The story of Stray Animal #7, continued...
We got him into the kennel, into the back of the truck, and back home.
I picked off some ticks, and cooked eggs for him. With a malnourished creature, you have to be very careful not to offer too much food, and it has to be very bland and simple. For dogs, this is cooked eggs, boiled chicken. He ate his eggs slowly, instead of wolfing them down. He had a very quiet way about him. I attributed it to how sick he was. I tried not to handle him, or anything around him, I scrubbed my hands and arms raw, and changed my clothes. He smelled awful, nasty with infection. It was dripping from abcesses on his neck. I worried that he had something that the other beasts on the farm could catch. I kept the kennel away from everybody and everything. I fretted, and then talked sense to myself. Then I would fret again.
When I dropped him off at the vet, the girl at the desk shook her head. "Name?" she asked.
"I don't name them until I know they are not headed for that big dog kennel in the sky," I replied.
She wrote "Stray" in the record.
In my mind though, I suspected that this guy was going to end up named.
He sat quietly in the kennel at first. It took awhile to get him checked in, the clinic is always busy on Monday morning. As he waited, he started to get interested in the surroundings. There were other dogs and cats coming in and out, and he could smell them. He started to make funny little grunts through his swollen, dripping throat. He was trying to bark!
"You tell 'em Dude!" I thought. "Not planning to die today, huh?" I left him in good hands, and headed for work.
A few hours later, I called in for the report.
I could hear my vet, as usual talking from across the room, the vet tech at the front desk relaying the message in real time. "No heartworms!"..... "Dr. Rachel says 'No Heartworms'"...."Oh, that's surprising!"...."Yeah, I could hardly believe it"...."Yeah, really!"..."Big infection in the neck"..."The whole bathing tub was black with dead ticks"...."Lots of hookworms and whipworms, bad diarrhea"..."We're having to clean the walls around here"..."So, is he going to make it?"..."Yes, I think he's going to be okay, need to keep him a few days"..."Dr. Rachel says he's going to be fine, she'll want to keep him a few days."..."Can you give him shots and fix him, then?"..."Yes, we'll do that, soon as he's feeling good enough"... And so on.
And so on. A few days turned out to be ten. As we waited for him to recouperate, we puzzled over his origin, and speculated about how he came to be in such a bad state of affairs. He was young, a year or so old, or less according to the vet. Mini dachshunds get grey on the face by the time they are six or so. He didn't have a grey hair on him. The name became a topic of discussion.
My husband, who is the Name Decider in our house, decreed that his name would be Jacob, after the male dachshund that he owned as a little boy. Pronounced with the German inflection - "Yakob". Jacob had a female counterpoint, named Lieba (Loved One). So, Stray #7 was officially welcome at that point. With naming like that, he's pretty much guaranteed room and board in our house.
When I went to pick him up on Friday, I informed the vet staff of the name change. They had a lot of fun trying to pronounce it. I explained the "overseas-ness" of it all, and the story of Jacob and Lieba. You can tell dog stories at the vet - everyone is interested.
I brought him home. He was clean, and his neck was starting to look normal. He didn't stink anymore. Well, not any worse than a hound dog normally smells. He still had the same quiet way about him. On the ride back in the car, he didn't make a peep.
The crew was waiting when I got home. I was stiff in the back, so my husband came out to carry the kennel in. Leilu (the Walmart dog) was bouncing up and down barking on her run line, trying to get a glimpse of the interloper.
In the house, we opened the kennel door. He popped out of the kennel, and started walking all over the kitchen sniffing around. He wasn't scared, or shaking, or agressive. He acted like he had been here his whole life. I couldn't help but to laugh watching him. He was so confident.
Dogs in my house are confined to the kitchen area. This is a time-honored tradition in my home, since that is how they lived when I was a child. All my dogs knew that they lived in the kitchen. That way, they didn't ever get in trouble for messing on the carpet, or tracking mud, or getting on the furniture.
I fully expected this doggie to follow the rules. We have a expanding baby gate in the doorway from the kitchen to the living room. That gate was put up to help the Walmart dog figure out the rules of the house. The Walmart dog is 50 pounds and tall like the German Shepherd that is somewhere in her lineage. Surely Stray #7, at 12 inches high and 12 pounds, would be confined by the same gate.
Jacob apparently didn't get the memo. I had gone to my bedroom to change out of my work clothes, only to hear peals of laughter from the other room.
"He just jumped the gate" announced my husband, amid all the giggling from the boys. "He just porpoised it." The boys caught him up, and put him back in the kitchen. Sixty seconds later, he was out and running around the living room again. He jumped up on the couch, and spread his legs out behind him. He obviously knew just what to do with a couch.
He bounced down and came into the bedroom. He levitated up onto my bed, and sprawled out. The cats which had been resting there a moment before scattered all directions.
I stared at him. He smiled at me with his dark eyes, and wagged his tail. He was in doggie heaven, and he didn't even have to croak to get there. I had a big fat vet bill to prove it.
"Well, there goes the 'no dogs outside the kitchen' rule", I thought. "And the 'no dogs on the furniture' rule". "And the 'no dogs in MY bed' rule."
Oh well, a small price to pay for so much hope.
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