For a period of about ten years, we had three medium-to-large dogs. The first of these three girls to join our family was Kushtaka (accent on the last syllable).* She was the third so-named dog in Scott’s family. I heard stories of the first and got to spend some time with the second. Koosh the third, our Girl Dog #1, was loving but not the least bit loyal. She would run off for two or three days at a time, at any and all opportunities. We built her a runner outside the trailer in Thorne Bay, but she would sit down and quickly back out of her nylon collar. We switched to a choke-chain, but she got out of that too, and for a while I couldn’t figure out how. Then I caught her, sitting with her head hanging down until the chain fell off from simple gravity. After that, we used an intricate interweaving of nylon and chain, which was reasonably effective.
Just as Koosh was starting to learn some manners, along came Bandit, Girl Dog #2. My son Jon, age 8, came home from school one day and cried out, “Bandit is all alone!” I knew that Bandit belonged to a classmate of his who was moving to Ketchikan. I walked up there with Jon, and sure enough, there was Bandit, released from her chain but not from her heart strings, waiting in the yard of the empty house. We brought Bandit home. Soon, she and Kushtaka were happily running away together.
After about two more years, during which time I read and re-read a book called “Surviving Your Dog’s Adolescence,” Bandit and Koosh were starting to mellow out a bit. Enter Boots, Girl Dog #3. We brought Boots home after moving to Craig full-time, because the neighbor had her chained 24 hours a day to the fence between our lots, and she would yip every three seconds, 18 hours a day. She was about twelve years old with a smelly skin condition and a heart of gold. Bandit took one look at her and started beating her up regularly.
One time, the three dogs all ran away together. Koosh and Bandit ditched Boots up on Sunnahae Mountain, which overlooks Craig. They came home without her some four hours later, looking not one whit ashamed of themselves. It was an easy task to find Boots because she was yiping loud enough for the entire community to hear her. After an hour of this, I shouldered a backpack with water and snacks and started up the mountain. I followed the sound and found her about a third of the way up, stranded at the top of a cliff and unable to figure out how to backtrack. I put a leash on her and walked her back down.
Craig is a small community; one can walk end-to-end in about 15 minutes, and I do not exaggerate when I say the whole town could hear Boots screaming for help. I was sure that I would hear all about it later, but nobody ever said a word. Perhaps my neighbors were, in fact, rendered speechless with amazement.
*You can learn a little bit about the real Kushtaka here: Kushtaka – Wikipedia