Treasure Hunt

 

Scout spends more time outside since the weather is warmer.  He makes up for it when he comes inside.  On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, he expressed no desire to go outside.  Instead, he spent the afternoon on a treasure hunt.

Any open, or partly open, box is an invitation to browse.  A collie’s nose is designed to stick into small places.  On this particular day, he found a tube of antibiotic ointment, a long plastic pipe from some unknown project, a pair of sweatpants, a stray sock, a Christmas bag, two plastic hangers, a package of screws, a small Tupperware container and something I didn’t recognize by the time I retrieved it.  He also got the shoes I had kicked off and pulled the insoles out.  He has a particular fixation on insoles and no interest at all in the old shoe I gave him for his very own.

He loves tools, and is ecstatic when he finds an open toolbox or bag of hardware items.  He once brought the electric drill into the living room and poured out a box of screws.  I don’t know what he was planning to build, but I put a stop to it before he figured out how to plug in and turn on the drill.  One morning when I got out of bed, I heard a noise that sounded a lot like water rushing out of a faucet.  My heart skipped a beat, and I went on a search for a broken water pipe or malfunctioning faucet.  I had visions of a flooded laundry room or a lake in the kitchen floor.  When I reached the source of the noise, I was relieved to find that it was not water.  Someone, and I’m confident in my assumption that it was Scout, had turned on the cordless vacuum, which was in the laundry room on its charger.  I don’t know if he meant to use it or take it apart.  My guess is the latter.

The real Aladdin’s cave for Scout is my closet.  He lurks outside the door constantly, checking to see if by chance I have left the door open.  I do that more often than I like to admit.  Even if it’s open just a crack, he knows how to use his big paw to fling it open.  Once he does, he has a wide variety of choices for treasures.  Shoes, pants, sweaters – what to choose?  Usually it’s shoes.  Not just one shoe, but several shoes.  His particular favorite right now is a yellow dress shoe.  So far, I’ve been able to rescue it without damage, but he keeps trying.  I can’t figure out why he goes for that one shoe every time.

Treasure hunting is exhausting

Low open shelves are fair game too.  He can wipe out a row of books in no time.  Fantasy seems to be his favorite flavor – he shredded 3 Mercedes Lackey books one afternoon and ate the cover off an Anne McCaffrey dragon adventure.  He enjoys pulling the rubber chair leg tips off and somehow has figured out how to do that without upending the chairs.  He is trying to pull the ends off my exercise bicycle, but so far he hasn’t succeeded.  He has learned that he can pull the flap on the back of the couch open (it is attached at the bottom with Velcro, which makes a satisfying noise when he pulls it loose).  He doesn’t try to tear it up – he just likes to lift it up over and over.

It's not because he’s bored, or because he has nothing else to play with.  The dogs have their own toy box and they keep all the toys neatly piled inside.  They have a large collection of sticks and bones in the yard, which they occasionally try to bring in the house.    The main reason they don’t get in with the sticks is that they are too long to fit through the door.

Sophie doesn’t participate in the treasure hunts – she outgrew that a year or so ago.  But she does like to reap the rewards of his finds.  They almost came to blows over the plastic container when she came in out of the rain last Tuesday.  She has no interest in the dog toy box either.

Scout’s most stunning achievement was a couple weeks ago when he ate a pie, all but the one slice  I had eaten.  It was a darn good pie.  He threw it up in the living room, which is what gave me the clue that he had eaten it.  Raisins are not good for dogs, but I don’t think they stayed with him long enough to hurt him.

He never holds it against me when I take things away from him, or when I chastise him for his misdeeds.  He is a cheerful dog who forgives me for what he must see as my obsession with things like shoes, tools, clothing, books and Tupperware.  And he has those endearing collie eyes that melt your heart.  He has mastered the art of coming to my chair after a particular egregious transgression and laying his sweet face on my knee and lifting his paw to shake my hand.  (I think Sophie taught it to him because she used it before he came to live here.)   It makes me think I really didn’t need to eat all that pie anyway.

As I finished this story, I got up to let the dogs in from their last potty trip.  Phoebe, my very old Sheltie, is having a hard time getting up the front steps.  Tonight, she finally figured out that it is easier to walk around to the end of the porch and come up the ramp.  As she was walking around, Sophie and Scout came back out the door.  I thought they were were going to go on a last minute patrol and started to call them back. Instead of rocketing off the porch as usual, they went to meet Phoebe and escorted her up the ramp and through the door.  Everyone got extra treats tonight.

They call this the "collie expression," also known as "sorry I ate the pie."