Rounding Up the Cows - Eleanor Shepherd

After a long absence I am resuming the stories of the adventurous Brittany Spaniel, Beau.  

When a dog becomes part of the family, you can almost image what he is thinking.  It happened to us one day at a farm in the French countryside.  If you drive west out of Paris on the A13 for about 100 kilometres and you find yourself in the centre of Normandie.  The main city is Rouen.  About 20 kilometres before you arrive in Rouen is a village called Fleury-sur-Andelle.  The Andelle is a magnificent trout stream – fishing aficionados come from far and wide to fish in it. It is in this village that The Salvation Army operates a facility called Radepont.  It is a reinsertion program for adult men, aimed at helping them develop job and personal skills.  The program operates out of a chateau, a bequest form a wealthy French industrialist in gratitude for the work of The Salvation Army.  The grounds are expansive with a full operating farm on the premises.  South of the chateau, still on the property is the abbey Fontaine – Guerard (Healing springs) and a wall dating back to the time of the Romans.

It was here that young people from Salvation Army churches around the northwest of France assembled for a retreat weekend.  Glen and Eleanor were the guests for the weekend and we came as a family, including Beau.  John was a delegate to the weekend and Elizabeth, at age 11, was with us. Beau’s exposure to music concerts, band outings and Salvation Army events had provided a good grounding in life in general. On Saturday afternoon Glen and Eleanor had some free time and decided to make the 2 kilometre walk from the chateau to the abbey.  Elizabeth was busy exploring the wall.

About half-way along the route, walking along the crest of a hill that ran north-south from the chateau to the abbey we looked down a field of cows contentedly grazing.  Glen found it boring and carried on.  Eleanor found it bucolic and peaceful and stopped to look.  Beau saw the cows and his hunting dog DNA kicked in.  Running back and forth he barked up a storm as if addressing the herd.  Fortunately for all of us, the fence around the pasture prevented Beau from encroaching on the cows’ territory.  As Glen marched on he was oblivious to the drama of herding being played and barked out behind him.  Only later did he hear the details as Eleanor recounted the events, according to what she believed Beau was thinking.

Beau saw the cows milling around all disorganized in the field and felt that something should be done to whip them into shape.  First he ran around to get the attention of the head cow.  Once the head cow was paying attention to him he gave instructions to the head cow:  “Get those cows to line up properly. They look disgraceful and bedraggled in that pasture. Pick one cow to start a line and have other cows line up behind him.  Once other cows have formed a complete line, get another lead cow and start a second line, and so on.”

He barked convincingly and the head cow got the idea.  He turned to another of the herd and instructed him:  “You hear that dog up there. He wants us to get better organized.  You stand over here and then I’ll tell some of the others to line up behind you.  We can form lines that way and the whole herd will look a lot neater that way.” The other cow understood, and slowly the herd began to get into position.  Task accomplished, Beau was free to run on ahead looking for more good work to do.

Some might find the tale a bit tall – but Eleanor assures us that this scenario explains what happened that afternoon.  And she was there and knew how Beau thought.

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Winner of 2009
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You will fina a review of my book More Questions than Answers on the website of Lisa Gay.  Here is the link to it.
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The Candy Stash

 There are two children in the Shepherd family – John, born in Montreal in 1972 and Elizabeth, born in Winnipeg in 1977. They share a common gene pool and have much in common. But they are individuals and manifest distinctive characteristics.  One of these differences, at least when they were young, related to how they would process candy.

If Halloween or Christmas yielded a good supply of candy, John could be counted on to finish it off fairly expeditiously. Elizabeth, par contre, could make a candy stash last for months.  In fact, we suspected that it had only psychological value, a sort of security deposit that would never be consumed.

One Christmas Elizabeth had done particularly well with candy - a fine selection of Quality Street, thanks to our provider, Marks & Sparks. She had it carefully stocked in the bottom drawer of the table beside her bed.  Presumably, in moments of acute temptation she could reach in and treat herself.  John’s stock, was by this time long gone.

Day after day, week after week, the candy stayed in the drawer.  Somewhere, somehow, the sensitive nose of the Brittany spaniel picked up the scent of the treasure.  Beau had, by this juncture, developed a sense of territorial comfort around the house. Whatever there was that was not locked away was his.  It could be a soft chair, it might be a bed to spread out on, and it could be a piece of cheese or meat.  It might even be extended to include Elizabeth’s candy stash.  So thought the noble dog.

There was a slight logistic issue to overcome.  The candy was in a bedside table drawer.  The drawer was kept closed. Elizabeth liked her room neat and took minimal precautions against intrusion by the dog – her dog.

Kerry Dearborn, the owner of Laura, Beau’s mother, had told Eleanor that of all the pups Brownie (Beau) was the most resourceful, most intelligent and most persistent, in spite of his being the runt.  Those three qualities coalesced in a masterstroke of canine theft, committed right in Elizabeth’s room.

His nose told him where the candy was – in the bottom drawer.  His taste buds told him that it would taste great. His sense of territorial ownership told him that it really was his.  But how to get it? The bedside table was an IKEA special, with a round handle to open and shut the drawer.  Somewhere, somehow, Beau figured out that a paw, strategically placed, could be used to pull the drawer open and grant the resourceful dog access to the candies in the drawer.  What shock was Elizabeth’s as she came into her room, saw the drawer open and the candy wrappers strewn about the floor.

It might not be the great train robbery, but in the world of canine lore, it is one of the better heists. 

Future candy stashes were move to higher, more secure, locations.

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Beau and the Chickens

Life in Paris revolved around many activities at The Salvation Army.  One of those activities was the participation in La Musique Nationale – the French national Salvation Army band – of which Glen and John were members. In 1990 Elizabeth, too, joined the band.  Often Elizabeth and Eleanor accompanied them on various outings with the band.  One such outing was the annual music workshop weekend of the band held at Morfondé.  Morfondé was a large residential centre for adolescents operated by The Salvation Army in Villeparisis, not far from Charles de Gaulle airport.  The campus covered several acres with residential buildings, administration building, an auditorium self-service restaurant and barns which were part of a working farm which figured in the training for the adolescents in the program.  Barns, of course, meant animals. And Beau, as a Brittany spaniel, had a penchant for hunting.  In Beau’s mind space to run and animals were made for each other.  It seemed logical to him.

The program for the weekend was intense – with rehearsals on Friday night and all day Saturday, a worship service on Sunday morning and a concert in Paris on Sunday afternoon.  The members of the band stayed at Morfondé and ate in the self-service restaurant there.  Most of the resident adolescents had gone to be with their families for the mid-winter break on this first week of March, 1989. 

The weather was glorious.  The whole family was there and Beau had come along for the Sunday.  He stayed in the car for a while during the activities, and we let him out during the lunch-hour break.  A lunch hour break in France meant time for a proper meal – with bread, salad, entrée, cheese, dessert and a long, slow coffee.  The Sunday meal was roast chicken – a good feast as I recall.  We had Beau out for a sprint as others were going through the line in the cafeteria.  At six months, Beau had grown and now had the sprint of a gazelle.  He criss-crossed the spacious terrain with glee. Then he spied a live chicken, which had escaped from the chicken coop.  Chickens, it appears, are like dogs in their desire to get out of enclosures and run around.  The hunter genes took over and Beau was off like a rocket.  Without breaking stride he took the chicken in his mouth and gambolled across the grounds with John, Elizabeth and Glen in frantic pursuit. 

The sure sign of a good hunting dog is a soft mouth so that the game is not hurt – just held.  Beau had the soft mouth of the hunting dog.  He also had the speed and agility of a hunting dog. There was not a chance of our catching him.  What if he ran into the dining with the chicken in a terrified squawk between his teeth as our colleagues finished their chicken meal?  What would this do to Beau’s welcome in the environs?  What would it do to our family’s reputation as responsible dog owners?

Glen was in a state of total despair.  It was left to John to save the day.  Out of the corner of his eye as we tore across the field in pursuit of Beau John spied an empty watering can.  Grasping it as he ran he aimed at Beau and flung the can, catching the dog in the right hind leg.  Beau opened his mouth to bark his protest.  That second was all the chicken needed to go free.   Our relief was palpable!

Winner of 2009
Award of Merit
Human Interest Article

Winner of 2011
Word Guild Award
Christian Leadership

Beau the Digger

 

The house where we lived, at 5 Claude Debussy was one of five row houses in the west-end Paris suburb of Rueil-Malmaison.  The main living space was the ground floor and the first floor.  There was an unfinished basement with the furnace, storage areas, and a play area for Elizabeth, and, at the time, the washing machine.  As noted earlier, the back door in the basement had been redone when a carpenter came and installed a swinging door to facilitate Beau’s comings and goings.

Through the door was the yard – some flowerbeds, a small lawn and fence.  The fence was about two metres high and fitted snug to the ground.  Perfect for a dog. We figured there would not be the slightest concern for Beau’s safety.  He could walk through the swinging door and out into the garden with no risk of his getting away.

It appeared that we had not incorporated paws – front paws specifically – into our calculations.  Even if we had overlooked it, Beau had not.

He might have been small, but his busy little front paws did the trick.  He dug, and he dug, and he dug. Beau discovered that it was not necessary to move all that much earth to make a hole adequate for a pup to squeeze under and go to explore the larger world.  Imagine our shock when we came home a found him sitting outside on the front sidewalk.

This development clearly called for remedial action.  A quick trip to Truffaut, the French home improvement store at the local shopping centre, Parly II and we returned with a quantity of bricks.  The earth was returned and a brick was put in place over the former hole at the bottom of the fence. “Gotcha”, thought Glen as he came inside.  The pup shall wander no more.

Unfortunately, it was not quite as simple as that.  Beau found other places where the fence did not go too far into the earth, and once again the paws went to work.  In the space of about two months, the back yard fence was ringed with bricks to prevent the digging of holes as escape routes for the wanderer.  More holes, more trips to Truffaut, more bricks; it seemed as if it would never end.

Fortunately the pup was growing through all this – a diet of the finest canned dog food and some supplements of fine French cheese (camembert was a particular favourite of the pooch) or meat.

Eventually his size got the better of him and he ceased from his escapades.  It might have been discipline that subdued, but, based on the evidence, size would likely be a better explanatory variable.  He would, however still indulge in the occasional digging frenzy, storing away a tasty crust of baguette in case of sudden famine, or une pénurie de croquettes, should the family not care adequately for his needs.  Periodically such tasty treats would be unearthed months later, and Elizabeth would come home from school to find a soggy, mouldy old crust of bread languishing on the basement floor or occasionally on her bedspread.  The pooch always enjoyed well-aged food, after all.

Winner of 2011
Word Guild Award
Christian Leadership

Winner of 2009
Award of Merit
Human Interest Article

UN BEAU SOUVENIR - Brownie Comes Home

 Some members of the family were aware of the scheme – some were not.  The Shepherds were living in Paris in 1988.  Elizabeth was 11 and was going into 6ieme, the French equivalent of junior high school.  Word was that it would be a difficult transition.

She had asked about having a dog on a number of occasions, and each time the answer had been a polite no – with maybe a fish or a turtle thrown in to soften the rejection.  In the fall of 1988 the “dog” question came up again.  Eleanor saw Elizabeth’s point of view.  She decided to pray about the subject – if God could send a dog who would cost nothing to procure, maybe that would be a sign that Elizabeth should have her dog. 

When school resumed at the Lycée International, Allison Dearborn, Elizabeth’s friend, came back to announce that Laura, their collie, had given birth to a litter of pups.  News of the event shook our house at 5 rue Claude Debussy.  Elizabeth saw her dog. Eleanor’s prayer had been answered. The only barrier was convincing John and Glen.

One day after school Elizabeth went to the Dearborns and saw the pups.  All were black except one, appropriately named “Brownie”.  Elizabeth remembers holding Brownie up.  The rest of the litter was fast asleep, while Brownie, true to his nature as we were to later find out, was wide awake, and barking for someone to come and get him out of the tedium of the pen.  No sleep for him.  Elizabeth held him up, and he peed all over her – no doubt a sign of appropriation of his new found human.  Her skirt was wet, and her heart was set.

After much discussion the decision was made.  The dog would come home. We would give it a try.  John and Glen reluctantly acquiesced, but set a condition.  His name would be Beauregard, after the illustrious pooch of Pogo cartoons – Beauregard Bugleboy Bloodhound.  And so we made the trip to Maisons Lafitte to the Dearborns to get Beau.

He was ours, a tiny ball of fur with big dark eyes and the energy of a bomb.  The Dearborns said goodbye to “Brownie” and we put “Beau” in our car. 

Life was never the same after.   Applications of Javex to the basement floor to teach him to attend to his needs outside, and the doggie bed basket chewed to bits.  The little mutt seemed to be all teeth.  But when he cuddled into you – the wreckage did not matter.

Beau was given his bed in the basement and spent the night there – reluctantly admittedly, but he did it – for all of about 2 weeks.  After 15 sleepless nights due to whimpering and scratching, Beau’s sleeping quarters were relocated up 2 flights of stairs, next to the humans.  Within no time he was sleeping on the various beds, relocating himself throughout the night to make sure all was well and ensuring a warm spot on the bed for all. We had the door from the basement into the back garden redone to put in a swinging door so that Beau could come and go as he pleased.  The swoosh could be heard as he trotted in and out, scouting out the events in the back yard and alley.

Four weeks later we went to London, England for the weekend and took Beau back to the Dearborns to stay with them and Laura, his mother. Laura had welcomed him back with maternal concern – regurgitating her food for her pup in case the new humans were not feeding him properly.  As our plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport coming back we couldn’t wait to get out to the Dearborns to pick him up and bring him home.  The dog had won our hearts.

He was not what you would call a well-disciplined dog.  In fact, that objective would never be fully realized.  There are lingering differences of opinion in the family about why that was so.  But the beast remained independent to the end.

Winner of 2011
Word Guild Award
Christian Leadership

Winner of 2009
Word Guild
Award of Merit
Human Interest Story