Max is now 8 months old and weighs about 120 pounds. High caloric engine that he is, the main animation of his day is dragging an old lobster pot up and down the road to stay in shape. As a teething pup on a mission, he quickly discovered a rope attached to the old trap I kept around as the coastal equivalent of a lawn ornament. This trap probably outweighed him three or four to one in the beginning, and his first heroic tugs never moved the pot more than a few inches. But soon he had the pot down to the beach, or out in the forest where some combination of rock outcropping and small trees also outweighed his analysis and ingenuity.Anyway, there was never need to waste those efforts out there; he had me as the dutiful retriever who could be convinced to go out on a rescue mission by his sulking about or looking bored to tears.





I always assumed he simply dropped the trap whenever he was tired of it, but it seems he preferred to leave it hidden behind a vehicle, and I was forced to take up the habit of checking for the pot before I drove away on some journey or another. The day I didn't, he had tucked his large tinker toy in the blind spot of the old RV and I thoroughly flattened the innocent assembly of curved wood. He watched as I jumped up and down like Rumplestilskin and that lesson included a flat tire for me and a then streamlined wooden sled for him which he dragged into oblivion in a few days, leaving small slats with nails poking up all over the yard and road.

Not having his pot was a disaster, and he took every opportunity to remind me of my thoughtlessness by going out into the yard and then staring back at me, asking just what was it he was to do now? Finally, I asked Jack Bond, the retired town engineer in Canso, to find us another lobster trap--the old kind mind you, not some new-fangled collection of plastic pipes and nylon ropes.

A few days later, Jack pulled up with another antique assembly complete with flat rocks hand-picked on nearby beaches for ballast, and Max waited patiently while we unloaded his new machine for the day's calisthenics.

I now have three traps, the Maxian equivalent of a big city gym, which I thought at first might confuse him as to what he left where. But I now am a tad suspicious that two might be left out in plain sight to get me to forget some bright morning when I'm in a hurry, that the third is again hidden quietly in the blind spot of the old RV.

Sometimes, just pulling a pot around by a rope isn't quite enough to keep a smart dog's day interesting.



Bob Wulkowicz



Max's Christmas Card





I'M PULLING FOR WORLD PEACE

Reply to post by Tubs, on December 30, 2001 at 23:46:51:


Can't even be whimsical these days...

Bob Wulkowicz

Reply to post by tubs, on December 30, 2001 at 23:46:51:

As he's a pup and in motion I can't quite tell from the picture. Newf or Lab?

Reply to post by Scott Cullen, on December 30, 2001 at 23:51:02:


Max is a 2fer. Last of a litter of 12 pups. Half Rottweiler and half Golden Retriever because I didn't want a pure-bred dog with all the unual inbreeding in a lust for profit.

My good intentions notwithstanding, we didn't pull it off and he has a rare immune disorder where his body attacks the black pigmentation in his skin and hair. The sections of pigment in his coat, nose, foot pads and claws will turn pink--which means nothing generally since neither of us is concerned with cosmetics--but he'll have a short life and blindness ahead.

That's a shame because he is the smartest dog I've ever had and is the personification of energy, curiousity and independence. Max has webs between his toes and his own ocean. What more could he ask for?

His teething was a disaster for me; the only thing he never carried off was a small crowbar. Everything else was fair game; slippers, shoes, gloves, the cuffs of shirts and pants, were all sacrificed to the great gods of gnawing. And the truly peverse thing was that he knew it was necessary to devestate only one of any pair to fix my clock. Every destroyed device usually kept company with its untouched equal--no need to do extra work, Max figured, one would suffice.

Goofy still consumes more considerably more cellulose than protein; he digs up and eats roots, takes off tasty branches within reach, and pollutes the air under the bed with what I can only delicately describe as pine farts.

I bought a truckload of slab wood for the stove--the excess quarter-rounds from trimming hardwood for pallets at a nearby company. I had subconsciously divided it all into 4 piles, the smallest of which was for firewood.

The second was the wood that I definitely wanted to photograph, the third what I might want to photograph and the last, the wood that intrigued me, but I hadn't yet understood why.

Max raids these piles every day, taking his own selection as only he knows, off to gnaw on at his leisure. Some pieces weigh about 50 lbs and are all 4 feet long so my cottage is surrounded by an array of random wood tank traps and starting to take on the appearance of a Ma and Pa Kettle movie.

Naturally, once he has depiled them, I can no longer tell what goes where or why I wanted them. And I learned if I bring the pieces back, he carefully avoids carrying them away again, so rather soon I will have no sense at all of my original categories. His way, I guess, of teaching me scientific researcher humility.

Max also now engages in what I can only call canine bungee-jumping. He has just a mouth and front paws as tools, so his ingenuity in somewhat limited in his games, but he discovered the cache of empty 5 gallon ice cream buckets I bought for concrete forms and miscelleneous storage.

As a student pilot, I had one of those training aids which is a plastic hood that keeps you from seeing the sky and forces you to concentrate on the instruments. Without any visual references, you learn to disregard your body sensations and trust only what you allowed to see on the front panel.

Max has inverted the process. He grabs a bucket at the rim so his head is mostly inside and he can't see anything at all. Then runs down the road at high speed, trusting on his memory as to what would be in front of him. On a good run, he stuffs his head entirely in the bucket with the rim at his shoulders and his head tilted back cavorting along until some external event occurs--generally, running into some of his own wood.

It's like a vaudeville routine. I'm working on something outside and a goofy dog comes running by with a bucket over his head, weaving around the things he's memorized, and smugly disappearing from view anound the corner of the cottage.

I'd learned to not pay too much attention to this exhuberence and one afternoon he was making routine intermittent runs back and forth behind the RV. I had been re-collecting and moving wood into piles again, went inside for a coke, and came out just in time to watch him run past bucket erect in proud display in death-defying gallop.

At his cocky best, Max ran behind the RV at a good clip and BOOM--he tangled with the empty wheelbarrow that wasn't there earlier. He wasn't as much hurt as embarrassed, and I got dirty accusitive looks all afternoon. I explained it was ironic justice and he huffed off into the woods to get away from me, but came back when he was hungry and decided we could be friends again.

The next day, a low speed, he ran into a small tree and we were back to normal. A few days later, a surprising amount of low branches had disappeared from that impudent pine.

Canine justice: simple, direct, and prevents tartar buildup.

I said he was smart.


Bob Wulkowicz


OK, I'll get back to trees--I've been snowed in.