pack contribution

Ever since Baxter's HGE and - ahem - baby bunny incidents, I like to keep an eye on the little kielbasa when he's out and about in the backyard, rooting around and following all the wonderful scents that mother nature has put out for him to investigate. Watching him, I figure, is much better than dealing with the alternative.

But yesterday it seemed there was one distraction after another when it came time for Baxter's evening hunt. Dana, asking me questions about what he could dig up and take home with him, the fragrant olive and hydrangea and bushes that needed a trim, the sweet neighbor girls who asked for "oh, a hundred" of the dried brown wisps of hydrangea blossoms that I was snipping and tossing into the compost pile. Had it not been for all these distractions and more, I might have noticed that the jingling of tiny chumley's collar had gone silent, and silence is almost always a harbinger of something I'd rather not deal with.

Finally, I caught a glimpse of my blaze orange attired friend trotting toward me with something in his mouth. Hm. I was too focused to realize what this might mean, and kept raking.

Tiny chumley finally arrived and stood beside me. I heard a thud at my feet that stopped me in my tracks. Uh-oh. Baxter placed whatever he had in his mouth onto the ground and the thud certainly indicated that it was not a twig or a pinecone or even a stone.

Fearing a gruesome sight and wanting to buy some time to muster up the courage I might need, I rewound in my head what I thought I saw, but that didn't help. Whatever it was, it was big enough to protrude out of both sides of his mouth. And the only other things in our yard that would be big enough for that had either two or four legs and at least up til recently maybe, a heartbeat.

I took a giant breath and looked down at my gently tail wagging friend. To my relief, little kielbasa had found an old twist of rawhide that he must have snitched thru the fence from his basset barking buddies, Bridget and Gracie.

Pride filled my little friend's body as he nudged his treasure my way. "This is for my pack, for us to eat!" his eyes told me. And then he trundled off in search of more. Our boy, growing up, one contribution at a time.