Happy Gotcha Day 2022, Curtis Loew! Three Years Later

 I know you don't care when your birthday falls. You're a dog. You don't even know what a birthday is. And I don't know when your birthday might be, so I've picked the day I brought you home. You looked like a little goblin with your black mask and missing teef. You made me laugh and cry all the two hours' drive home at the wonder and enormity of that day.

 Most of what we do for our dogs, we do for ourselves. The fancy foods with bison, salmon and venison; the high-class leashes and harnesses--that's all for us. What a dog wants is sun on his flanks, fragrant straw beneath him,

a rabbit or squirrel to light out after, and the freedom to do that. What a dog wants is a hug, a kind word, his kibble on time, a soft warm place to sleep.

Curtis, you've got that. All that, and acres to cover, your voice bawling like a hoarse bell through the trees.

You're out coursing the woods right now, as I write. It's freezing and dark and spitting snow, but you don't mind. You're free. I have to be OK with that, and I am, because you are who you are, and you get to be who you are meant to be. How many dogs can claim that?

You came to us three years ago today, and my eyes well with tears to think how very much we all needed you, right then, when the world was crumbling around us. You took a look at the situation, and went where you were needed most. There you stayed. You didn't even know us, but you knew right off the bat you had a lot of work to do.

I watched you in astonishment as you put your soul-soothing magic on everyone.

You're such a good guy, such a simple, hearty soul. Life is simpler now than it was in spring 2019, and we have a clear pact. You do your dog things, and I keep myself busy doing my human things, and try not worry too much about what your dog things are and where they take you. 

But when you're gone for too many hours, and you are gone for hours at a time...

that's when I come after you, reminding you with the tiniest electronic ping that I am here, and worrying. And then you come boiling up out of the woods, thorns bristling all over your skin, often as not bleeding where the briars have ripped your velvet ears.

I throw my arms around you, kiss you, tell you I've missed you, and we walk home. I clean your wounds and give you your dinner and tuck you in, and the next day we do it all over again, the good bye and the waiting and sometimes the worrying.

In return for that, you are my everything, my strength in times of weakness, a warm woodsy scent filling my senses, reminding me that everything will be all right, because you are Curtis and you are here with me. For me.

You can be a warm puppy, dribbled across the blankets

or a commanding and noble presence with a deep bass bark--you have many moods. But you are unfailingly kind and good to me.

The first time I saw your picture I wanted you in my life. I'll never forget the feeling that shot through me when I saw you. I knew Kelly had found my next dog, without my looking or asking or even knowing it had happened. And the wild thing is that Kelly knew, too. No communication had passed between us, but you were calling to me. I heard you all the way from Oregon. I flew home to get you.

"Is he already someone's darling?" I asked.

Not yet, he wasn't. 

                                          

Happy Two Year Gotchaversary, Curtis Loew!

 We're a pair, and it's a damn good thing, because living alone this far out in the country, snowed in for weeks during a pandemic isn't for sissies, or extroverts, for that matter. Just knowing there is someone else in the house, even if he's hairy, has a cold nose, and doesn't talk, helps. But that someone is Curtis Loew, a dog of great character and kindness, and that makes all the difference. 

                                                           You are hairy too. Just in patches. 

Love between two humans can sustain, enrich, swell, fade, wrack and rend, and that many-splintered thing, wonderful or heartbreaking or somewhere in the gray zone between, can go on for many years. But dog-love is constant, a bright flame we get to kindle and cradle in our hands for but a decade and change, and then it must go, be replaced in a different way. I've started with Curtis mid-decade. He's five now, and I treasure him all the more for it. He's a specimen and a half, in his prime, and I am delighted to be here for that stage of his beautiful life.

"Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way." This quote by Franz Kafka is often reworded to say "a different form," which is a little more direct. Kafka could, of course, have been writing about dogs. Yes, I miss my little black inkblot every day, but Curtis does a fine, fine job of filling that sweet, achy cavern in my heart.  He's love, too, in a different form. 

 Curtis Loew is anything but Chet's reincarnation. He is a separate nation. Independent, self-contained, focused primarily on his freedom to do his work in the woods. He accompanies me, at least partway; humors my primate need for long hugs and ridiculous endearments, and shares a bit of my every meal with the slightly stunned, wide-eyed look of someone who's just won the Ohio Lottery. 

on the ride home from the shelter Feb. 19, 2019, his IV patches still shaved from neutering surgery; wide-eyed wonder in every line.

What this dog came from, chained out for most of his four years in the deep south of Ohio, and what he's landed in...Lord, Lord, he's a brindle Cinderella. Yet he earns this champagne and knucklebone life with every swish of his eloquent tail. 

He delights, comforts, warms and amuses me. He worries me to death, plunging off after unseen scents, and gone for hours on end. I have to remind myself, each time, every day, that he knows what he's doing and he will come home. Curtis was sent to teach me how to love without clinging, to hold on loosely. It shouldn't be that hard for me to do; that's the kind of love I'd like to have, too. 

Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above

Don't fence me in!

Let me ride through the wide open spaces that I love

Don't fence me in!

Let me ride to the rim where the West commences

Gaze at the moon 'til I lose my senses

I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences

Don't fence me in! Just turn me loose... let me wander over yonder 'til I see the mountains rise...

 Curtis is my spirit animal, without question. 

Two years ago today, I filled out a questionnaire, signed a bunch of forms, and tearfully said, "I do!" to the soulful gold-brown eyes of an unknown but hopeful and polite cur-dog at the CHA Animal Shelter in Columbus, Ohio. 

Happy Gotchaversary, Curtis Loew!  I threw my arms around him after writing this, remembering him in a cage, waiting so patiently for the right person to come along. It made me cry to think of him

discarded. Who could just get rid of a soul like Curtis?

photo by Shila Wilson, taken five days after his adoption and I'm already besotted. Curtis baby, no more chains or cages for you. Just soft beds, willing rabbits, table scraps, and a million kisses.

And two years later:

               

With my deepest thanks to Kelly Ball for bringing us together, for knowing she'd found my next dog the minute she met him.

What's a Cur For?

 

I will admit that when I brought Curtis home from Columbus Humane Society’s Animal Shelter, I did not know what I was getting into. I knew he was smart, intuitive, handsome and kind. I didn’t yet know what he was, and I didn’t know what he was made for. 

Literally one of the first of 10 million photos I have taken of this dog.

 

It’s important to know what a breed was made for. I had lived in the lap of luxury with Chet Baker, Boston Terrier, for almost 12 years. Because Boston terriers are made for lovin’,  keeping people company, and making them laugh. They weren't bred to kill anything, herd anything, guard anything...they were just bred as fun little pals. Chet hung on my every word and move, and he believed his highest purpose in life was to keep me company. (here, he's helping me sign books at a show). Boy, did I need that then. He was the perfect dog for me, a busy mom trying to keep my career afloat while caring for three other people. Chet never wore a collar because he never strayed far enough from me to need one. The only time he was ever on lead was in town, and that wasn’t very often.

Photo by Jenny Bowman at the Midwest Birding Symposium, 

Lakeside, OH, 2013. Bandana by Jen Sauter!

 

Because I hadn’t yet figured out Curtis’ breed, or if he even was anything other than mixed, I didn’t know how to work him. Work, as in David Byrne, asking, “Well, how do I work this?” I decided to trust him, and I let him out of the car without a leash on his first approach to his new home, and he peed on the forsythia bush, where he pees to this day, and walked up the sidewalk to the front door as if he understood perfectly that here he would live for the rest of his life. That night, I took him out for a pee before bedtime, and he perked up his ears and headed into the backyard, me close behind with a flashlight. And he was gone, running pell mell through the ruined orchard, crashing and leaping. And that, as Lyle sings, was when I made my first mistake.

 

I called and yelled and hollered and he didn’t come back. Oh boy. I’ve done it now, stuck my foot in it bigtime. He eventually appeared, eyes glowing in the flashlight’s beam, a wide grin on his face. 

Runs After Things in the Night. Check.

Ignores Frantic Calling When Running After Things in the Night. Check.

Needs to be Leashed After Dark. Check.

 

By the next afternoon, I’d done some thinking about how to work this animal. I had to know what he was made for. I decided he was far too delicate in structure to be a pitbull mix. I thought he looked like some kind of southern cur-dog, so I started by Googling Catahoula Leopard Dog, then “brindle cur.” Bingo!  I had a Mountain Cur, more specifically Treeing Tennessee Brindle. I had never even heard of the breed, but it seems I had rescued a hunting dog! Well, dip me in chocolate. Wonder what that'll be like?

 

Being a hunting dog means a lot of things. First, he’s a fine companion, and he seems to be able to read my mind. He loves to go out into the woods with me, but he doesn’t  stick close by my side, the way Chet did. He leads! He has a job, and that is to find edible things. Things made of meat.  Curtis might have written the line: “If God didn’t want me to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?”

 

Now, this strike-out-on-your-own tendency Curtis has normally manifests with a lot of chasing and very little eating; high, excited yelps; crashing through briars; stripping himself of collar attachments such as tags, bells and trackers; and a resultant need to wear said tracker at all times. As I look back, I have been remarkably sanguine about the possibility of losing this dog. Something in me has known from the very start that he’s too smart to run willy-nilly, in a straight line, headed for the next county. That’s not who he is or what he's made for. He does, however, run after meaty things. If they can climb, he trees them, and tells me with excited barks just what he has and where it is.  Being human, I have been slow to awaken to the part he wants me to have in all this, which is to come join him, raise a gun and shoot the coon, possum, squirrel or what-have-you that he’s found for me. Then, in Curtis’ ideal world, we feast.

 

It is said that this is the breed that helped settle America; part hound, part Staffordshire terrier--which is where the brindling comes from--, part Indian village dog--which is where the brains come from. The mountain cur was bred to track and hunt anything, his highest mission to put food on the table for his family. And so when he trees a squirrel, he circles the tree, harassing and herding it around to my side, to give me the best shot. And still I don’t shoot. Poor Curtis must think I am either very stupid or very well-fed, because he keeps trying; it’s in his DNA to try. He wants to work with me, wants to be a team, but I just walk along with my head in the clouds, binoculars on my chest, and a trek stick in my hand, when I should be packing a thunder-stick.

 

I like to think I hold up my end of the pact pretty well, even if I don’t dispatch his quarry. I do take him out every morning without fail, and we are rarely gone less than three hours, rarely roaming less than three miles, either. He, of course, traverses far more ground than I do. I will linger in certain places, gazing around, and that’s when my wonderful companion invariably takes off. But only yesterday did I figure out why this happens again and again. I think that in stopping to gaze, I'm inadvertantly sending him the signal to go find me something to shoot.

 

I was standing at the overlook, the mile-long trail to which I have laboriously cleared this winter, enjoying the shifting light as it broke through high clouds and started raking the snowfields. I was peering, looking for the castle my neighbors are building to the east. It was vanishing in and out of the morning mist. Curtis, of course, had just ditched me, gone on a toot. Suddenly, the wooden fireworks of a startled flock of wild turkeys exploded deep in the valley to the east. Three, four, five, seven, they flapped noisily and then planed out over the holler. It was a stunning sight. For maybe ten seconds I simply stared at the silvery sunlight hitting off their bronze backs. They were too far away and I had only my phone, but I dug it out of my pocket and hit Video anyway. And so it was that I had my iPhone SE out of my pocket, turned on, and horizontal, even! when THIS happened.  

Of all the videos I've taken recently (and ask my laptop and it'll respond with a small, choked sound that means "a lot"), this is my favorite. It's perfect, perfectly focused, and perfectly unrepeatable. And I have Curtis to thank. Because it was NOT an accident that those five wild turkeys flew right the hell past my face. It was Curtis' plan. His design. This is how this dog works, and I have been too dumb, to asleep, to even know that.

Here he came, immediately on the spurred heels of those turkeys.

Had I had a gun on my shoulder, or even a goshawk on my fist, we would have eaten for a couple of weeks. 

Curtis tries, again and again. It's what he was made to do, and he is damned good at it. He emerged from the brush, glanced at me, knowing I would have blown this PERFECT SETUP AGAIN, WILD TURKEYS FIVE OF THEM MY GOD WOMAN WHY DON'T YOU SHOOT?? then shook off his disappointment and came to join me. Imperfect, clueless me, who he somehow manages to love anyway, because I love him so much. 

I'm no Annie Oakley, but we're a pair. 

Gotcha Day for Curtis Loew

I let Curtis run on this first real snow of the winter. He loves snow and cold and he loves nothing better than to run. When he’d been gone for about an hour I set out after him with the Marco Polo tracker. I knew about where to start because I’d been with him when he picked up a coon trail, ever his favorite. So I headed west, out the old orchard, and in the direction I’d last heard him bark. No dice. The signal said he’d gone southwest. So out the meadow I walked, snow clinging to my boots with that crunching tramp I’d had yet to hear this winter. 

Man, he was a long way off. I heard him bark, and plunged down into the west valley. He was clear over on the other side of the Chute! I called, and the tracker sent a little ping to let him know where I was, and before too long he appeared on the slope above me. He wove through the trees and was so happy to see me. Not as happy as I was to see him!

We found a deer bed.

And an old cast iron bathtub, on our land, one I’d never known was there! It shows up a lot better in snow. For those who wonder (and I do, all the time), farmers use them to water cattle. They place them in a natural spring and let the spring keep them filled.

Bonus score. I now own an old rusty bathtub, and I can tell you it’s staying right there. I wondered who lived in it, but didn’t feel strong enough to tip it up and see. 

Since we were sort of in the vicinity, I decided to show Curtis the Chute. The Chute used to be where I went when I needed a destination. It took me about a half hour to get there, tramping quickly through the woods on trails I maintained with a clippers. Chet Baker and I went there all the time. 

In fact, in my very first blogpost, which I think was called Chet Likes Ice, back in December 2005, I told about how that pup skibbled  up and down this watercourse with a huge grin on his face, like it was no big thing to race up and slide back down a slick icy creek bed. That’s the kind of dog he was.

Curtis is not that kind of dog. He doesn’t do a lot of things just to be silly. He is a more serious kind of guy. He is all about independence and freedom and exploration, about hunting and then finding his way back home to keep me company in the most marvelous way. 

He’s the kind of dog you have to let go, so he will come back.

To see this magnificent dog, my Curtis Loew, in the Chute for the first time was a wonderful and wondrous thing. To look up the stream that feeds it

And down the path where Chet and I used to walk, now completely obstructed by fallen beeches, was incredibly moving to me. Could he know what it meant to me? This is where I hiked with my babies in backpacks, and later with the Boston terrier who made me a dog lover for life. 

I think he knew. He stuck to me like a tick the whole time, when he could just as easily have gone off on another toot.

I’m writing this in honor of Curtis Loew’s Gotcha Day, which is February 19, 2019. What all my family was enduring at that time I cannot and will not even describe. Adopting Curtis was the best decision I could possibly have made, for all concerned. How I connected with this dog, first through a chance viewing of his photo in my friend Kelly’s ( @ballabing) Instagram post; how an arrow pierced my heart when I saw his face; how I thought about him the entire time I was at Klamath Falls, Oregon; how I decided in Medford’s tiny airport that I had to adopt him, and then how I stayed overnight at Kelly’s home in Columbus just so I could meet him the next day... it still melts me just to think about that chain of events.

And how that dog connected with everyone who needed him, how he guided us through the darkest woods anyone can walk with the sweet light of his love...he saved US. All I had to do was say yes, please open that stainless steel door, and let that brindle one out. I want to meet him.

I led Curtis up out of the Chute and he kept looking over his shoulder to the northeast, toward home. No, sweetheart. Follow me. I want to take you somewhere else.

He fell into place beside me and I took him to the Overlook, where I had stood so many times with little Chet. We gazed out at the view, which is different, and still the same.

Here, the coyotes had milled around, greeted each other, and undoubtedly howled in the night. Oh, he was all afire investigating their news.

Here I used to come when I needed to clear my head. Now the paths I so carefully cut are all grown to briars and crossed by tree fall after tree fall. It is hard to get here now.

That makes me sad. But it made me happy to know the way like the back of my hand, even when I had to detour for hundreds of yards. I know these woods.

And it made me so very happy to have a fine dog at my side to hug and talk to, a dog who cares about me and loves nothing more than to see me happy.

In one of my tree fall workarounds, I slipped and fell deep in the forest. Unbeknownst to me, my iPhone 6 bounced out of my pocket and into the snow. I didn’t discover it until we got home. I explained to Curtis that we had to retrace our steps until we found the place I’d fallen, because I knew that was where the phone would be. Thank God for snow! I could follow my steps exactly, looking the whole way for the little slot in the snow I knew that phone would have made. 

And there, 3/4 mile back, was the big floofmark where I’d gone down, and the little rectangular slot off to the left that the phone made when it landed. I laughed out loud to see the phone standing pertly upright in the snow, waiting for me exactly where I knew it would be. I hugged Curt and thanked him for coming back with me to find it. He danced and his eyes sparkled, and we loped even faster toward home.

Back up the meadow, to the red house with the red garage.

Back to the place that feels like home, because of who lives there with me. 

I don’t know that there’s anyone who could have helped me through this ongoing labyrinth of grief the way Curtis has helped me. And, seeing him coursing through snowy woods, I don’t think there’s anyone who could have given him just exactly what he needed, exactly when he needed it, either. Some things were meant to be, some souls were meant to meet and be together, as long as Fate allows. And Fate has allowed a great deal here.

Curtis, finest of brindle curs, thank you for gracing all our lives with your wise, warm, mellow presence. Thank you for, under all the loving, still being the purely wild thing you are, for knowing the ways of the woods and of wild animals, for perfectly embodying whom I most want to be, in canine form. You truly are my spirit animal.

No thanks for being skunked three times in 8 months. No thanks for thinking that getting sprayed is perfectly worth it, because next time you’re gonna grab that little animal just right, before he sprays. You big dummy. You’re the smartest dumb dog I’ve ever known. And the best. Happy Gotcha Day, dear Curtis Loew. Let’s have many, many more.

Cur Love is Pure Love

Remember Resusci-Annie? that big supercreepy close-eyed rubber mannequin we used to have to try to resuscitate in health class (after first wiping her lips with rubbing alcohol?) Was there anything grosser than that? Or more difficult? I could never, ever get a chest rise out of Annie, no matter how hard I blew. (yes, I've put a link there, and it's a heck of a tale, but please, read this post and then come back to it...)

Have a major life crisis or two, then leave your blog untended for a month and a half at a time, and you've got a Resusci-Annie on your hands. Flatlining. Dang. I blasted y'all with penguins and hyraxes, no... BABY penguins and hyraxes, and fully 384 of you (picture Dr. Evil, pinky to lips) partook! Come on. Penguins. Hyrax toes. Still no takers? Three hundred eighty-four hits...

I found an "article" in USA Today about "side hustles" that will add to your income. And one of the suggestions was Start a Blog. "Build your readership to a few hundred or thousands, and you can start selling advertising!" I took the red pen I keep on the kitchen table for just such inanities and circled the offending paragraph. Then I did one of my trademark HA. Ha. HAAAA's beneath it. In an increasingly inane publication, that was as inane as anything I've ever read. Blogging for fun and profit.

So this is a test. If pengins and hyraxes don't move you, will dogs? What about a little dome-head curdoggie? One whose tail never stops wagging?

 Still wagging. Tail always blurred. Oh, how this dog lights up my days. Just the joy he takes in being outside with me makes every hike special. To be able to lean down and throw my arms around this little creature...it keeps me going.

And then there is the daytime snorgling... he's too sexy for his bedspread.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and Instagram are aware that I've been campaigning heavily on behalf of a certain Treeing Tennessee Brindle who is in very bad straits in West Virginia.
I was alerted to her existence by my friend Katie Fallon, who tagged me in a post back in late October, with a photo of a dog who could be Curtis' stunt double, or sister!

It turns out that this little cur was found collarless and lost in a park near Morgantown by a veterinarian named Nikki. Nikki brought her home, only to find that Ladycur, as we've been calling her, took exception to Nikki's dog. And others.

This is something you see every now and then, especially in female dogs...they just don't like being around other dogs.

In every other respect, she's a tail-wagging, supersweet brindle cur-ry dream. Good on a lead, and wonderful with people.

 

Ladycur is slender and well-muscled (though she looks a bit thin to me, having taken Curtis from 38 to 45 lb).

She's spayed and up to date on her shots. Nikki thinks she's around four years old (the gray muzzle is a cur thing and not indicative of advanced age). Her teeth are shiny white and perfect, which Curtis' are NOT.  Curtis is a known four and his whole chin is gray.

Little Ladycur has spent way too much time in cages lately, but Nikki has had no choice but to confine her while she's at work. And now she's keeping her at home, because the office environs were just too much, and there was no room for her there. Nikki would take her in a heartbeat if she'd just get along with the homedoggie, but it is not to be.

 Nikki's colleague has also joined the search for a one-dog household for this beautiful, sweet dog. Everyone who meets her falls in love with her.

Are you lonesome tonight? Would you consider opening your one-pet heart and home to Ladycur?

How I would love to help find her a forever home. And I would love for someone else to experience the kind of love a cur can give. Cur love is pure love.

Right, Curtis?

Ladycur says RIGHT. And Please?

and thank you. Share this far and wide, please. Let's find a home for this wonderful, somewhat persnickety dog.

If you're interested, email nbecichATgmailDOTcom

(wrote it that way to foil the scammers and bots)