for about an hour when
suddenly I saw one of our red winged blackbird buddies swooping in
from the distant distance. I watched it come about half the distance
to the house then suddenly swerve straight up and back the way it
had come like a wind had blown it.

   No way our buddy could have seen Cedric sequestered safely away
amongst the branches. So I have to suspect old Cedric was putting
out some pretty powerful vibes of a nasty kind. Which probably
explained why the blackbird was the only bird I had seen on any
horizon ever since Cedric had landed in the tree.

   For the three months of the summer and fall of 1997, you may
recall that Greydie and I were holed up in a tiny 20 foot trailer
in a popular campsite south of GREELY about 15 miles due south of
Ottawa. The trailer had a glassed in porch of the same size, so
actually our space was about  40 by 15. But it was still pretty
dam tight for the two of us and our computers.

   The entrance to the trailer was through the porch, which was
through a small wooden patio where full length sliding doors opened
into the porch. A standard campsite picnic table and bench sat on
the patio just a few feet outside the doors. Following a habit we
had gotten into at our previous houses, we started putting some
seed and nut mix on the table for the birds, squirrels, and
chipmunks which were everywhere, it being a campsite.

   The squirrels would come in, eat up a meal, then be on their
way. The chipmunks on the other hand, would carefully fill their
large cheek pouches to crammed full, then be off to stash it
somewhere. We could see this activity unobstructed going on
just a few feet outside the patio door.

   We likened it a bit to the hand of God. From the animal's point
of view, every now and then would be this suddenly appearance of
food on the top of the table from out of nowhere. Or so we thought.
Actually it hadn't taken some of the visitors all that long to
figure out who the hand of God was.

   After a while Greydie had started to notice that squirrels seem
to just roam around for things, seeming to come across lucky finds
like the picnic table as though by happenstance. Chipmunks on the
other hand always gave the impression that they were always in full
charge of everything they were doing, and always knew exactly what
was going on at every second.

   For example, he started noticing that if the table was out and
a squirrel happened by, it would just do a quick check around and
be on it's way. Chipmunks on the other hand, if the table was out
of stuff, would sit up on their haunches like a kangaroo, clasp
their paws together across their chest, and stare through
the patio door trying to attract someone's attention.

   Sure enough, as soon as we one of us noticed and got up to get
another load, the chipmunk would jump up into tree, we would put
the new load out, and a couple of minutes later the chipmunk would
be back filling it's cheeks.

   Actually, it turns out that squirrels are just as aware of what
is happening, just not as anxious about the food supply. When we
lived at our previous location on Kingsdale, the kitchen window
where we left a smorgie for the birds and squirrels was always
open.

   The squirrels and chipmunks had long since found out where the
seed bag was in the kitchen. So if the goodies on the ledge ran
out, the squirrels would just come in and help themselves as part
of the route.

   Chipmunks were different. They were in the house and all over
the place. The  squirrels would eat a fill at the window ledge
or seed sack. But the chipmunks always filled their cheek pouches
and stashed it somewhere for later. We would see the chipmunks
scooting around in the house all the time.

   One day I happened to pull up the corner of a carpet in one of
the rooms and there was a little stash of goodies. I pulled some
stuff out the laundry hamper and there was another little stash.
Any port in storm apparently. We found eventually little chipmunk
stashes everywhere, including one under the pillow in the bed,
looking like it was being readies for a nest.

   But one day at the trailer, we washed a bag of salted roasted
sunflower seeds to remove the salt and put it out on the table.
The picture for the squirrels changed immediately. The washed
seeds were an instant hit no doubt because of the salt trace. By
half way through the day we had already put out five or six little
handfuls.

   I was at my computer at the back of the glassed in porch,
Greydie was at his other end by the patio door which happened to
be open. I looked up and there was a black squirrel sitting on
it's haunches inside the door less than two feet from Greydie's
foot looking straight up at him looking for all the world like a
cute little character out of Walt Disney. Sure enough the table
was out of seeds.

   It was the first time I had ever seen a squirrel do that, or
even seem interested. In all the times coming into the house at
Kingsdale and hitting the food sack, and all the times they had
come on and off the table at the trailer, that was the first time
I has seen one officially make an ask, let alone come into the
house to do it.

   Knowing how timid squirrels are, I figure this must have been
the critter equivalent of going into Saddam Hussein's living room
and asking for political clemency.

   A tiny little bird with white bottom and black top also used to
stand at the table and stare through the door to get Greydie's
attention when the goodies were out. So now it was complete.
Ducks, chipmunks, squirrels, and birds all knew who owned the
corn. We were it and they had no problem with it.

   Similarly, squirrels and chipmunks aren't the only critters
that stash. Just this last summer at our place back in Ottawa,
I had been putting shelled peanuts out on the driveway for the
squirrels and crows. One afternoon I watched a Blue Jay swoop
in grab a peanut, fly straight up into a small tree along the
driveway, and drop the peanut safely in a small fork in a
branch then fly away. Ergo Blue Jays stash.

   Similarly, Greydie watched a crow pick up a peanut, hop over to
the lawn, dig out a little hole, drop in the peanut and carefully
cover it over. Ergo also crows stash. There seems to be a whole
big part of the animal world goings on going on that the rest of
the world seems to be completely oblivious about. One day a crow
stashed a peanut in a lawn 3 doors away, was back for another nut,
stashed it too near the 1st, then a third, then a fourth, the last
peanut. This time the crow took off flying between houses. A moment
later it was back getting one of the stashed peanuts, then back for
the second, then back for the last peanut. This crow had temporarily
stashed all of the horde, then once safely stashed, proceeded to move
the horde further back out of harms way.

   A lot of people might think all this commotion about birds and
animals is a bit dorky. But it has provided me with an unprecedented
insight into pure natural intelligence. Plus for curious minds like
Greydie and myself, it allows a very big window into the difference
between engrammic inherited behavior and that which has been
environmentally learned.

   Over the years I've therefore come to have great sympathy for
people who work with primates like chimpanzees or smart birds like
parrots. Then a bureaucrat in an office thousands of miles away
decides to terminate the project and toss the animals into a
dumpster like so many rag dolls. It seems to me that people who
don't have a feeling for nature, don't have a feeling for people
either.

   Similarly people who think animals have no intelligence have no
idea what's going on. Back in the sixties I saw a dog walking down
the street in front of me and stop at a bone which was lying at
the edge of a yard just ahead. Instead of just picking up the bone
and heading off which a rote response to the environment would
have implied.

   The dog shot a quick look up and down the street to see if the
coast was clear, checked again just to make sure, then it grabbed
the bone and took off feet flying. I had watched a whole complex
data processing mode take place. That's when I knew that animals
were not just dumb automatonnic environmental responders.

   They go through thinking processes just like we do. Not as
sophisticated or fast, or likewise creatively or spiritually,
which is the actual facto de factor which differentiates Man from
animals. A groundhog gave me conclusive proof one day, just in
case you're still not convinced.

   You will recall that at the end of the nineties we took care of
a fairly decent house out in Greely after moving out of the camp
ground trailer. The place was an ecological wonderland. Dandelions
aside it abounded in both normal and exotic fares of nature.

   The area was basically a wetlands on top of limestone. The area
was festooned with old quarry pits which in fact was why the area
had developed so much without a downtown center of any kind. The
quarry workers had simply moved out to save the long drive to work
every day, swapping it for a long drive for groceries once a week.

   Right across the road from us was a small duck pond about an
acre in size settled beautifully in the woods and bordering the
road. Every spring a family of blue herons would show up and raise
their family. We could hear then booming all night long like they
were in the front yard.

   A pair of red headed woodpeckers came by the front lawn one day
and gave it a careful going over for about ten minutes. Sure,
enough the next day they were back with the two kids in tow
showing them the ropes. A robin nested in a balsam tree right
beside my window where I sat at the computer. About four feet
away.

   Cardinals were constant visitors. I even heard a loud cheeping
by my ear one day. I looked up and a cardinal was hanging on the
screen about two and a half foot feet from my ear and making an
huge commotion. I never did find out what it wanted because as
soon as I stood up to see what it did want, it flew away. Like I
said I never had the bird communication thing down quite as pat as
Greydie.

   Those of you who thing groundhogs are just lumps of brown
slowly figuring there way round on the side of a roadway, have
never seen one straight up on all fours like stilts, in full motor
between some houses. Or those of you think the creatures of nature
are barely able figure out how to get to a roadside or not have
never seen one pulling bread out from the end of a loaf on the
floor.

   Our best visitor however was a groundhog that took up residence
on day under the garage, then spent most of it's time checking
around inside the house to see what was up. Since we had no idea
whether it was a male or female without being rude, we decided to
call it `Sam', a nice gender friendly name.

   Greydie used to sit by the patio door all summer with the door
wide open. He first discovered Sam in the house when he heard a
commotion in the kitchen and discovered Sam routing around through
stuff.

   When it noticed Greydie noticing it, it just scooted behind
Greydie and out the door the way it had come in. After that it was
business as usual and it basically didn't give Greydie much
thought.

   We eventually had it comfortable enough that it even came into
the living room where we were watching TV one night. It did a
complete trip of the room, my feet, some newspapers on the floor,
Greydie's feet, the newspapers on the floor again, then slowly
wandered back out into the kitchen.

   Despite trying, we never got it to become more tame than that.
However it did give me an amazing insight into what's really going
on with these little characters who are very much going to be also
home upstairs in where humans used to call heaven, one day.

   We had gotten into the habit of leaving a opened loaf of bread
on the floor in the kitchen, having discovered one day that bread
was it's favorite score from rummaging. It would simply shove it's
snout into the package, grab a slice then haul off out the patio
door with it's bounty.

   I came in from shopping one day, dropped the plastic bag of
groceries on the floor for a minute while I answered the phone. A
fresh loaf of bread was in the bag. When I came back, Sam was
checking out the bag so I stopped and watched.

   He/she nosed around the outside for a few seconds. Then, swoop
into the bag she/he, your guess is as good as mine, went in face
first. A few seconds later out he/she backed. Then with a long
stretch, in went her/his face again.

   This time, in one quick decisive no muss, no fuss, no waste of
motion 'swipp', out came the whole loaf of bread, entire length,
onto the kitchen floor beside he/she. He/she quickly walked around
to the end of the loaf, lined up, and gave the end a bunt with
it's nose as she/he usually did to get a slice. The wrapper of
course was sealed and wouldn't open. He/she gave a bunt again.
Then stood back for all of about five seconds.

   Then he/she walked decisively around to the side on the bag,
put one paw on top, grabbed a chunk of the plastic wrapper with
it's clackers, gave one quick giant sized sideways yank,
spittooied out the big piece of wrapper which it had just torn
off, reached in the open hole with it's clackers and hauled out
about half a slice of bread and headed out the door.

   I couldn't help but marvel at how amazingly well a hundred
million years or so of evolution had so finely tuned Sam's
instinct that he/she was able to flawlessly move through that
whole little operation, including figuring out on the spot how a
plastic wrapper works, stumbling and bumbling along guided by
nothing more than instinct alone. Which is of course what the
scientific community would have reported had they been the
observeree.

   Actually another instance of animal intelligence yells the
story even better. An add showed up on TV about two years back
with an Orangutan standing at the counter of a cellular phone store
looking up at the clerk. An animal non-intelligence advocate would
make the case that the ape's part in all this was strictly by duly
trained trainer trainee hava banana good good rote response.

   No doubt they would have been right if things hadn't taken a
left turn. Undoubtedly considerable training went into preparing
the ape for the shot. As it was supposed to, the ape looks up for
a few seconds, then reaches up and releases a handful of crumpled
bills on the counter. This implies of course that it's buying a
phone. Therefore by implication, it's so easy even an ape could do
it, which of course was the whole point of the blessed commercial
bless their creative little hearts.

   However as the ape withdraws it's hand, it snags one of the
crumpled bills and pulls it towards the edge of the counter. The
ape catches the movement out of the corner of its eye and quietly
reaches up and shoves the bill safely back towards the middle of
the counter. Just like you or I would have done. And you know it
hadn't been rehearsed so fooie on conditioning.

   It was all right there. In my opinion that one little action
was worth more than all the tests and experiments in the labs ever
conducted. It proved that the ape understood what was required
even if it couldn't of course be expected to know why it was
required.

   But because he understood he was unhesitantly able to put
things back on track once it started to go off. And no way on the
planet it could have been trained for that in advance because it
hadn't been anticipated in advance. See how it works.

   If there had not been understanding, just rote instinct
response, the bill would have hit the deck and the shot would have
had to be redone. It's not that rote is non-intelligence and
understanding is high IQ. Rote response and understanding together
are what constitutes intelligence. Even when a rote component is
high in the mix.

   Animals react through life mainly by conditioned engrams and
instinct. But they also understand and grow. Mankind likes to
think they are above engrams and are all understanding.

   Not so. Stand in a crowd and drop a coin on the floor. Watch
the number of heads which turn instinctively towards the sound.
It's all just a matter of degree.

As a wise man once said, "give me wisdom but above all give me
understanding.



THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 4

`THE TANGENT ANIMAL STORIES'

CHAPTER 28

   Of all of mankind's many institutions since the time of the
Atlantians, surely one of the most winning is the institution of
family pooch. It's a little advertised fact, but dogs are the
planet's official greeters. If a household has a dog and you knock
on the door, the dog will be the first at the door to greet you
guaranteed.

   In most cases the mouth and the tail will be moving at the same
furious pace. It's one of the most endearing attributes about dogs
that they wear their mood on their sleeve. If the tail is wagging
not a problem. If it stops, not so good.

   Another endearing feature about dogs is that of all the
animals, dogs love most to wash people's faces. All you have to do
be is within range. A family cat is not the same. A cat may be
good company to be sure, but a good pooch is not only good company
but a good buddy to boot. Similarly one dog is a commotion, two's
a party.

   When we were kids we lived in Winnipeg from the spring of 1944
to the fall of 1955. You may recall that in the early fifties we
were living in a semi rural suburb of Winnipeg south called Fort
Gary. Pembina highway ran from Winnipeg south to the US border
ninety miles further down and went by our house only a block away.

   Point Grey road also ran by our house about a half a block
away. When the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth and consort Prince
Philip did their early fifties cross Canada tour the procession
went up Point Grey Road at fifteen miles an hour about half a
block away from our house. I ran beside the limo for about half a
block looking in. They probably thought I looked pretty dorky
staring in like that but that's the price you pay for being Queen.

   The main rail line south out of Winnipeg paralleled the Pembina
highway. Most of Fort Gary on our side of the tracks was developed
and even included some sizable upper class digs. Nearly all of
Fort Gary on the other side of the tracks, except for occasional
little pockets of railway worker tracks, was open wheat fields as
flat as pancakes and as far as the eye could see.

   Winnipeg was like that. For a lot of people Winnipeg
unofficially ended on the other side of their street. That was
mainly why when the Red River came up as high as it did this
spring in 1997. The risk of floods in Winnipeg was more than just
ominous.

   Back in the early fifties Dad came home with a Labrador pup one
day. He hoped to have her trained one day as a hunting retriever.
Tess grew up into the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. She
was a pure black lab retriever, right out of the top end of the
pure high bred breeding circuit.

   She was full sized, had a huge wide maw, had an absolutely
brilliant black glistening coat, had a nearly pure aesthetic
streamlined body. Best of all for us kids, she could play all day
and never get tired.

   Labrador dogs, among all the species except for maybe German
Shepherds, love to play. Since our family at the time comprised
five boys, all old enough to wrestle with the dog by ourselves,
she was in what had to be considered a doggie heaven.

   The problem was that being so high bred, she was also almost
impossible to train. She was bright enough. But between us kids
constantly giving her inconsistent signals, and her own sense of
independent forbearance, she did her own thing like it or not.

   For example, whenever Mom put up a wash on the line, Tess would
party up a storm of cloths onto the muddy lawn. She would do it
every time. After three years of scolding she was still doing it
with no apparent intention of ever stopping. We did fortunately
cure her of chasing cars by swatting her bum with rolled up
newspapers. But not even that would work for Mom's laundry.

   Likewise she would follow us to school. That by itself wasn't a
big problem. But she also liked to go into the school to see what
was happening. In the spring or after a rain, she would traipse up
and down the hallways leaving big muddy footprints much to the
dismay and annoyance of the janitors. So the heat was on big about
the dog.

   Our school was a small semi rural school with grade one to
eight in an old stucco one story building. The classrooms were
arranged around the perimeter of the school much like the
perimeter of a rectangle with one long side removed. My twin
brother Greydie and I were in grade eight. The grade one class was
at the southwest corner of the school. Our room was at the very
end of the short leg along the west. The grade one teacher was
also the principle. She was also a lady. She was also not one to
be messed with.

   One particularly muddy spring morning Greydie and I were busy
in class doing some math or something. Suddenly in the loudest
voice imaginable, the grade one teacher's voice boomed throughout
the whole school, "get this frigging dog out of here".

   Suspecting the worst for knowing our dog, Greydie and I raced
up the hall to check it out. It was our beloved little Tess all
right. The grade one door was wide open and she was inside
enthusiastically applying her tongue to every kid's face in
greeting.

   Unfortunately this it turned out to be all too easy for Tess to
do which was the problem. The kids were all on their hands and
knees on the floor beside their desks working on a project. For
the whole winter the class had been working on a group Easter
project composed of individual little finger paintings. When
finished, the paintings would go up on the wall as a mural.

   Every couple of weeks the teacher would bring out the project,
and the kids would get on their hands and knees on the floor
beside their desks to do their painting. The door had been left
open on this particular morning and Tess had come in with mud to
her elbows. She had muddied every kid's painting by being a great
pal to one and all. It was little problems like this that I'm
talking about.

   We had a new 1952 Ford family station wagon. Every Sunday the
folks would pack everybody into the car and we would head out for
a Sunday drive, including the dog. We were heading back home from
the Seven Sister's Falls area of the Winnipeg River later one
Sunday afternoon when one of us kids had to pee.

   Dad pulled over into a farmer's field access road to let him
out. Unfortunately it was a cow pasture and not a wheat field, and
unfortunately it was full of cows and not wheat. Tess instantly
spotted the opportunity of a lifetime. The back door window was
half open. Before any body could think fast enough to close it or
grab on tight to hold her, she was though the gap and out and
after the cows.

   The cows raced for all they were worth down to the far end of
the field Tess in hot pursuit. When they got to the end they
reversed like a symphony of birds and headed back up our way with
Tess in hot pursuit. When they got to our end again, then turned
around and went straight back off again. Tess was having the
undisputed time of her life. The poor farmer was going to have
sour milk for at least a week without ever knowing why.

   We all leaped out of the car and did everything we could to get
her back into the car. But as you know by now she wasn't having
any of it. Greydie even tried to run out into the middle of the
field and to catch her going by.

   But about half way out he yelped, turned around and was now
racing back in panic as fast as his legs could carry him. Tess had
turned the herd around and they were now in hot mode running him
down right behind him. When he got to the fence he dove the last
six feet through the fence, just like a movie. The cows swerved at
the last second at the fence and were off again to the distant
back. Tess still in full pursuit having the time of her life.

   Finally realizing all our attempts to call her back into car
were futile, we just went back into car and decided to wait it
out. After about another ten minutes Tess decided she had had
enough fun for one day and headed back to the car. She was
grinning from ear to ear and her tail was wagging so fast it was
almost invisible. She couldn't wait to tell us all about it. When
she got to the car she leaped straight in through the back door
and we slammed it shut.

   She immediately started to tell each and every one of us
personally about the fantastic time she just had because she
jumped eagerly from front seat to back and onto into one lap and
then another, licking and wagging her tail in everyone's face.
Fortunately she was covered from head to toe in cow shit.

   For us kids it was just another day at the farm. Sadly, for my
parents though, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Dad's
original idea for bringing Tess home had been to have her trained
as a retriever. He had once sent her to obedience school for six
weeks along the way. The first time out on the lake for ducks he
brought one down. She went straight out into the water without
being told just like she was supposed to.

   She brought the duck straight back to Dad just like she was
supposed to. But then just like she was not supposed to, she went
up on shore and ate it. That was the first and last time Dad ever
tried taking her out hunting for ducks.

   A couple of weeks after the cow incident, we came home from
school one afternoon and there was no sign of Tess. My parents had
found a farm couple who wanted her. As sad as we kids all were, we
were happy to think she would have more room to roam. Also
depending on her new owner's level of tolerance, we all believed
she could probably commit an indiscretion or two without causing
another major incident throughout the neighborhood.

   No matter how well attuned you may be to animals in the wild,
nothing brings the depth of animal intelligence into focus more
clearly than sharing close quarters with a good bright pooch.

   Our good chum and buddy Quasar first came into the picture
while we still lived on Holborn. Quasar was part Basenji, about a
foot high and brindle brown like a boxer. He eventually passed on
in the winter of 1997 fourteen and a half years later. It's true
everybody likes to tell their favorite family dog stories. But
this little pooch definitely earned his keep.

   Quasar was the result of a happy relationship coexisting between
a friend and his faithful traveling companion Tover. The two used to
come over frequently during my loudspeaker research days on Holborn.

   Tover was a little white dog, almost completely round like a
miniature Samoa. They arrived one day in the pouring rain. Turned
out Tover was skinnier than a Whippet. Poor guy was mortally
embarrassed, the rain had blown his cover.

   Tover was sharp as a tack. But the thing most noticeable about
the two was the way they carried on straight across most of the
time like good budds rather than master and slave.

   Tover was all dog though. Brad came over one day and Tover was
in the dog house so to speak. They had been doing the rounds
shopping for groceries, mail, etc. When Brad came back out from
somewhere, Tover had eaten the chicken in the grocery bag in the
back seat.

   Brad stopped by one day and wondered if we could look after
Tover for a couple of days because he had to go out of town. Sure
I said. Actually delighted. A little buddy around the house would
be fun for a while.

   An hour later, Tover wanted out. Ten minutes later he wanted
back in. Twenty minute later he wanted back in. And so it went for
a couple of hours obviously where in the hell Brad had gone.

   Finally after a couple of hours while letting him back out, I
got exasperated and in a moment of stupidity said, "get lost will
ya". We didn't see him again for four days.

   Brad came back two days later and just imagine how I felt. We
had looked everywhere over and over again. It had been raining non
stop which didn't add to everyone's enthusiasm a whole lot. After
two more days of everything with Brad, I was just about to throw
in the towel and there was Tover looking like he had just come
back from the French Foreign legion.

   The little bugger had done exactly what I'd asked him to do and
had gotten lost. After awhile of Brad and Tover, and remembering
the good old days with dogs like Tess when we were kids, Greydie
and I decided to get a dog.

   I went down the pound. It was a heart rending scene. The cages
were full of poor little creature sidling around in their cages
trying to figure out what cruel twist of fate had put them there.
Quasar sidled better than anyone so got the nod. I paid the fee,
asked what his name was and what kind of a dog it was.

   They clerk didn't have a clue. Usually when people bring in a
dog to the Humane Society, they give papers, name, everything. But
the middle aged owners of this one had just walked in, dumped him
gruffly on the counter and walked out without saying a word. About
the only thing the clerk could suggest was that the society vets
suspected he was only about four months old.

   At this early age he looked exactly like a smaller version of
Pluto from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. Same floppy feet, ears,
thin tail and loppish gate. Only brindle brownish orange in color
instead of whatever the heck Pluto was.

   We could tell right off that this was not going to be your
average garden variety type animal. Less than five minutes after
coming into the house, the dog had already scoped out every nook
and cranny of every room of the house, including both ends of the
basement. He was in the process of flying by the two of us
standing in the hallway when Greydie quipped that he was just like
a quasar, referring of course to high energy quasar stars which
have the output of whole galaxies and not the TVs made in Japan.

   Apparently whatever the dog's original name had been, it must
have been close to Quasar, because he stopped dead in his tracks
and stared straight at my brother and I with both ears standing
straight up. So his official naming ceremony had only taken a
second. Thereafter he was called Quasar and none of us seemed to
any problem at all in remembering the fact.

   The next day, I got up and was greeted with the sight of every
object in the house accessible by floor, and moveable, piled about
three feet high in the middle of the hall. The pile included
socks, paper, towels, boxes, everything. In a bit of a pique I
started to bend over to remove the pile.

   But Greydie, always a little in front of me on these kinds of
things said, "no, wait, let's see what he does next". Sure enough,
the next morning the entire show was in a corner of the living
room. Not one stick had been left unmoved. The next day it was out
in the middle of the floor. The next it day it was all over, the
experiment evidently a success and thus concluded what ever it had
been. This was definitely not like any dog we'd experienced before.

  A few days later, one morning it was the shoes, every pair of shoes
in the house neatly piled side by side in the hallway. Greydie got
the better of curiousity, searching the house finding one pair of
white sneakers still in a room partly hidden behind something. Sure
enough, later that day, the last pair of sneakers had migrated to
the pile in the hallway and were sitting a perfect pair side by side as
if on display in a shoe store, left side to right side correct as with
all of them, the rest of the side by side pairs of shoes in the hallway.

  He never did this number with the cloths again. But about two
months later, my brother called me into the living room all excited.
Quasar's bones, chewies, toys, etc., were all sitting in a perfect
line along the floor.

   The next day they were in a perfect L. The next day they were
in three neatly distributed little piles. This kind of activity
showed up from time to time throughout Quasar's whole life. This
was definitely, definitely not your garden variety panting pooch.

  Quasar also had a habit of telling us when friends would be
arriving, about two or three minutes before they arrived. Holborn
was a small street branching about a block off highway 16 South of
Ottawa down along the Rideau River. The speed limit on the highway
was 50 miles an hour (80 kilometers per hour).

  Quasar would suddenly start barking and run to the door. I would
let him out and he would stand in the driveway looking up the road
leading to the highway barking his head off. Sure enough, four or
five minutes later, one of our friends would swoop in off the
highway onto our driveway and Quasar would be all wags and wiggles
saying hello.

   He was also `looked' unlike any dog I'd seen before. When we
first got him home he was a foot high, brindle orangish brown and
black like a boxer, had a tail which was usually curled up like a
large capitol C, had huge flopping paws at the end of spindly
brown legs, and enormous ears for his size approaching the ear
proportions of a Dashchund.

  As he grew he retained the absolute same ungainly look and romp
as mentioned of Pluto from Mickey Mouse, only smaller in size. The
funny part was that, unlike most pooches, he grew up to fill out
and grow into big floppy puppy paws, but he never grew an inch in
height. He always remained the same foot high pooch we originally
brought home.

   No one had any idea what breed he was, even as a mongrel. A
year later, the owner of the house retired, wanted to move in, we
had to move out. So as you may recall we moved to Almonte Ont.,
looking for cheaper rent to start up a hi-fi loudspeaker business.
We had rented an old church which had been the former
manufacturing facility of a company refurbishing fire engines and
manufacturing high speed snow plow blades attachments for airports
and public highways.

   We hadn't been in town more than two days when an old timer
walking slowly up the other side of the street said, "I see you
boys have a Basenji". The very next day an old gal came walking up
our side of the street, and said, '" see you fellows have a
Basenji". It seemed that everybody in town knew what kind of dog
we had except us.

   So I checked it out and sure enough, turns out a guy about
three blocks up the street used to breed them. We took Quasar up
and he was a Basenji all right, but only about eighty percent. He
explained that Basenjis came from African bush dogs.

   Bush dogs had ultra long noses, and a fully curled tail.
Basenjis were the domesticated version of the bush bog, about
10,000 years old. Quasars nose was a little shorter than the full
bred, and his tailed curled in a backward C rather than full curl.
Otherwise he was right on the money. Terrier was our best guess
for the other twenty percent.

   Purebred Basenjis tend to have troublesome dispositions which
worsen with age. Some Basenji mongrels can have ideal household
dispositions. But sometimes they get cranky as they get older. We
lucked in all the way.

   The original bush dogs are one of the only natural enemies of a
lion. A dozen or so would go in a pack and being agile and
fearless enough, they would simply worry the lion into exhaustion.

   Australian Dingoes were another branch of the original bush
dog, slightly larger. But the Australian Dingo connection wasn't
too far off. I was walking down Elgin Street in Ottawa one day,
and saw a guy walking down the sidewalk straining at leash with
two dogs towing him along from in front.

   One was a German Shepherd, the other was streamlined like a
Collie but the same brindle coloring as Quasar except pinkish
instead of brownish. And with a much longer nose and a more curled
tail.

  Thinking it might be a pure bred I jumped out of the car and
asked if she was a Basenji. "No", he replied proudly, "Australian
Dingo", as she proceeded to wash my face. No doubt about it, this
was a nice tightly knit little family of animals.

   I saw the undomestic part of Quasar peeping out on a couple of
occasions. Once I heard a sonoric howling coming from the backyard
of our townhouse in Nepean one night about five years later. It
was a full moon and Quasar was sitting on a small hill of grass,
nose pointed straight up at the moon and giving it everything he
had. You gotta wonder what's behind that.

   On another occasion I saw him looking out the window standing
high on his tiptoes as rabbits sometimes do. His front paws were
drawn in tight to his chest and his ears were straight up as he
looked around out the window. I had the distinct felling that this
was how the Bush Dogs did it while stalking a lion through tall
grass.

   From time to time I would have occasion to see Quasar moving
through thick bush. He jumped over tree falls and under tangle
like they didn't exist. In fact, because of this particular in the
wild related dexterity we thought he might have been be part
Coyote in his earlier months before we learned about Basenjis.

   Basenjis typically don't bark.  The Pups are born with scar
tissue on their vocal cords. If they don't bark in the first six
months, the tissue fuses and the dogs only make grunts and
whimpers for the rest of their lives.

   Therefore Basenjis are known as the famous barkless dog. We
figured that most of the twenty percent of Quasar that wasn't
Basenji had quartered in the barkit area because he loved to bark
given any excuse.

   Here's an interesting little bit of trivia. A dog growls from
its nose not its throat. We tend to think throat because that's
the only place we can simulate the growl. Dog's growl for warning
or for fun like in a tug of war with a cloth. If you're ever
playing with a dog that's growling for fun, check it out.

   Similarly there's a very good reason most dogs bark. To say,
"hello", or, "you're in my face". More specifically, "you're on my
turf". If you enter a yard in which a dog is tethered, the dog
will likely go bananas because you have invaded their turf.
Barking is their only option to thence you hither.

   They will keep barking, and eventually you will leave. Thus
they will have achieved their objective. Straight forward stuff.
This is why dogs and postal carriers are always in such an
infinite loop.

   The dog always barks like bananas, the postal carrier always
high tails it to the next stop. So from the dog's perspective, the
desired result is always being achieved. Talk about Pavlovain
reinforcement.

   But if the dog is off the leash some day, then it will see the
same idiot coming into the forbidden territory who still evidently
hasn't seemed to have gotten the message despite the six or seven
hundred previous messages. However now the dog has another option
open. So it bites the postal carrier. That's why postal carriers
are always getting bit.

   The solution for all this is to simply pack some dog biscuits.
Now the dog has a wayyy more compelling reason for having the
postal carrier around on its turf, than off. That's why postal
carriers who carry dog biscuits never get barked at or bit. Life
from a dog's point of view is pretty straight forward stuff.

   Before Quasar was even six months old, we had already
determined that he was fully responsible enough to monitor his own
daily food intake. Dogs normally wolf down everything in sight
including your hand if it's too close to the food. Quasar ate a
bit now and a bit later like a cat.

   For a while he also started eating cardboard, paper, wood, in
fact anything in sight just like a goat. Which concerned me. One
day he came upstairs from the basement carrying a used loop of
sandpaper from my hand held belt sander in his mouth. The belt was
full sized, 4 inches wide and 24 inches long. It was a heavy duty
belt consisting of very course sand held onto a heavy blue denim
backing by thick purple glue.

   Then Quasar did what any self respecting dog would do in a
situation like that and proceeded to lick the glue. No problem
there I thought. I came back a while later and the belt was gone.
Quasar had downed it down the hatch, every scrap. "Not good", I
said to myself.

   The next day the driveway was covered up and down in very long,
very thin strips of purple cloth. Some of the strips were over
fifteen feet long. It was the sandpaper belt after due process. I
never worried about his eating habits after that.

   Same with chicken bones. Dogs can't eat chicken bones because
they splinter and the dogs can choke. Actually it's only the
shanks that splinter. The knuckles are fine. So whenever Greydie
and I had chicken we would cut the knuckles off the shanks for
Quasar as his part of the affair.

   The shanks were a no no. Sometimes out on the rounds, I would
see him pick one up. I would carefully take it away, break off the
knuckles and put the shanks in the garbage.

   Quasar apparently caught on to the rule. One day I was at the
grocers. This particular place was on a very small plaza with a
stand alone take out Jamaican chicken joint at one end of the
parking lot. When I got back to the car, Quasar was waiting and a
brown paper bag was at my feet by the back door.

   I kicked it out of the way, loaded up the back seat, then went
to the trunk to load the rest of the grocery bags. When I finished
and stepped back I stepped onto the paper bag again. It had
somehow migrated around to the back of the car. It was lined up
precisely under foot so I couldn't fail but to step on it stepping
back from the trunk.

   The only possible explanation of course was Quasar. He must be
trying to tell me something. Sure enough when I looked inside the
bag it was filled with chicken bones. He had found it on the lot
somewhere and had brought it over for me to fix. Ya gotta kinda
like the style of that.

   If chicken bones were treats in the fast lane of city life for
a dog, I once had a glimpse of what life was probably like in the
fast lane of the wild for Bush Dogs one day. We were selling corn
at the roadside one summer. There was an old log nearby and I
accidentally knocked it over with my foot. What must have been
something alive at one time lay underneath, but the flies had got
it and now it was nothing but a seething mass of carrion.

   Quasar went absolutely nuts trying to get at it. I literally
had to hold him off with the blunt end of a two by four as I
hurriedly covered it back up so he couldn't get at it. I was fully
aware that for him this was probably the equivalent of chocolate
covered caviar. But frankly I just couldn't face the thought of
getting my face washed sometime later. We definitely live in
different world's at some levels, dogs and we.

   Man and beast are also often at odds over the best choice of
cologne. We do it to appear Attractive to the opposite sex, i.e.,
so they can tell we are around and happening. Dogs do it for the
opposite reason, to appear invisible so game won't know they're
coming downwind. That's why hunting breed's are always rolling
around in things you don't even want to think about.

   I was out at a pumpkin patch one fall just before the end of
our second year selling Pumpkins. I was checking around to see if
there were any still lying around worthy of collecting.

   Sadly there wasn't. Most of them were disgusting rotting hulks.
An early frost had fallen that year so a number had been frost
damaged and after nearly a month were little more than stinky
orange puddles.

   I got back into the car, and Quasar hopped in over my lap to
the passenger seat and I couldn't believe my nose. The shock
almost passed me out. Quasar was absolutely bright orange with
rotting pumpkin covering every square inch. And was he strutting.
Not wanting to miss a golden opportunity like this, while I had
been looking for pumpkins Quasar had been rolling in them.

   I found a hose behind a shed at the front of the field and
managed to wash him off much to his very great disappointment at
my total lack of understanding and abject insensitivity to his
lucky score. But hey I was driving and the drivers call the shots.

   In the earlier days back at Holborn Quasar didn't take long to
put his stamp on things. He set rules we were to follow quite
quickly and was quite specific about them. For example, we weren't
allowed to feed him. Most dogs, if you put down a bowl of food,
its one gulp and gone with the dog looking up hoping for more.

   Quasar wasn't having any of that. We fed him Premburgers, small
hamburger like patties of soy based dog food wrapped in
cellophane. The idea was to unwrap the pattie and crush it up into
the bowl.

   The adds said, 'Feed your dog only Premburgers, and reprimand
it severely if it tries to eat anything else. Eventually it will
come to relish its Premburgers. I should think so. If I only fed
you Premburgers, and kicked your bum every time you tried to eat
anything else, I'm pretty sure you would come to relish your
Premburgers too.

   Actually though, in Quasar's case, Premburgers for breakfast,
Premburgers for lunch, and Premburgers for dinner was his idea
not ours. He wouldn't bother with anything else, even top of the
line canned dog food. Kitchen scraps yes of course, but, every
day, it was also Premburgers.

   One day just before I started to crunch up a Premburgers, up
went Quasar's paw and down to his mouth went the pattie. He gently
took the pattie out of my hand, walked into the other room, found
a comfortable spot, lay down on his stomach with the pattie
between his paws like a bone, and leisurely ate it a small niblet
at a time like he had all day

    So that's the way it was from that point on. Sometimes he
would just eat a little, leave it, come back later, eat a little
more, and so on. Sometimes it would take him a whole day to eat
the pattie. He often had a whole pile of them around on the go at
the same time. You never touched one of his patties in progress
though. That was a no no.

    One day as I was taking off a wrapper, up went the paw again
and off he went with the pattie still wrapped. He lay down,
grabbed a bit of the cellophane in his teeth, gave a quick flick,
and out popped the Premburger.  From that point on, removing the
wrapper himself was also part of his business as usual. Sometimes
he would just nip off a piece of cellophane and eat it out of the
wrapper a bit at a time like a box of popcorn.

   At any rate thereafter doing it all himself was the new rule.
We just handed him the patties out of the box. Eventually even
that went by the way. We just left the box open in a convenient
spot in the kitchen and he helped himself.

   We used to keep our eye on the box, and when it got low would
buy another. If the box got too low and we hadn't been paying
attention, he would bring it to our attention. One day he brought
it to our attention, but we forgot. He brought it to our attention
again, and again we forgot. Greydie was watching TV and Quasar
came into the living room and dropped the empty box straight onto
his lap. Greydie went straight out and bought a new one.

   Another time in the early nineties, Quasar brought his empty
box to my attention and I forgot. The next day, same thing and I
forgot again. I wasn't all that worried because patties were
stashed everywhere so he wasn't going to starve.

   The next day the empty box landed in my lap, and again I
forgot. The next morning the box was completely shredded in a
perfect straight line up and down the hallway all the way to
the front door. I went straight out and picked up a new box.

   Because of his elegant eating style with the patties I
presumed, Quasar also had a completely unique style from a normal
dog's perspective at least of eating corn. For example Labradors
love sweet corn but would just munch through the sheath managing
to get some juice and a few little tidbits. Then they would grab
another.

   Quasar would lie down with a cob, carefully grip a bit of the
sheath at the open end, peel it back and eat the corn methodically
down the cob just like you or I. then it would be another leaf, peeled
all the way back like a banana. When he was finished, the whole cob
would be as clean as if it had been eaten by you or I. The silk
tassles were a bit different, off would come a tear, spit spit
spit then another tear, until every silk tassle was gone before
Quasar proceeded into the corn niblets proper.

   I kid you not and I can prove it. Our local newspaper carries
the comic strip Marmaduke in the Sunday funnies. Marmaduke in case
you didn't know, is a about a Great Dane and has been around for
years and years. With every strip is a write in from somebody with
a brief story about their dog or something it's done.

   The strip at the end of July, 1998 told of a German Shepherd
which watched its boss sheath a load of corn from the garden. The
next day it grabbed it's own cob of corn, sheathed it perfectly,
and ate it clean as a whistle. Just like I've been saying.

   Not to be outdone, Squirrels also ate corn this same neat
efficient way. But it was a lot harder to catch them at it since
they usually carried it off to parts unknown.

   As easy a time as Quasar had with some things like corn on the
cob, like most dogs, peanut butter and soft toffee candies were a
different matter. Like all dogs, the stuff would get stuck on the
roof of the mouth and they didn't have the equipment to deal with
it. In fact, trainers use peanut butter to get dogs to lick their
chops on cue on camera for TV and movies.

   Quasar loved Halloween candies. Particularly the soft chewy
ones. After every Halloween, Greydie, Quasar, and I we would all
polish off the leftovers. We had sort of got Quasar into the
routine of chewing the toffees, which is not a natural activity
for a dog who usually chomps things down in chunks. He would
clack, then again, then again very slowly like he was trying to
program a whole complex sequence of events between each clack.

   He was in the middle of a clack one night, when the candy got
stuck on the roof of his mouth. The tongue went out and all over
the place trying to find it. He rose to his feet and did some
circles to see if it would stay behind.

   The paw went up and vaguely groped around the front of his
mouth. He clacked some more and started all over again. Eventually
it came free. It went down the hatch then Quasar sat straight down
and looked over at me with ears straight up and a look of
anticipation on his face that clearly said, "you got another one".

   The one thing we noticed though rather curiously about Quasar
early off, was the fact that he never ate a lot or seem to want
to compared to the other dogs of our experience. When he was only
about six months old I followed him out one day and he did a salad
bar through the shrubs and lawn. His Bush dog heritage was showing
through. It made me suspect that coyotes and foxes are also
probably good part veterinarian.

   Over time, the result of our casual way of feeding Quasar was
that patties started showing up all over the place, like stashed.
He never ate more, but would stick one behind a chair, under a
table, more outside. Also, every time we were to go out in the
car, he would grab a pattie and leave it on the sidewalk or at the
end of the driveway. Since I could see the possibility of some
other dog happening along and finding it, I would try and get him
to bring it along, which he would eventually do all the time
looking at me like I was stupid.

   One day I happened to noticed that the first thing he always did
when we got back was to check the pattie. Then the light bulb hit.
It was his surveillance camera. If the pattie was disturbed or gone
when we got back, then another dog had been around. Ergo, same thing
for the stashes all around the yard. Another little glimpse at the
world according to a dog.

   A less progressive eating habit of Quasar's that stayed with him
his whole life however, was paper out of the waist paper basket. When
he first hit the house, one of the very first things he did was pull
a number of pieces of paper out of the waist basket and shred them
around the floor. If you tossed anything into the basket he was on
it in a single bound and out it would come. We figured this particular
little activity may probably have been one of the things that had done
him in with his previous owners.

   We also eventually concluded that what he was really after was
salty snot rags. If you blew your nose and threw the Kleenex into
the basket, Quasar would be on it like a desperate man and have it
down the hatch in a second because of the salt. If it was just
ordinary paper it would end up shredded all over the place looking
for the salt.

   That was one habit Quasar never forewent. He spent his whole
life supplementing his sodium intake with snot rags. One of the
only people in his life he ever bit was a computer technician over
a potential snot rag. Quasar used to go with me everywhere like a
compadre. He was so well behaved most places didn't mind, in fact
some looked forward to his visits.

   I had been in one of my regular computer stores one day and the
technician had just crumpled up a piece of paper and thrown it
into the waste basket. Quasar had it in his mouth in a single
bound. The guy tried to take it back so Quasar bit him in the
hand. The only thing I could think of to say after apologizing
sheepishly as he was getting ready to off for his tetanus shot
was, 'never try and take away a dog's stuff'.

   The two other neat little rules that quasar set up were that
dogs always want to do their share of the work, and the union
principle of a `fair day's pay for a fair day's work.'. Only in
this case Quasar was both the arbiter of succession and recipient
successee. We did our business through a post office box in the
early days of the software business.

   One day I was coming back to the car from the post office, and
up went the paw. Sure enough, the letters went back to the car in
his mouth, and they stayed at his feet on his seat until I coughed
up something like a candy out of my pocket for his wages. From
that day forward, he always waited outside the post office for the
mail. Anybody who's dog insisted on carrying in the newspaper or
bringing out the slippers can relate to that. You'll notice that
they always strut proudly.

   Same thing coming out of the bank. One day, up went the paw,
into his mouth went the money, and from that day on he always
carried the money back to the car. I had to remember to always
have something in the glove compartment to pay the salary, not
forgetting that I had no access to the goods safely sequestered
under his chin until I paid the appropriate tariff.

  People in line at the bank used to love it. I always quipped my
bucks were probably in safer hands sticking out of his mouth than
in an armored car.

   Same thing coming out of the grocery store. One day up went the
paw onto the bag I was Carrying. In went the head until he found
something he could handle and off to the car it went in his mouth.
Usually it was a pound of coffee or butter. The first brick of butter
to get carted from the car into the condo had 3 fang puncture and an
indented fourth. Greydie showed the marks to Quasar as a matter of
noting how well Quasar had carried the brick home. The second butter
brick carted home had three fang indents no puncture, the third brick
one slight fang indent, the fourth was clean, thereafter it was always
the same an unmarked brick of butter even when carried gingerly clamped
in Quasars fangs up to 3/4 of a kilometer home from where we sometimes
had to park the car.

   One day he discovered a pack of my brother's smokes, and cigarettes
were the number one item from that day after. In particular while we
still lived at the Nepean townhouse, Greydie or I plus the dog, would
walk up to the local convenience store for a newspaper and cigs for
Greydie. Quasar would carry the cigs back, about three blocks. He would
check his route on the way and crank and whizz his way along, the pack
of smokes still clamped firmly in his mouth.

   One winter evening when we still lived in the townhouse I got
back to the door and no sign of the cigarettes. I asked Quasar
where the cigarettes were and he sort of looked around a minute
looking confused. I asked him again, and suddenly the ears went
straight up. It was almost almost like seeing a light bulb go off.

   He ran all the way back down the street and around the end of
the town house  complex as fast as he could go. Two minutes later
he was running back up the street as fast as he could run the pack
of smokes clamped tightly in his mouth. True story. He had been
looking around aimlessly trying to remember where he had dropped
it, and as soon as he remembered the ears had gone straight up.

   He did that often with both my brother and I with anything
including the coffee. And some people argue that animals don't go
through a thinking process. The swick of the ears going up every
time was so specific it had to be the Spock world equivalent of a
light bulb going off.

   Eventually Quasar started bringing the smokes or whatever into
the house, lie down with the item between his paws and his chin would
go down on top. After bringing him a piece of cheese or other wage and
he would look it over and look over the item. If he didn't think the
wage was the equal of the job just performed, or otherwise inequitable,
down would go the chin again.

   You would have to keep raising the ante. Quasar would keep
carefully comparing the two inequities until he figured the
offering was equitable with the work done, Then off would go
the chin and you were back in business with the whatever it
was. This pooch would definitely been at home in a Moroccan
Bizarre.

   One day, when Quasar was now about eight years old, he came
back to the house with a pack of smokes and down went the chin.
Greydie coughed up a ransom, but it was evidently not enough. He
coughed up more but it was still not enough.

   Soon there was a sizeable pile of stuff but it was still no
deal. This was definitely something new to the pattern. So Greydie
left him with his chin on the pack. He checked back later and the
chin went back down on the pack, He came back again and the
cigarettes were all over the floor.

   But it was not like the dog had been ticked off. Actually it
looked more like he had been studiously studying it for a while
before shredding it than anything else.

   The new pattern repeated itself now every day cigarettes came
home. For almost six months. One day my brother came back to check
things back and Quasar was standing beside the pack tail waving
frantically from side to side. Instead of in shreds all over the
floor, the cellophane was off the package, one end of the box was
bitten off, and three completely managed cigarettes were hanging
about half way out of the pack. Quasar was beside himself with the
achievement.

   After all these years of observing what Greydie did after he
picked up the pack, Quasar had evidently decided it should be part
of his valet service. Now after studying it close hand for almost
half a year, he had it. It eventually became quite refined.

   By the time he was twelve he had the filter ends out eight
times out of ten. Now and then Quasar would get back off track
and the package would be mangled all over the floor. About one
out of twenty times exactly one cigarette would be sticking out
and it would be one happy, happy dog waiting for you to see it.
Most people would never believe us about this one. But it's
absolutely true, I swear it. At first, every so often a filter
or two would get torn off by the pull, but then one day pulls
stopped and that was the end of it, thereafter, the ciggie pull
out of the carton ready for Greydie to smoke, was perfect.

   Actually some credit for this should go to the genius of dogs
in general and not just this one particular individual. For a while
in 1995, Shep, our ex car salesman friend who helped us with our
anti-virus software sales for a while had a Dalmatian named Danny.

   The experts say that Dalmatians are not the most intelligent of
dogs. You can't easily train them. I think it's just because the dogs
aren't into pointless things like 'roll over big rover' and 'play dead'.
They are certainly intelligent.

   Shep came over one day to make a bunch of phone calls and his
wife was also going to be out for the day. So he bought Danny with
him. Quasar and Danny had a bit of a problem trying to sort out
who owned the house. So Quasar spent the day in one room with me,
and Danny stayed in the another room with Shep.

   Quasar and Greydie went out in the afternoon to get cigarettes.
When they got home. Quasar did one of his more successful pack
openings. We made a big commotion telling Shep about what a good
dog he was. Danny watched it all intently from the other room.

   A few weeks later I was over at Shep's for an hour. Both he and
his wife smoked like chimneys. I sat down at the kitchen table and
Danny gave me his usual face wash and wagging tail `hello'. Then
he went out of the room and came back a few minutes later and gave
me another big commotion.

   I looked down and there was a cigarette at my feet. Evidently,
because of all the commotion surrounding Quasar over at our place,
Danny must have concluded that cigarettes were the most important
thing in the world to humans and so had brought me one.

   I'm telling you, people who say that animals aren't intelligent
haven't a clue to what intelligence is.

   Regarding animal intelligence, as bright as pooches are,
Chipmunks  definitely have to be one of the brightest matches in
the box. Harrison Lake is a 60-mile long lake running like a
finger into the Coastal Rocky Mountains about 80-miles up the
Fraser River valley from Vancouver. The lake has a town at it's
southern end, and also a world famous mineral spa and resort.

   In the summer of 1970, a friend living in the town told me
about a fairly deluxe abandoned cabin on a small island part way
up the lake. Since a mail boat ran the lake twice a week, he
suggested that if I wanted I could have the mail boat drop me off
at the island and check in on me twice a week while doing it's
route.

   "Why not", I said, and he asked me if I would take his two
Spaniel Terrier pooches along for the trip to give them a little
variation in life.

   The pooches were a brother and sister, and quite a pair. Dogs
are like a business. In business, one office is one headache, two
offices is two headaches. With dogs, one dog is one commotion, two
dogs is fifteen. These two were an even extra gregariously impish
pair. Actually they were a joy to behold if you're into dogs, always
on the cook for fun flat out going all the time.

   The first day at the cabin I discovered a pair of Chipmunks holed
up under the front porch. Of course the pooches had discovered the
chipmunks long before I had and by now set up a big commotion every
time they saw them. This went on for about two days. No doubt it was
the fun of a lifetime for the two pooches. But of course it was
probably just a big pain in the rump for the chipmunks.

   After the two days of this, I heard the dogs barking off to the
right of the cabin for a while, then off to the left, then off to
the right again. This went on like so for some time. So I went out
to see what on earth was going on. The chipmunks evidently had
found the dogs number.

   To the right of the cabin, about 30 feet away was a tall
Douglas fir tree. A similar tree sat to the left of the cabin
about 60 feet away. One of the chipmunks was on the right tree,
the other on the left. The right tree chipmunk would come down the
tree trunk to nearly ground level then set up a chatter to attract
the pooches.

   The two pooches would race over to the tree as fast as they
could run yapping their heads off. The chipmunk would go up the
trunk to about eight feet then sit chattering while the two dogs
would go ballistic at the base trying to leap up and barking their
heads off.

   After a few minutes the left tree chipmunk would come down to
the ground, set up a chatter to attract the dogs back it's way,
who would then race off to the left tree as fast as they could
run. Then history would repeat itself the left tree chipmunk
chattering down at the dogs from about eight up.

   After a little while the right tree chipmunk would come back
down again, and history would repeat itself again. The two
chipmunks were in fact working the dogs almost as perfectly as if
they were remote controlled. I recognized right away that if I
lived to be 200 years old, the two pooches would probably never
figure out what was going on. The engrams for this kind of stuff
were just too strongly evolved in.

   Being dogs, I also figured they would continue this activity
until the chipmunks had run them into the ground. So I had to call
them inside, and for the rest of the two weeks I stayed at the
cabin I had to keep my ears open for sounds of frantic barking. I
also kind of wondered what the chipmunks had been saying to the
dogs from their safe perches eight feet up the trees. No doubt it
probably wasn't very flattering.




THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 4

`THE TANGENT ANIMAL STORIES'

CHAPTER 33

   As maybe easy to fool as dogs may be when chipmunks are
involved, dogs in general are not dumb. Not only do dogs have very
sensitive hearing, they also know who's causing a problem.

   When I was fairly early along in my speaker resonance
experiments in 1983, someone came over and asked if I had anything
that might improve the sound of his home built pair of Tannoy
speakers. British made Tannoy speakers are very good, their big
fifteen inch monsters at the time were considered top of the line
in many quarters.

   The big fifteen inchers were designed to work in gigantic big
boxes whose specs were commonly advertised to encourage people to
buy the big fifteen inch drivers to fill them. This looked like a
good chance to test out some of the experimental stuff I had
fooling around with by then. So over I went.

   With all due respect the guy had built the enclosures paying
complete attention to the specs obviously enough. But he was just
as obviously oblivious as to why the specs were intended.

   The two boxes were in unfinished plywood. The interiors were
absolutely bare and devoid of padding or bracing. The two giant
boxes were occupying nearly the whole end of a little 8 x 8 eight
foot living room with bare walls and no carpets. Worse, he
insisted at playing them at full volume. They were nothing but a
roar, the same kind of jet plane sound you hear from an average
rock band. Only this was supposed to be hi fi, very expensive
Hi Fi, extremely expensive Hi Fi, in fact.

   I should have known better, even the gods of sound wouldn't
have been able to help with this situation. But I couldn't resist
the challenge. Sure enough, my stuff only made the roaring screech
louder. The other fellow stood by the amplifier twiddling the knobs,
I sat in a chair at the other end of the room with my speaker wires
in my hands ready to short them together for a test run whenever he
gave the nod.

   We fiddled like that for over half an hour but it was a lost
cause. Whenever my speakers came in, the sound got worse. This
wasn't surprising or a disappointment. My speakers worked with the
ambient background so were actually doing what they were supposed
to.

   In this case it was just an exercise in futility because the
two big original speakers were just blasting anything of an added
coherent sound away, resulting in more screech.

   Suddenly the fellow's dog got up from the middle of the floor.
Then walked over to the chair where I was sitting, shoved his nose
between my closely held hands, flicked his nose quickly to the
left then the right knocking my hands with the wires wide apart.
Thus instantly cutting out the extra racket from my speakers. The
experiment was officially over.

   Cows aren't that dumb either. You might think so seeing them do
nothing but stand around eating grass all day in a pasture and
pooping. It's just that under those circumstances there isn't any
reason for them to be any more than what you see. Animals as a
whole are very efficient. They evolved as little self contained
survival units, so they only put out what they need to at any
given time.

   But put a cow in a more natural setting and watch what you get.
During my mining days in the mid sixties, I was looking at a piece
of property up in the wilds of the BC interior due west of
William's Lake. The property had an old abandoned airstrip. The
airstrip was a leftover from some oil exploration in the forties.
A wild herd of cows was at one end of the strip.

   As we moved around the area in our exploration, we started to
approach the herd of cows. Suddenly they looked up, their nostrils
flared and their ears went straight up just like a herd of wild
mustangs in a Wild West movie. As we moved closed the cows
suddenly all took off at a very fast jog to the other end of the
airstrip.

   No herding shuffle or mindless stampeding of sleepy bovines in
this bunch. This was a well hustled, no nonsense, straight up
slick boogie to safer digs at the other end of the strip. These
were very very alive and alert animals.

   Similarly, while I lived for a while in the foothills west of
Calgary we decided to build a fancy rock garden in front of the
place. A local dairy farmer said we could take as many rocks as we
wanted from along his pasture fence.

   One of the other fellows and myself went over in one of our
vans to pick up a load. When we arrived, one of his herds, about
thirty five cows, was standing in the middle of the pasture. We
backed the van up to the fence and started heaving rocks into the
back. The rocks made a very loud clamor and clatter as they hit
the metal floor of the van and rolled to the back.

   We worked intently for about ten minutes. Suddenly I heard a
noise and looked up. The nose of a cow was about three feet away
from my nose. The cows had heard the clattering and the entire
herd was crowded tight around the fence to see what we were doing.
Like I said, no dummies these guys, just give them the right
chance. I'm telling you, people who say that animals aren't
intelligent don't have a clue to what intelligence is.

   Sometimes though you got to wonder a bit at the genetics. When
I was managing the rock band in Vancouver, our friend Diane had a
small white Lhasa Apso dog. These are the dogs with so much hair
down the front of their face they look exactly the same way coming
or going. I had been visiting one day and asked wryly, "how do
those guys see anyway", obviously meaning do they actually have
any idea where they're going.

   Before she could even formulate an answer, and as though
perfectly on cue, the dog got up and started across the room. He
was headed straight for the wooden leg of an easy chair. So we
both watched to see what would happen.

   The dog walked straight across the room at a fair clip and
walked face first into the wooden leg. He boinked straight off the
leg, backed up a half foot without a pause, turned a few degrees
to his right and continued on walking as if nothing whatsoever had
just happened. With a grin, Diane just looked at me with an
expression which said as much as, "just like that".

   Most dogs know when they've been properly addressed. Dog
trainers do it loudly. Our friend Paul had a different technique.
As you might recall, Greydie and I thought of dealing philatelic
stamps on and off through the eighties. In fact we helped survive
the long winters in the late eighties by dealing off the few more
highly valued stamps we had.

   A friend named Paul came out of these stamp endeavors. Paul was
a so called pocket stamp dealer. Paul, Greydie and I were at a
local stamp auction one day. Quasar was sitting with us. Before
the auction had started, every time someone new came into the
auction room Quasar would give them a big yap. He was probably
just trying to say hello but I was too embarrassed by all the
racket to try and deal with it. So I kept trying to shut him up
without success.

   After a while of this, Paul, who was never one for mincing
words, turned to Quasar and in very authoritative voice loud
enough for everyone to hear said, "shut up ya little shit, or I'll
pull your eyeballs out through your asshole",

   Quasar stopped barking in mid yap and sat there utterly silent.
After about twenty five seconds more of complete silence the whole
room together suddenly realized what had just happened and burst
into resounding laughter. Paul sat back with a grin and said, "Ya
just gotta know how to talk to em".

   Dogs can also see in the dark and have very fast reflexes.
Quasar was sleeping beside my bed one night. I was wakened by the
very annoying sound of a mosquito buzzing around in the jet black
room. Suddenly I heard the dog get up beside me. After a few
seconds there was a single loud snap. Then the room was absolutely
silent. No more buzzing. Seems like I wasn't the only one being
bugged by the Bug.

   By the way, here's a research for someone. If you attempt to
swat a mosquito they always seem to see your hand coming and take
off. The thing is that the pitch of their wings is always way
faster taking off then when coming in. The research is to qualify
the difference and make all kinds of important sounding
conclusions as a result.

   But as canny or uncanny as dogs may be, at some level at least
we're all the same. I was flower blitzing through the small town
of Black Diamond south west of Calgary Alta. one afternoon when a
suddenly thunder storm struck. Black Diamond is in the vicinity of
Turner valley where the first oil field discoveries in Alberta
were made in the 1920s. The town sits close against the mountains
where the foothills gave shrunken up, almost giving the impression
that the mountains leap straight up from the prairies.

   Because there is a lot of air turbulence through the area as
the prevailing winds from the west tumble out of mountains passes
just to the west, little thunderstorms pop up impromptu all the
time in the area. As soon as the black clouds started forming
overhead I ducked into an open two bay garage to wait out the
inevitable down pour to follow.

   Suddenly a German shepherd also ducked in and took up station
right beside me. I looked down at him and he looked up at me as
much as to say, 'quite the downpour eh'. We stood like that side
by side for about ten minutes until the sun suddenly popped back
out.

   As soon as it was over the dog gave me a nod goodbye and was
out and down the street on his way and I was out the door and up
the street to finish my blitz. It was just like two friendly
strangers sharing a quick shelter side by side out of the rain. At
last that's just the way it felt to me at any rate.

   As anyone with a male pooch knows, they whiz nonstop, and
something definitely than mere bladder relief seems to be going on
with these little whizzes. I found this out first hand one evening
while standing at a pay phone in the town of Almonte during our
eighteen months there trying to mount a loudspeaker manufacturing
business.

   The phone was at the corner of an empty lot. About ten feet
from the phone was a very long low slung wooden trailer. The
trailer looked like a farmer's hay wagon, but only about half as
high as normal and without the sides. Quasar was with me, sitting
near my feet. Suddenly another little pooch about the same height
as Quasar came lopping up the street. He spotted Quasar and came
over to check him out.

   They did the usual dog plus dog thing, noses to noses, noses to
bums, and back to noses. Somebody once told me this is checking
out the food supply. If the food supply was better in the current
territory where the meeting was taking place than in the visiting
dog's home turf, then a fight for takeover would ensue. In this
case nobody's territory was up for grabs. So both dogs' tails were
jaunty in the air wagging politely. No problem.

   Suddenly, on an obvious cue between them, but which I must
confess I was far to dumb to have noticed, the two dogs split
apart with one going to the front wheel of the trailer, the other
to the back.

   Both dogs sniffed their chosen targets for a few seconds. Then
as though on a mutual cue, both dogs lifted and whizzed a good one
on their respective tires. Down came the legs simultaneously. The
dog at the front wheel turned and headed straight to the back and
the dog at the back headed just as single mindedly to the front.

   They passed each other at the halfway point, and never even
acknowledged each other's existence going by. When they reached
their respective new wheel locations, both took a few seconds to
carefully sniff the respective telegrams left by the previous
tenant. Then as though on cue again both lifted their leg and
cranked out a reply. Then traded places again not even
acknowledging each other's existence going by. Then they went
through the exact same procedure again as though in a time loop.

   By this time I was onto the action and watched it go on
unabated as I talked on the phone. A friend of mine once commented
that he often wondered what the universe was like at the end of
all those little whiffs. Well whatever it was, talk about single
minded purpose.

   Back and forth went the two dogs conversing with each other in
doggie talk via the whizzes, just as seriously as I was conversing
back and forth on the phone with someone via sentences. Both dogs
were obviously just as serious on their equivalent of a telephone
call as I was on my actuality of a telephone call.

   It went on like this for almost ten minutes. Then just as
suddenly as it started, it stopped, using the same invisible
semaphore system I just didn't seem to be able to perceive. The
other dog had just suddenly headed off in the direction down the
street in which he was originally headed as though nothing had
ever happened. Quasar just as suddenly came back over and sat down
again at my feet as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

   What a time to be without a video or movie camera. To this day
I would still love to have know what they were talking about
through those little walkie talkies up their noses. I know it
wasn't bravados or insults because neither dog ever showed even a
trace of upset or umbrage.

   On the other hand Quasar was just as equally capable of raising
another dog's umbrage to the heavens. While my brother and I were
stilling selling sweet corn at roadside one day, I was at Mac's
farm where we bought Seneca corn in the earlier days of our corn
selling era.

   Mac had two full grown Labrador dogs. One was a young wine
colored Weimerran. The other was an older full size black lab. The
black lab had one back leg missing at the hip from a car accident.
The black lab's name was Reilly, and being missing one leg didn't
slow him down in the slightest.

   Whenever he wanted to whiz, he just went up on his two front
paws like a circus handstander, lifted his one good leg high over
his head, and let fly with the best of them. Psychologists would
have loved this one. If you're left handed at birth, you're left
handed for life. Some engrams never seem to transmute.

   As courageous as the lab may have been for the disability, for
true grit in my books however, the ribbon goes to a Thamildahyde
lady I saw in restaurant one day eating a hamburger. Thamildahyde
as you may recall was a pregnancy drug which has the tragic
reaction of causing births with severely miss formed extremities.

   The lady had no arms and was holding the burger between her
toes and eating just fine thank you very much. You had to respect.

   Labs are also among the most territorial dogs on the planet. So
usually whenever I was at Mac's farm, I would leave Quasar in the
car to avoid any issues ever property rights. On this particular
day, Mac was up in the second floor of his barn with the two labs.
Since the coast was clear I let Quasar out of the car to sniff
around.

   African bush dogs, in their natural state are some of the
fiercest critters on the planet despite their small size. Also one
of the most fearless of animals. The domesticated Basenji when not
a purebred, is considered to be among the gentlest and most fun
loving dogs to be with on the planet. Quasar was all of that. But
the other side would sometimes show through. Sometimes in the form
of ill advised bravado.

   I went upstairs in the barn to meet with Mac. We had only been
talking a minute or two when suddenly we saw Quasar sniffing out a
post beam only about two few feet away from the two labs standing
by Mac. He had followed me up the stairs.

   Sure enough, up went the leg, out went a crank, and up went the
fur on the back of the two labs who held their place. Quasar
walked nonchalantly to another post. Out went another crank and up
went the fur yet a little higher. You couldn't believe the gall.
Mac and I looked at each other, exchanging a quick glance of, "Oh,
Oh".

   Sure enough, Quasar let another one fly this time right under
the noses of the two labs. The one thing you never do is piss it
up in someone else's living room. So the two labs were on him in
about one forty one hundredth of a second. In less than five
seconds, Reilly had Quasar by the back of the neck in the patented
Labrador death grip, holding him about two feet up in the air just
standing there.

   I thought Quasar was done for. He twisted and snapped wildly,
eyes bulging. But the lab just stood there, holding his ground. I
grabbed Reilly and Mac frantically tried to pry his jaws apart.
After about five minutes of both of us wrestling frantically
around, Reilly just let Quasar drop and stood back.

   Quasar was OK. Apparently Reilly had only been chomping onto
loose skin. Quasar landed on all fours, then quietly started to
just saunter to the stairs as cool as the evening breeze. Every so
often he would look back over his shoulder with a look back to the
two labs that said as much as, "So I guess I really showed you two
who's boss". He strutted so nonchalantly you would have though it
was Bogart in his bar.

   I followed Quasar down the stairs and out to the car and he
never even once took a skip step or speeded up. Cool Hand Luke had
nothing on this boy. Once we got back to the car Quasar quietly
climbed up onto the driver's seat business as usual, sat down, and
gave me a look as to say, "those guy's will never know how lucky
they were that you broke us up". Not even once did he let on for
even a glimmer that he had just been wiped. You really did have to
admire these Bush Dog's style.

   When I got back upstairs, Mac was examining his arm. While he
had been trying to pry open Reilly's jaws, Quasar had caught him
with one of his wild snaps. The bite had gone clean through his
heavy leather jacket. I escaped with only a couple of teeth holes
in my hand.

   But it seems that discretion being the better part of valor was
strictly a relative thing with Quasar. A few years earlier in
Almonte he had had to run for his life, and run he did. A fellow
in Almonte had a Border Collie lab mix. If Labradors were only one
of the most territorial dogs in the world, it was because Border
Collies owned the title. Hence the name. No one gets inside the
fence.

   This fellow's dog therefore must have been hard wired with the
territory genes from both. Because no other dog could even venture
onto their street. The dog was kept on a heavy chain. One day
someone happened onto the street walking a Doberman Pincer. The
Border Collie broke the chain and the Pincer wound up at the vets
for a couple of weeks to recoup.

   One day I had to go over to the street in the early evening to
meet with someone. The street made a sharp angle bracket turn with
the house I was visiting right in the elbow. The Border Collie
lived about half a block down the block on the heavy chain. So I
didn't give it any thought and let Quasar out of the car to sniff
around.

   The fellow and I were by my car talking. The fellow's cat was
sunning itself on the porch. Quasar was minding his own business
snuffing around the guy's lawn. I looked up and saw the Border
collie making a bee line straight towards us with the broken chain
trailing in the wind.

   "Oh shit", I said, knowing the dog's reputation. I frantically
tried to get Quasar back into the car. But the Border Collie beat
me too him. Quasar headed off in a big circle around the car with
the Border Collie in hot pursuit.

    They completed one complete loop around the yard, and had
started on the second with the Border Collie quickly closing the
gap. All of a sudden the cat shot off the porch, caught the collie
at the knees with a perfectly executed football styled cross
block, and shot the Collie straight up into air about five feet
ass over tea kettle.

   The dog landed, scrambled to his feet, got another bead on
Quasar and took straight off after him again. You had to admire
the animal's ability to stay focused. Again the cat shot off the
porch, again hitting the Coolie at the knees and again sending him
ass over teakettle.

   By this time Quasar had come around the yard enough so I was
able to scoop him safely into the car and slam the door. The cat
wound up back on the porch like nothing had happened. The Border
Collie was doing circles where he landed, trying to figure out
what in the hell had just happened.

   "Did you see that", I said in amazement. "Yeah", said the other
guy. "Actually the cat's done the same thing to the dog before".
Nature definitely looks after her own. And I had a new found
respect for cats from that day on.

   After I saw a cat on America's funniest videos open a backdoor
by turning the doorknob and letting itself in, I had even more
respect. Oh yes, and please explain to me how instinct alone
taught it all that.

   Cats aren't the only animals who know how to deal with dogs
with bad ass attitudes. Bennie roamed the streets of Almonte for
the whole eighteen months we lived there. Bennie was a full grown,
full size, pure bred St. Bernard. He was enormous, standing almost
waist high with a fantastically gentle disposition.

   Seeing Bennie actually made you believe that a St. Bernard
could really climb half way up a mountain in a raging blizzard,
sniff you out of a frozen snow bank, and give you a life saving
swig from a little keg hanging from their collar just in the nick
of time.

   Bennie's was almost a sad story. He had been a family dog. The
family split up. Bennie had been left with a relative. The
relative wasn't into animals so just left food out now and then on
the back porch. So Bennie had become the unofficial town mascot.
He ate at a number of places that put food out for him. And he
found shelter when he needed, usually here and there.

   When I was at the University of British Columbia in the early
sixties, a similar mascot roamed the campus. Thunder was a full
grown full sized Irish Setter which had somehow been abandoned on
campus when a pup and had generally become adopted by everyone.
The cafeterias all put out food. He took shelter wherever and
whenever he needed. Thunder was a welcome landmark around campus
for many years until he finally passed away at a ripe old age.

    Bennie and Quasar became instant buddies. Quasar had no
trouble letting Bennie into his house whenever he came over and in
fact shared his bones. Dogs will do that if the supply is good.

   To give you an idea about Bennie, Quasar would lick the marrow
out of the ends of a shank, the rest being far too big for Quasar
for anything beyond an occasional knaw at the end. Bennie would
lap the whole thing up and crunch it down in one motion like a
piece of candy. Made you stop and think.

   During the summer, a young Bubba and wife moved into the small
foreman's apartment at the back of our place. The apartment had
it's own entrance out back. The couple had a pure white Shepherd
Husky mix which they kept tightly chained at the back of by their
door. We tried introducing the dog and Quasar since we were now
officially neighbors.

   But it didn't work. Quasar was always quick to recognize a
mortal enemy when he saw one. After about two minutes of slowly
circling each other with hair up, they were at it fur and
feathers. We got them apart with no problem. But the white dog had
been in such a frenzy it had chomped it's own tongue and I had to
clean blood up from all over the place.

   After that we had to keep the two dogs completely apart,
basically by the white dog being kept on a chain out back. The new
neighbor said it wasn't Quasar's fault. His dog was the 'Billie
the Kid' of town, and no other dog had even a ghost of a chance in
a fight. Bubbas are like that. If it isn't their pickups, it's
their dogs. After their dog and their pickup, a man's best friend
is Liquid Sew.

   One day Quasar and Bennie were loafing around on the front
porch when suddenly the white dog came bounding around to the
front and straight up the stairs at Quasar. He had broken his
chain. Before he made it to Quasar however, Bennie whirled and had
him full mawed by the back of the neck, face pinned flat to the
ground. The whole thing had taken about a half a second.

   The two dogs remained in suspended animation like that for
about two minutes. Not a whisker twitched on either pooch.
Bennie's point was loud and clear. "Move even a hair and you're
toast". After two minutes Bennie relaxed his grip and stood back.

   The white dog slithered off the steps like a flattened snake
and we never saw him again around the front of the building.
Bennie was a pal indeed. I always made sure I had an extra new
bone or two around for Bennie after that. You gotta love the way
Mother Nature makes her points loud and clear.

   A dog on a leash can still look after it's own. When I was at
university in the early sixties I had a neighbor, single, with a
big yard and no fence. He was away at work every day, so he put up
a cloths line from one end of the yard to the other and leashed
his dog to the line so it had the full run of the yard.

   One day I heard a big dog commotion from the yard, and then a
very distinct Yelp! I looked over and saw the dog straining at the
limit of the lease beading after another dog hightailing it down
the street and yelping at the top of it's lungs. As my neighbors
dog strained at the leash, it pituuied. And a big jaw full of rump
fur fell to the ground from it's mouth.

   Most of the time dogs who live their life on a leash or in a
yard don't have clue. If they get off, or out as the case may be,
they either don't know what to do or run out on the road and get
hit. Sometimes though when dogs get off the leash they know
exactly what their moment of freedom is worth and milk it for
every penny it's worth like the two respective dogs which had came
straight after Quasar.

   A large German Shepherd mix, also named Bennie, lived behind us
in our townhouse complex in Nepean. Every now and then Bennie
would manage an escape. We'd see him running through the complex
out back doing his route. We would see him doing his route every
couple of weeks or so.

   At a full jog, he would approach one of his sign posts, lift a
back leg and continue hopping on the other, cranking out a couple
of zips going by. Then he would head off to the next shrub without
even breaking stride. Bennie knew what his time was worth and was
getting his money's worth of freedom before being lassoed again.
You had to admire the focus and perseverance of nature.

   In another one of the units lived a mother and daughter pair of
Chihuahuas, fourteen and four respectively. These were the real
McCoy, about four and a half inches high and with absolutely the
exact same brindled coloring as Quasar. Most of the time they
stayed in the house or on a leash.

   I was at my computer near the open patio door one day. Out the
back I heard a five year old passing by suddenly exclaim to
another kid nearby with a high voice of authority, "see I told you
Quasar had babies". I look out the door to see Quasar going by
with the two Chihuahuas in tow right behind who had gotten out of
the house off their leashes. It looked for all the world like a
mother duck and her ducklings out for a walk.

   Quasar was also quite a different dog regarding leashes. Mainly
because he had never been on one except for once or twice here and
there. His reaction to being off a leash was the exact opposite of
most dogs and what you might expect. This in itself was source of
a lot of amusement.

   Quasar went everywhere Greydie I went in the car as co-pilot,
loved the car. People would ask with one of us he like the best,
and we would simply answer, "whoever has the car at the moment".

   Every time I stopped for something, Quasar would immediately
jump out of the car and be off checking out the area. Since I
covered the whole Ottawa area and surroundings in my assorted
computer software sales travels, I used to say that Quasar had the
largest territory on the planet and at least a couple of thousand
memorized whiz markers.

   Whenever I stopped for gas for example, Quasar would be out the
door and doing his route. Even it had been months since the last
time there. The gas attendant would run out in a panic that the
dog was running off. "Not a problem", I would say.

   Sure enough, just as I would be going in to pay, the dog would
be coming back to the car across the lot. Kids should be so well
behaved. Since most young people today only know about dogs that
are goners once they're off the lease, this used to blow the gas
attendants away.

   We actually tried keeping Quasar on a rope out the backyard at
the town house for a while. But after only a couple of days, he
came back in through the open patio door holding a broken rope in
his mouth for us to fix. He had taken off after a squirrel and
snapped the rope. We never had the heart to stay with the leash
program after that for long.

   The squirrels were never in danger by the way. Much to my
dismay, only a couple of days after we first moved into the
townhouse I watched a squirrel take off one day with Quasar in hot
pursuit. The squirrel cut an absolutely perfect ninety degree turn
at full steam. Quasar just kept going ass over teakettle like a
champion gymnast doing somersaults. I never worried about the
squirrels after that, and Quasar just stopped bothering for the
most part. There's nothing like a well made point to make a point.

   One day I had my own chance to make my own well made point by
making a point. I was at a tire store picking up a pair of
retreads. By coincidence it was right next door to the Ottawa
Humane Society where we had originally picked up Quasar. As
always, Quasar was out somewhere either checking out the sign
posts or setting up a new route.

   I was at the counter inside an open bay. Suddenly the dog was
at my heel, about four inches away. Sure enough, less than a half
minute later, two very officious looking ladies in brown Humane
Society Sheriff's type uniforms huffed into the place and said,
"This your dog", pointing to Quasar standing hard at my heel.

   "'Yeah", I replied. "'It's not on a leash", one said gruffly.
"Sure it is", I replied, "watch". I walked to my left exactly four
feet and Quasar stayed exactly four inches from my heel. I walked
back to the right four feet and Quasar stayed exactly four inches
from my heel.

   The two ladies glared at me for about twenty seconds out of two
hard beady little sets of laser eyes that looked like they could
cut solid steel. Then they turned on their heels and stormed out
of the place like a marching pair. Quasar had no trouble getting
with such quick impromptu little programs between us whenever the
heat was on.

   Actually Quasar had a number of unspoken little rules regards
his non leash status. All developed by himself. If I came out from
somewhere and he wasn't in sight, I just tooted the horn. Within
seconds you would see him coming down the street flat out to the
pavement. Greydie used to call it the little brown streak.

   Sometimes he would pick up a scent trail, and since prenatal
engramming takes priority over postnatal instigated programming
every time, he would be off somewhere lost in concentration. So I
would have to scour the neighborhood and always found him about
two or three blocks away nose to the ground like a magnet. Having
said that, Quasar ended up in the hoosegow five times over the
years for being out there when I was somewhere in there just at
the wrong time and a truant officer happened by.

    I had been in an office building for about twenty minutes in
Gatineau one afternoon, just east of Hull on the Quebec side of
the Ottawa river. Quasar was still sitting in the car when I came
in. When I came out, no sign of Quasar.

   No problem I thought, he's just out sniffing around like he
always was when I was inside someplace. I tooted and called and no
sign of him. I checked up and down the street and no sign of him.
Figuring he must still be up one of the side streets I headed off
in the car to find him.

   Just around the corner was a pickup truck with a cab back, and
the guy was just climbing in to drive away. The side of the pickup
said, `Les Gendarmes De Chiens', or something like that. Despite
my poor French the aspects appeared ominous. Any time you see an
official vehicle around and your dog is on the loose, the aspects
are ominous.

   I figured I had better check it out.  I asked the guy if he had
seen a little brown dog on the loose. He opened the back of the
pickup and in his thick French Canadian accent said." you mean
dis". Sure enough Quasar was sitting in the middle of the back
with a question on his face that clearly said, "what the hell just
happened".

   What had evidently had happened was that Quasar had been
sitting in my car looking out the open window minding his own
business. In due course a dog went by across the street at a
fairly good clip. The dog catcher was in hot pursuit about a
quarter of a block back. The two had apparently been in this
special symbiotic relationship for some time already and the dog
catcher was getting not amused.

   Quasar saw this and felt it was his obligation to check it out.
So hopped out the window and headed up the street after the
felonious mutt on the trot. The dog catcher was not a stupid man,
whose job description said, `catch dogs', specifically which dog
not being specified. So spotting what looked like an obviously
easier target, did a full reverse and grabbed Quasar instead.

   I had missed having to fetch Quasar out of the Hull pound and
paying an astronomical fine by the skin of my teeth. Another
fifteen seconds or so and Le Gendarme de Chiens would have been on
his way.

     The other handy unspoken little rule Quasar had developed was
to return to exactly the last place he saw me if we happened to
get separated. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to find him when
checking around the neighborhood. But if I eventually went back to
the original spot where we had last seen each other, he would be
there.

   This was true whether it was in front of the door I had gone
in, or by the parking spot were I had parked. Except for the five
times over the fourteen odd years that he wound up busted in the
dog pound, this little unspoken rule worked just fine.

  The rules were pretty specific. During the later years of
selling roadside corn and down to one stand and spelling each
other off every couple of hours. Greydie was on his way to spell
me off and spotted a yard sale sign and decided to check it out.
It was only a few blocks up a side street from the main drag on
the way to the corn stand. Quasar had gone home with hin the
previous round so was with him in the car.

   A beautiful real red leather easy chair was sitting in the yard
with a price Greydie (we) couldn't refuse. He shot forth to the
corn stand, grabbed every cent I happened to have on me, and
headed back and bought the chair with what he had and the rest to
come later in the day from sales. Then headed home to drop the
chair off. Then headed back to the corn stand to spell me off.

   I headed home. Five hours later I headed back to spell off
Greydie. Greydie then headed back to the yard sale house with the
rest of the money to finish the deal off for the chair already
hauled home five hours earlier. There was Quasar sitting in the
exact spot the chair had been on the front lawn.

   Not a few feet over, the exact spot! Turns out that Greydie, in
his great haste to get the chair home then back to the corn stand
to spell me off, had completely forgotten about Quasar. Greydie at
the corn stand thought the dog was at home. I at home thought the
Quasar was at the corn stand. At the house where the chair had
been purchased everyone wondered where the heck either of us were
including the pooch.

   Quasar at that time was not wearing a licence, no number to
track down, no phone number. And wouldn't move an inch from the
sacred spot where he had last seen Greydie. The family waited with
the same patience as Quasar.

   You have to appreciate the pure joy dog experiences when it knows
it has been perfectly on the right frequency and sees the result of
such perfect unquestioned patience when the dog's best friend and it's
other best friend come around the corner honking the horn after finally
realizing the dog is missing and finally reason that the only place the
dog can possibly be is the house where the leather chair had been
purchased five hours earlier. Such a happy reunion. You know what
dogs are like.

   We used to have little slip ups off and on in other ways too.
On the whole, the good news about the little brown streak `beep'
rule was that Quasar would always invariably come. The bad news
was that if someone else who beeped, he would go after them
thinking it was me. I was in Cornwall one day in the middle of
July 1995 meeting with one of our software distributors. Cornwall
you may recall is about 90 kilometers up the St. Lawrence River
towards Montreal from Ottawa.

   As I always did on the road, I stopped at a Burger King for a
Double Whopper with Cheese for lunch. Quasar's lunch on the road
was always a Burger King cheeseburger plain. I took his burger out
to the car, but he wasn't around. No problem I thought, he'll be
back by the time I'm ready to leave as had happened on at least
the dozen or so times we had made that trip before.

   But when I came, out, still no sign of the dog. "No problem", I
thought, "I'll go have my meeting and pick him up after", as I had
had to do once or twice on previous trips. When I came back, still
no sign of the dog. Now for the first time it was a problem. By
now he should have been back at the fast food. I concluded that he
must have followed a beep off the lot and gotten lost.

   I scoured the town until four thirty. By then I had to get back
to Ottawa. So I cued up the staff at the Burger King to call the
distributor when the dog showed up. I similarly cued up the
distributor to phone me back in Ottawa. By the time I got home at
six thirty, the call had already come in.

   A staff member for the Burger King had driven off for a break,
and when he had returned Quasar was standing where our car had
been. The kid had pulled into my old spot and when he opened the
door to get out, Quasar had hopped in and sat down in the
passenger seat to await my return. A car seat in exactly that
location had in fact been the last place he had seen me.

   The kid tried to get the dog out with no luck. Then he phoned
the distributor, who phoned me. I cued up with the distributor
that when the kid got home after shift, the distributor would go
over and pick up Quasar and I would therefore pick up Quasar at
the distributor's house. Because I had already been to Cornwall
and back already that day, Greydie volunteered to go do the
pickup.

   He should have been back by around nine thirty or ten, round
trip. But didn't get back until after eleven. It turned out that
when the distributor had gone to get Quasar at seven, the dog
wasn't moving from the front seat until he saw either one of his
two Daddy's. And as dogs can sometimes be, he was quite blunt
about it.

   So by the time Greydie found the distributor's house under the
dim street lights, and they got over to the kid's house where
Quasar was sore pleased to see him, it was already well past nine.

   Quasar was the closest dog to a people I've ever met. The only
other candidate was a pooch who was a family member of some
friends of ours in Vancouver in the early 1970's. Luke was small,
light brown, and of mutt heritage. Greydie was over for dinner
one night with other friends and eight people sat around the
table. One of them was luke.

   Luke Sat patiently at his place waiting for the ok to be given
to dig in, which he did with all the manners and dignity eating
carefully by tongue off a raised plate could muster. I dropped by
one afternoon. I was standing face to face talking to someone and
suddenly noticed this little brown thing bouncing straight up and
down in front of me.

   It was Luke trying to get my attention because in my enthusiasm
to talk to my friend I had been too ignorant to say hello to Luke
too who was after all a fully sanctioned family member.

   Quasar had his own similar rules about greetings. At the door,
if it was a friend of ours, Quasar would immediately stand up and
give them a sharp push with his two front paws. This evidently was
the official Basenji equivalent of hello because he would
immediately walk back into the room evidently satisfied.

   Only problem was, that given Quasar's height, and the height of
the average North American citizen, this would deliver the
greeting rightly smartly into the area where the recipient would
have preferred it had been otherwise.

   Quasar's other rule, for strangers at the door, was to bark
nonstop until we cued the person up to say, "hello Quasar". Then
he would instantly stop and head back satisfied into the room.
Like I said, like all dogs, Quasar just wanted the dignity of
being thought of as a people.

   Quasar was put to sleep in the winter of 1997. He had certainly
earned his keep. Neither Greydie or I are in any hurry to find
another pooch. Instead we're just going to continue savoring this
one for a while.


---------------------------------

Thank you, and God bless.

CliffR

(c)CliffR Projections, Canada, 1997 - 2002.
Form AndO33