Last night, Dakota was a naughty boy. He did too much. First, he took a prolonged stroll around outside, looking for a satisfactory place to do his toilet business. I don’t understand what the ritual is with this, but I know there is one and it is often convoluted and lengthy. You’d think that a dog with a million stitches in them wouldn’t feel like rejecting so many toilet spots, but I guess they do. It was apparently extremely important to Dakota to get this right. But it took forever, with him hopping around the yard the entire time and post-holing through 4 inches of frozen, crusted snow and inspecting every possible spot. He fell frequently, but I didn’t interfere.
Shortly after coming inside, I had to go outside and shovel out the gate to my dog yard. The same frozen, crusted snow Dakota was falling in was preventing me from closing that gate so I had to shovel it clear. While I was doing that, the dog door opened up and who should bounce out of it but Dakota! I was not sure this was a good idea at all because our dog door is in a funny spot. To exit from the house requires the dogs to step up. Because of all the mud that they bring in from outside, my husband put in a slatted deck outside the door to catch the dirt. This makes it a bit awkward for a 3-legged dog, though.
So now Dakota had made it outside, but where he exited is a long way from the front door. I had no harness, no sling, no nothing. Just a dog on ice–literally. He managed to hop all around the icy outside of the house, though, and make it to the front door. He had to skirt a low retaining wall and switchback around it, but he did. Then he pogoed up the driveway, up the walkway, up one step onto the stoop and up the other step into the house.
Today, Dakota is paying for his gymnastics with a 10-hour nap. He’s happy, wagging and occasionally looking around. But he’s mostly sleeping. Naughty, naughty doggie.
