When I'm walking around the countryside it's not unusual for the happy Hopeful hound to go dashing off into field and forest to chase small woodland creatures--squirrels or bunnies or, once, a domestic chicken that had escaped from its coop. Sometimes she brings back souvenirs of the chase, but she's learned that I'm not really interested in examining the carcasses very closely so she generally skulks off and hides them in some inappropriate place (including, as I discovered to my chagrin over the weekend, in my front flower garden).
Yesterday, though, she went bounding across a field to track down her elusive prey and brought back for my inspection a different type of souvenir: a loaf of bread. Well, most of a loaf. A chunk had been torn off the end, perhaps by Hopeful or perhaps by whoever tossed the loaf down there. We weren't near any houses but we were close to an area where passersby, mistaking the countryside for a landfill, sometimes toss stuff over the hillside, including, most recently, a sofa.
Hopeful didn't retrieve the sofa. I wish someone would. In the fall those woods are full of hunters braving miserable conditions to track down deer and wild turkeys, but they show little interest in tracking the elusive sofa. No challenge in it, I suppose.
Neither is there any real challenge in hunting down a loaf of bread, but Hopeful was so proud of her treasure that she immediately dashed off to enjoy it in some secret place known only to dogkind. She swam across the creek still clutching the loaf in her mouth, a passage that did not appreciably harm the bread. Must have been fairly bricklike.
A dog that can track down and retrieve groceries is a useful companion. Next time I run low on milk or cheese or other household staples, I'm sending Hopeful out with a grocery list.
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