CHAROITE SIBERIANS

Had plans last night but the weather forecast for the evening was for about 12 degrees and haven’t managed a run that wasn’t at silly o’clock for ages so rushed home from work and packed the dogs in the van. The forecast wasn’t specific about the torrential rain we hit as soon as we got on the A1 but I’m made of neither butter nor sugar, as my mum used to say.

Sherwood is able to get very wet very quickly. By the time I’d run two teams of dogs I was head to toe in mud. I’d taken my goggles off on the first run as I couldn’t see a thing. I still couldn’t see a thing on the second run but that because I had half of the surface of the trail in my eyes. I still haven’t sorted out the eye protection in the rain situation but really should wear something as this morning I look like I’ve had a major crying session and people at work keep asking me if I’m okay !

The dogs seemed to enjoy their runs although clearly they do think they are made of either butter or sugar and will almost definitely melt because as soon as they had grabbed a quick drink, they all jumped back into the van – harnesses, lines and all.

As usual we went to a little American Restaurant in Ollerton for tea. I wonder if it crosses the mind of the staff at McDonalds to wonder what we’ve been doing as I’ve eaten in there in various degrees of filthiness over the past few years !

Clothes, harnesses, lines are all minging today but the self cleaning huskies have transferred all dirt to my house and are mostly pristine as ever. Glad we went though as it’s muggy as ever again today.

The dogs didn’t get a run this weekend. Decided to trust the weather forecast which suggested the temperatures weren’t going much below 17 from Friday onwards so didn’t even bother setting the alarm for stupid o’clock. It was actually a nice change not waking up before 5 on a weekend. It’s set to be a lot cooler this week so might try a pre work run with them, just wish the cool evenings would hurry up.

I had a major D’Oh! Moment on Friday evening and managed to reverse the van into the side of my own car. Nice little dent and the mirror is currently gaffer taped together. Thankfully, it was my car and not one belonging to any of the neighbours. It was only a gentle brush (the dogs in the van didn’t even glance up) but apparently a gentle brush with a huge white Transit leaves slightly crumpled Citroen’s in its wake. If I still had my old Fiat, the van would have come off worse. The Punto was indestructible.

I decided to reorganise the dog run on Saturday which involved moving the free standing pen inside to the other end where there is better shade. This was almost an epic fail as at one point I had rearranged things in such a way I was blocked inside the dog run by kennels and nothing would move a centimetre further to let me get out ! I have one huge fabulous coated galvanised kennel that cost a fortune and is as heavy as you like. This wasn’t going anywhere and was the key to everything else fitting where I wanted it. I may not be strong but I’m determined. I managed to climb over the boxes and squeeze out of the gate so I could fetch some rope (a snub line) out of the van. No, I didn’t harness up the dogs and get them to pull it although the thought did actually cross my mind. But the rope and a lot of sweating helped me shift the thing and everything else went nicely into place.

The dogs were very excited, bless them. Maybe the feng shui is better.

Watched Shutter Island with Kev. Different. Felt more challenged than entertained but definitely more to Leonardo Di Caprio than Jack Dawson.

Decided to go along to the Open Day at our local Jerry Green centre on Sunday. There is a fun dog show and I took along Tigerlily who loves meeting people and getting lots of attention. It all started out very well - it wasn’t even too hot with lots of cloud blowing around to keep throwing the place into shadow – until someone started doing the old “Testing Testing” routine on the PA System. Tiger had a fright at Aviemore as a puppy when the person doing the start timing’s voice suddenly came out of the loud speaker she was walking past. This obviously had an impact as from then on she would get hysterical every time she heard someone speaking through a microphone. She isn’t bad about noise in general so I assume it’s something to do with loud disembodied voices that disturbs her.

After her first few classes as a youngster, I stopped showing Tiger as she would dissolve into a wreck in the ring anticipating the mystery voice would boom out to scare her at any moment. Not nice to see a lovely dog with her tail between her legs and trying to move as quickly and flat to the ground as possible. However, somewhere along the line, her confidence suddenly grew and she seemed to – while still not loving the loudspeaker – come to the conclusion the pay-off of loads of attention and treats was worth braving the scary mystery voice. I still only show her lightly but she usually charms the judges with her cute antics (as well as being a very nice little Siberian who floats around the ring) and has an adorable way of stamping her feet into place to stack herself. Tigerlily has even been to Crufts and came 4th out of a class of 20-odd dogs.

Unfortunately yesterday wasn’t a good day for her and her flight mechanism kicked in stronger with each announcement. It’s a shame, I’d told Tiger about the biscuit catching class and she had been looking forward to it but the bloke with the microphone just would not shut up ! When I told her we were leaving, I’ve never seen a more relieved little dog as she dragged me all the way back to the car. At least Jerry Green got her entry fee !

I would rather not listen to loud scary voices, thank you !

I hate hedgehogs.

Well, I don’t really. Someone sent me an email the other day with some pictures of baby hoglets that were undeniably adorable. Hedgehogs are fairly cute and generally harmless creatures that make gardeners insanely happy by munching on the nasty slimy things that eat their Hostas. People build houses for them, feed them Whiskas, give them flea treatments and generally welcome them with open arms.

Unlike foxes (if you believe the recent hype), they don’t enter our gardens with the intent of causing GBH. Except the one that comes into mine, that one is the embodiment of evil.

Red Spot made a habit of visiting us last summer. The trouble is, his visits usually resulted in husky mayhem. Mostly because he used to trash my chainlink fence to get in and leave nice holes for the dogs to squeeze out of. His visits briefly stopped all evening play sessions in the garden as these usually ended up with me crawling through the fence trying to retrieve some husky or other. The dogs loved Red Spot, in the way that killer whales love baby seals except hedgehogs come a little better armed and come out of dog encounters fairly well. Mine haven’t killed one yet. They have, however, played football with him and Mojo did manage to throw him into a tree which is only one of the places I’ve had to rescue the prickly little sod from.

The hedgehog has been placed in a bucket and carried to safety many times. I started off just taking him into the front drive, convinced he’d learn the error of his ways and decide Siberians don’t make the best playmates. When this didn’t work, I started taking him into the neighbouring fields. At some point last year I decided we either had a plague of hedgehogs or one or two very persistent ones so during one rescue, I marked him with a bit of red paint. Sure enough he came back. And back again.

Red Spot seriously blotted his copy book when he sat outside the dog run one evening last autumn sticking two hedgehog fingers up at the dogs. Tigerlily and Raven got so frustrated that they couldn’t reach him, they decided to have a bitey-scratchy session instead. Raven was left with a lovely hole in her leg and Tiger added it to the list of reasons she doesn’t really like Raven any more.

As a result, Red Spot earned himself a ride in my car to a hedgerow a couple of miles up the road. End of ? Not really, within the week he was back.

He went quiet after that. I know some hedgehogs hibernate and honestly, I was NOT hoping he’d decided to kip in someone’s November 5th Bonfire or been made dish du jour in a gypsy feast. Honestly. I was just relieved to see the back of him.

Dogs have a distinctive bark when they’ve found a hedgehog. It’s a high pitched, excited but slightly unsure sound. Sort of a canine “WTF?” Everyone was in the house last night apart from Dakota and over the sound of Brew and Pyewacket happily worshipping Raven, I heard a familiar Yip from the far end of the garden.

Emergency code amber lock-down kicked in and the dogs were bundled into crates and I went out with a torch and something smelly to lure Kody away from her new best friend before she came in crawling with lice.

Sure enough she was pushing a rolled up hedgehog around the garden with her nose. It was too dark to check for tell tale red paint and it will have probably washed off by now but the nonchalance with which he uncurled and wandered away once Kody had been safely removed made me think this one has been here before.

I couldn’t find the hole in the fence this morning. Tigerlily did. She spent a few minutes running around in the gap between my fence and the school fence behind the property before – being a VERY GOOD LITTLE HUSKY – she came back under when I called her. The garden is temporarily off limits again til I fix the hole after work.

If he comes back tonight, Red Spot is getting a one way trip to the other side of Dodge in the boot of my car.

When you browse the husky forums one thing that constantly comes up is the issue of dominance. I'm not sure if it's raised as much in other breeds but certainly with Siberians, concepts like pack order, hierarchy, dominant behaviour and the (to me, anyway,) dreaded term Alpha come up regularly.

I got a message off someone who'd watched a video I had posted on YouTube showing some of my gang messing around indoors. I've mentioned before how much comment this has attracted, mostly along the lines of it's funny but you shouldn't let them jump all over your furniture. Fair enough. Yes, they should play outside but sometimes they don't and I'm not going to worry about it. My correspondent, however, worried there was more to it from a canine point of view and saw it as a signal my dogs didn't respect me and implied I was putting myself at risk. This poses an interesting question. If your dog climbs on the sofa is he trying to take over the world ?

Dominance, of course, exists in the dog world. All of our dogs are descended from ancestors who lived in packs and relied on some kind of strict order to make sense of the world and not go hungry. There seems to be the expectation that because Siberians still comfortably live in groups that they are more likely to have dominance issues than dogs whose path to domestication involved guardianship, lap warming or herding livestock. Hmmm, not sure I agree.

I'm not a behaviourist. I have spent many hours of my life around dogs though and watching the huskies, the thing that strikes me most about them is how pragmatic they are. Siberians strike me as the greatest opportunists of a species that has flourished on its opportunitism. Yes. my lot will fall out occasionally but they always fall out over STUFF, not ideas and, I don't think, rank. We've had noise wars and the occasional toothy/naily thing over food, over toys, over girls, over a hedgehog and, inexplicably, over the cardboard tube out of a kitchen roll. I have a hot-head who takes exception if anyone bumps into her, another one who acts like she rules in the outside world but sits under the coffee table if doggy voices are raised at home and one who will risk stealing anything off anyone because he can grab quick and run like hell. I've never seen much behaviour that constitutes hierarchy.

When one of them gets on the sofa, I always figures it's because it's more comfortable than the floor than because they want to the big daddy, or mummy.

I'm pretty relaxed around the dogs (unless someone jumps on my sore wrist then I can get a little shouty, which is nuts as that doesn't make sense at all to a dog). We do have house rules though. Mainly that they are supposed to do what I ask them. I know they like the furniture but if I ask them to get down then they should. The dogs are all different. Pye is, for example, much more stubborn than Brew and gets quite mardy with the girls if anyone hurts him during play. Brew just gets dragged around the floor and comes and hides behind my legs if he wants a break. I think this is more personality than rank - certainly no one takes Brew's food off him but the girls will try and pinch Pyewacket's dinner if they get a chance however much he rants about it. Similarly Mojo spends a lot of time running round telling the others off but they tend to ignore her. She reminds me of Cartman - "Respect my Authority, Respect my Authority !"

Anyway, I hate to think of some poor dog getting alpha rolled or whatever for wanting to sit on the settee.

 Beany planning world domination. Today the sofa, tomorrow the planet ....

Things have been a bit quiet lately so I thought I'd dig a bit further back for something to write about and started looking at some old pictures.

As you can see, the lack of glamour in my life these days isn't necessarily a new thing. This snap was taken on a trip to Canada quite a few years ago. We'd made the mistake of hiring some canoes from someone who was either a) completely nuts (he looked it) or b) had a great sense of humour when it comes to holidaymakers. This was May on the Yukon River and the old guy was convinced none of us were kitted out properly for the mild 20 mile round trip we were planning - in spite of eveyrone having fleeces, waterproofs etc. Before he let us have the boats, he insisted we gear up in his borrowed oil skins and, yes, carrier bags. Carrier bags must have survival qualities I hadn't thought about before.  

Scenically, the trip was like something out of a Hollywood film featuring a bunch of dumb tourists who end up getting eaten by cannibals or turned into wax work exhibits. I can't remember what we were exactly planning to see but looking at my pictures from the paddle trip we clearly didn't find it ! About a mile or so up the river, the trees disappeared. There had been a massive fire the previous year and we paddled through about 5 miles of burned stumps and piles of ash until we lost the will to live and turned round. There weren't any cannibals (probably the best thing about that particular excursion). There wasn't really anything except the eerie dead trees, the occasional raven and the residual smell of smoke. Oh and that  tune from Deliverance also gets a bit annoying when someone hums it on and off for four hours. . .

When I was about eight or nine, one of the books I read really struck a chord. The story has stuck with me ever since. It's the tale of Sirius, the magnificent dog star, who finds himself caught in the body of a stray puppy. We always had dogs when I was growing up but our family pet wasn't really viewed as a kindred spirit. I think this is one of the stories that showed me that our relationship with dogs can be the closest thing humans can get to magic, true love, belonging, Pack...

Even though the story haunted me, I couldn't remember who wrote it or even the book's title. But you know what it's like on the Internet. At work today I was looking for something completely unrelated, saw the name Sirius which sparked off a memory and one search led to another and eventually to Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. I'm so excited and have to read this again, now I'm surrounded by beautiful Dog Stars of my own.

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Instead of being practical and taking the stuff to the tip that I need to get rid of, I went for another walk this afternoon. Beany and I headed to the nearby Brocklesby Estate woods which - in spite of it being a popular local beauty spot and a lovely sunny Sunday - were curiously quiet. Had a lovely couple of hours poking around the woodland walks which have all kinds of interesting follies and monuments scattered around them, relics of someone's 18th Century overspend. We saw some deer which are always a lovely sight when you're not on a rig with 4 huskies in front of you. 

Beany did have a bit of a weird moment when she refused to go near an old brick building in the woods and acted as spooky as I've ever seen my exceptionally calm confident dog. 

Who Lives in a House like This ? No-one, we hope.

Turns out there was a very large buzzard perched on a table inside enjoying a freshly caught baby rabbit. The bird flew out with an outraged screech and Beany recovered from her shock sufficiently to try and steal the bunny. We had a few words and she decided to leave it for the big bird that was waiting ominously on a nearby branch.

Enough with the pictures already, let's GO !

Yes, it's another old building. Where's my tea ?

Earlier I took Brew to an open show at Newark. Brew isn't shown as much as his brother Pye as he gets a bit over excited in the ring (to say the least). I've decided to try a few open shows over the summer to see if he settles. He did really well today and came 2nd to a lovely boy who was really showing his socks off. The important thing was Brew seemed to enjoy it and at least managed to keep all four feet on the floor to show the judge his outline and moved around the ring without dragging me into the next county !

Knee is holding up well !

Come on Mel, click that knee into place and let's go !

The trail at Sherwood is a bit rough and ready for Beany at the moment (more on this later) so she decided to go for a walk with me in the woods near home instead of a run with the rest of the gang. I love this picture. Must be the gypsy in me but paths, trails, roads that stretch ahead make me want to just keep going... Hmm, long distance footpath sounds appealing.

That is, of course, if my knee ever sorts itself out. Everything was going fine until I inexplicably got my big toe stuck in the hem of my pjs the other night and over-straightened my bad knee. When I woke up the next day it was bent and wouldn't straighten at all and it felt like I was back to square one :/  !  Horrible, added to the fact my dodgy wrist is aching this week too. Thought what the hell and ran the dogs early today with a moderate amount of ouchiness. Took Beany out later and somewhere along the walk the knee clunked back into place. It's still sore but at least it's straight and I'm not really limping now.

There was a car rally last week at Sherwood and the trail is in fairly bad shape in places. For anyone who is planning to train up there, there is a nice run of about 2.7 miles that's doable (with caution in a couple of spots where the cars have screamed round a curve and kicked up a ridge of dirt to get the rigs over). This is mostly Dave's Trail which obviously didn't get any rally traffic. The forest fire road is pretty rough and there are deep ruts in places (over the old railway is completely trashed). Sherwood normally has the benefit of a few different lengths of trails but at the moment it's limited to two lengths really - the one I mentioned and the straight in and out everyone does with puppies. Hopefully the FC will get it fixed up soon, fingers crossed. It was cool and dry this morning. The boys were absolutely nuts to set up which is always a bit entertaining when there's no one else about to help ! Had a couple of nice runs though. Took Pye and Brew out as a 2 for a change and ran Raven, Tiger and Daisy together as a 3. The start area is a bit rougher than usual at the moment as the rally churned up the sand and brought a lot of loose small stones to the surface so no point in trying to run Beany as she just doesn't do less than nice trails !  We seriously need to find somewhere closer to home to run ! It's nice to get the dogs out for a hook-up and short run even if it's not as cool and fresh as it was this morning but a three hour round trip to Sherwood is a bit far for that !

At least I get to chase squirrels on a walk !