Mean SOB
A dead bluejay is where this starts. Molly picks it up and runs off with it. I roar for her to "LEAVE IT!" and I take off after her. She whips away around the arbor vitaes and is half way down to Cathy’s place before I round the grove. I see her there on the other side of the fence. The bird is gone, dropped during the excitement of the chase no doubt, certainly not out of obedience.
I ignore the little West Nile carrying brat and let the old dog out of her kennel. We oldsters shuffle away, out the path toward the orchard. Pretty soon Diggy wanders away and Molly whips past like a bullet train, tightens her trajectory around a clump of red twigged dogwood and barrels on in with a grin. I give Digster a wave and she catches the hand motion and ambles our direction. Molly is off like a shot again, twice around the woodlot, back to the house and then back out on the bullet train orchard path cutting as close to Diggy and me as she can without knocking us down. I walk over the little rise and I see the beekeepers out by their hives in the orchard.
Shit.
Molly has burned off the first few stages of rocket propulsion so she’s back in a nominally biddable state of dog. I suggest that she be seated and remain there while I leash her. Mirabile dictu, she obeys. I suppose I could have turned my little herd back toward the house at this point and avoided conflict. I knew there was a chance that Diggy was going to do the next wrong thing. But she vectored off toward the road and I wanted to check out the service berries that we planted a few weeks ago, so I led Molly on the west side of the orchard headed north, well away from the beekeepers.
The shrubs were doing fine. We headed back and of course there was the Digster tail-wagging on her arthritic way toward the guys in the moon suits. She’s deaf so I didn’t call. I waved at her, trying to give her the signal to come back our way. The spacemen waved back. "The dog!" I yelled and they got it, too late. She’s being stung anbd they’re doing nothing and I have to go down there and try to rescue her and she rubs her nose in the grass, and comes my way, and I tell these guys, "I’m really angry. If you had stopped by the house I wouldn’t have taken the old dog out in the field."
They didn’t handle the anger part very well. They gave me back attitude, kind of a "humph - well now we know how you feel" kind of thing. I’m not a fully realized master. I said, "Well, you can get the hives off my land then."
Guy says, "Okay, we will. When I get back from Mexico."
To which I politely replied, "If that shit’s not gone in a week, I’ll burn them."
"Thanks for the warning," the guy says.
This stuff may be deeper than it appears. I went back to apologize for my hostility after I put the dogs away, but they were gone. Last year, the people who have the CSA here at our place kind of invited the bee keepers to do their thing and I was in the position of agreeing or looking like a jerk. So this is kind of the slow reflex. I look like a jerk a year later.
If the guys had stopped back at the house to talk, to ask about Diggy, to connect, then this thing would have resolved itself. They didn’t. Life’s too short to let people take advantage of you. Diggy is only going to be around another summer. Why mess it up with a bee-stung nose?
