When I took Hugo for his first check-up and to meet our vet, I recall the vet looking at him and then me, and saying “these guys need a lot of exercise you know.” I hoped that all the elements for pet ownership were in place. We are on a big rural property. Most importantly I had a job that allowed me to work from home most days of the week, and over the years if that didn’t work out perfectly Hugo was rarely left for long expanses of time, alone. We had at minimum two outings, with toys.
I set about building an enclosed “poodle yard’ for Hugo. I knew no matter how obedient or willing to be by my side he might be, that the population of bunnies and squirrels were itching to lead him astray and perish the thought, onto our country road. The rabbits had a diabolical habit of waiting at the end of the driveway and then dashing across the road. I had heard that so many pets who seem to just follow in their proud owners’ shadows, leashless, eventually are distracted by a dashing fox, squirrel or rabbit, at the wrong time, and that’s it.
I used to let Hugo of the leash in the back fields and he usually kept within view of me and me of him. The odd time he’d get caught up in a bird chasing cycle and once headed after a large lumbering furry thing which I feared was the ever present, evasive and very dangerous fisher. At the beach too, Hugo was off leash and to see him run then was breath taking poetry. He just ran for the sake of it.
So I built the poodle yard and one day, somehow off leash between the house and the yard he ran top speed, missing the entrance, bounding and bouncing into and then off of the surrounding chicken wire, leaving his poodle imprint, comically like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. On another dash across the garden he collapsed in a yelping ball. He had banged his knee on the wood barrier of the freshly built raised bed. Some coddling and cuddling and he was back in action.
Only once did he dash out the door and make a b-line for the very thick forest across the lane. The profanity that followed out of my mouth could have set the ground on fire. This was the first of very few panic situations. He must have been in heaven in the tangled boreal jungle of smells and decay and god-knows-what kind of animal dwellings. I was mortified that he’d come out onto the road––which he did, covered in burrs and flotsam looking at me as if to wonder why all the fuss?
He loves our Saturday trips, usually involving a stop at the dump and then onto Canadian Tire for something in the garden department. On one of our early visits, we waited patiently at the returns counter and he sat staring at a waist high pile of cases of pop on sale. The cases of soda were parked between the counter and where we were standing and as I was chatting with the staff, a thing that happens in our rural life (I always say if I was in a hurry I wouldn’t live here), I guess Hugo got a bit bored waiting for a potential treat. From a seated position he leapt and landed on the waist high display, leaving all of us breathless. Had we just actually witnessed this? He was more or less standing atop the boxes at counter height about three and half feet off the ground, looking like a gawky unwieldy teenager, not sure where or what their limbs were doing.
We still talk about it to this day, thirteen years later, many of the same staff, who still offer a treat. Remember that day, we say. It was a kind of magic, laughter, dismay, did we all see it, did it leave us breathless for a moment and dismayed, not knowing whether to laugh, forgetting for a moment to breathe.
He’s quite the athlete!