The unknown can be a scary place for a squirrel

On Saturday I woke up feeling tired and achy; everyone else in the house had more or less gone through this malady, and it finally caught me.  Let me tell you something: it pays to get sick on a Saturday.  I had a sick day like I have only dreamed of for years and years.  While my husband ran the ship, so to speak, I napped, grazed copiously all throughout the day, and lay on the couch watching two hours’ worth of Corner Gas reruns.  I rallied only long enough to make – and eat – a batch of guacamole, which I swear had a medicinal effect on me because I was feeling well enough to resume normal activities the very next day.

One of those activities was baking pumpkin loaf (which turned out beautifully – watch for the recipe to be posted over at the cooking blog, which I seem to be plugging a lot today).  As I stirred the wets into the dries, I idly looked out the window to see my dog chasing a squirrel.  The squirrel was on the wall of our detached garage; the dog was barking at it and running back and forth.  “Good luck, Barkley,” I sighed, “You’ll never catch a squirrel.”

If this was a movie about bloodthirsty hounds, ominous music would have started playing.  As Barkley chased the probably idiotic squirrel back and forth along the garage wall, my husband stood beside me watching.  “I think he’s got it cornered,” he said, “I think I should probably call him in.”  I did not realize that my mastermind of a Labradoodle actually was exhausting the squirrel as a hunting technique, until seconds after my husband uttered that remark, he yelled “He’s got it in his mouth!”

And there was my fluffy, Gund-like dog with a squirrel in his mouth, shaking it back and forth.

My husband ran to the door to call him.  I, always good in an emergency, started shrieking “BARKLEY!  TREAT!  TREAT!” as I shook the treat container frantically, hoping that he would let the squirrel go BEFORE coming into the house for a treat, which he did.  Nervously, I went outside to make sure that there were no squirrel corpses in the backyard.  Fortunately, no squirrels were harmed in this drama.  However, the squirrel had evidently decided that the best place for it to be was back on the garage wall.  Natural selection seems to be at play here.  Eventually it scampered back up a tree, evidently leaving its scent behind as Barkley spent the rest of the day circling around the yard, standing at attention at the bottom of the trees.

Beneath this fluffy, adorable exterior lies a bloodthirsty hound.  I’m actually kind of impressed.  I’m looking at him in a whole new light.  Perhaps this is not unrelated to my attraction to Dr. Hunt on Grey’s?