Left Coast Cowboys

California has been pounded by rainstorms this week, complete with thunder, lightning and lots of power outages. Add one nervous, neurotic terrier and it’s a recipe for disaster. Or at least a week of no sleep. Lucy would be that terrier. And from the first loud clap of thunder on Tuesday, she became the shivering, hyperventilating poster pet for animal medication.

The problem is that her fears didn’t manifest as fear of thunder, lightning or even loud noises and flashes of light. They translated into fear of anything that sounds like water — including showers and running faucets — and anything that flashes — including a light switch going on or the flicker of the television set. Her immediate response is to dive under the bed and start hyperventilating as she frantically tries to dig a hole in the floor boards. This has been pretty much around the clock behavior, although night time is the worst time. It’s safe to say that nobody has had much sleep around here for a week. Not to mention that there hasn’t been much showering going on. I have two choices for a shower. I can lock her out of the bathroom and endure her howls and cries. Or I can bring her into the bathroom and watch her completely lose it as the water hits the tile. Both options give me about a 90 second window. Needless to say, there is no hair washing.

Lucy's feeling much safer under the covers.

Now you would expect that this would be the moment for the heartwarming solution. Where little Oscar, her terrier brother, snuggles up and calms her, resolving the whole situation. But that would be the wrong movie.

Oscar, for all his pretend ferocity, is usually completely under the paw of Big Sister Lucy. He gobbles down his food because, if she finishes before him, she’ll rush over and grab the remainder in his bowl. He is relegated to one special corner of the bed. If he steps into another area, Lucy chases him right back. It goes without saying, that she owns all the toys. But there is now one terrier who is completely unafraid of storms. And he’s been leisurely eating his dinner and hers, stretching out and claiming all parts of the bed. And he now has all the toys. So much for terrier love.

Oscar is now the boy with the most toys. All the toys, in fact.

Luckily California has about one month of winter and about a week or two of it is usually extreme. That means we are getting to the end of this storm season. I can’t imagine how the balance of power is going to shift once Lucy can emerge from her phobias. It’s probably not going to be pretty.

Note: Any post that references a Doors song seems to require a hippy trippy photo illustration. I’m playing around with FX Photo Studio, an iPhone application that lets me manipulate photos in hundreds of ways. This is my “Flashback to the Sixties” style.

And speaking of The Doors, this parody by Weird Al Yankovic gave me a much needed chuckle through all the madness. Ladies and Germs, I give you “Craigslist”:

Terriers have so many uses. My macro lens is having trouble focussing. So I grabbed two of my favorite short focus subjects for experimentation. Terriers have such long noses that, if they will cooperate, you can focus on the end of their noses and at F-stop 1.8, your focus is blurry by the middle of the nose.

But, unfortunately, photos of the dogs are a sensitive subject. It just points out that, despite both dogs being descended from long lines of dog show champions, only Lucy has the correct conformation. Little Oscar? He’s all over the map. His most noticeable flaw are his ears. He’s actually not supposed to look like very small, yappy German Shepherd.

No his ears are supposed to be perfect little foldy triangles like Lucy's in this glamour shot.

I don’t even want to tell you all the regimens the breeder ordered us to go through to make his ears behave. One of them involved gluing a headband contraption to his head and folding and gluing his ears over it. Since there wasn’t much chance either Oscar or Lucy were going to be show dogs, that plan was abandoned pretty quickly. Good thing, too, it turns out there is a genetic code for sticky-up ears. And we all know how much luck you have fighting genetics.

Oscar says, "I reject Society's narrow definition of beauty."

"Wanna make something of it?" (It's not for nothing he was named after Oscar de la Hoya.)

And that short focus nose trick?

Oscar's still the perfect model for that!

When we first bought this land, we had nothing but a tent cabin to sleep in. Every night we used to hear the coyotes howling. However, we only saw one once. He was large as a German Shepherd, glossy and completely unconcerned as the dogs jumped up and down on the tent cabin bed barking at him. He threw them a disdainful glance and loped past us down the path. We haven’t seen or heard one since. Until, John the Baptist and Louis told me recently that they’d seen two large adult coyotes and two, maybe three, younger ones playing in the brush around the barn. We laughed and dubbed them Wiley, Wilma and the Kids.

Now the large male seems to have staked out the barn and pasture as his territory. I’ve seen him twice in this past week. Which given the nature of coyotes, probably means he’s been lurking around here all the time. Both times he’s been strolling along the dirt road from our back gate up to the vineyards. I’ve had more time to observe him than you usually get with coyote. He’s not the scrawny coyotes that I used to see raiding garbage cans in LA. Or the skittery little coyotes you sometimes see in the southern deserts of California. And, believe me, this is no buffoonish Wile E. Coyote. From his glossy pelt, bushy tail and loose-limbed lope to his arrogant glances, it’s clear, this is Coyote, with a capital C, the Trickster God of Native American legend.

One depiction of Coyote as a Man-Animal-God. Source: Wikipedia.

Coyote features in a lot of Native American myths, sometimes as a man-coyote God and sometimes even as the Creator. The local tribes that would have lived around Sonoma, the Pomo and the Miwok, especially revered Coyote and had numerous legends about him as Creator. In Miwok tradition, Coyote Man comes into the West with his son, Red-Tailed Hawk, and makes the the Pomo people from mud and the Miwok people out of sticks. In other legends, Coyote and Silver Fox sing the world into being. Pomo mythology has Coyote and Lizard creating the tribe on the shores of Upper Lake (just up the Silverado Trail in Lake County) from  sticks. Another local tribe, the Ohlone, have Coyote fathering the tribe after Eagle carries him to Mount Diablo (the tallest mountain in the Bay Area). Probably most of us are familiar with the Coyote myth from the Navaho detective books of Tony Hillerman that mix tribal lore with modern day police work on the Navajo reservation. There Coyote plays his more traditional role as Trickster, who sometimes helps man by fooling monsters that would hurt the tribe and at other times shows up man’s own foolishness with his pranks.

Here's the road to the vineyards that Coyote has claimed as his own, now looking appropriately mythological.

The bottom line: Native Americans knew their coyotes. Coyotes weren’t the biggest predators on the block (especially back in the day when there were wolves, Grizzlies and a lot more Mountain Lions.) But you could easily argue that they were the smartest. One of the blogs in my blogroll is The Daily Coyote, the diary of a woman who has been raising Charlie, an orphaned coyote pup. She reports that Charlie, now a teenager, can open kitchen cabinets, walk as silently as a cat, and figure out any gate she puts in. Add to this native intelligence, the arrogance that our coyote seems to have. Other than our resident Mountain Lion (who only seems to make cameo appearances since he has a huge State Park to roam around in), coyotes would be the biggest predators around here.

And our coyote’s done what even Pitbulls in San Francisco have not been able to do: he’s intimidated Oscar, who like his namesake Oscar de la Hoya, is usually unaware that he is not the biggest dog on the block. This morning, as Coyote loped by, Oscar jumped up on the dining table (because standing on a table makes you look REALLY BIG) and barked furiously. But he certainly wasn’t going to run after Coyote, who never broke stride, even as he gave Oscar a contemptuous glance over his shoulder.

Here's a dramatic recreation of Oscar barking at Coyote through the window from the table.

Lucy, on the other hand, is petrified.

She's spending her indoor time hiding behind the bathtub.

And outdoors, she's still always seeking protective cover.

As for little Oscar, he’s been busy marking all the territory around the barn with his own special brand of Oscar essence. He’s not ready to take Coyote on. In fact, I think there is a bit of hero worship happening. After all, here’s a pointy faced, prick eared canine who is obviously in charge.

So here's Oscar, in a Native American patterned chair, practicing his best Coyote look.

This post was supposed to be about more winemaking technique. Or maybe about my latest adventures in cooking and canning with the produce I’ve grown. Instead young Oscar got stung on the nose by a wasp and precipitated a tour of Sonoma’s veterinary clinics in search of a place that would take him on an emergency basis.

It all started as I chatted with John the Baptist and we plotted our usual strategy to capture Oscar so he didn’t run out the gate in an attempt to follow John home. (John, as loyal readers will know, is a huge favorite with everyone. But no one more than Oscar.) Suddenly Oscar came running in and jumped in my lap. That’s not normal behavior. Usually, when it’s still light, he has to be bribed in with squeeky toys and food. Oscar’s not going to give up a moment of playtime in Sonoma. He knows stepping into the barn means someone is going to lock the doors and maybe take off to town without him.

But now here was Oscar looking like one of those big-eyed Keane paintings. Then we noticed his nose visibly swelling and a puncture mark down by his nostril. We quickly checked him over to see if there was a second puncture, which might have meant a rattlesnake bite. Luckily we didn’t see one, but the swelling seemed to be getting bigger by the minute.

Here's Oscar's expanding nose.

Because the swelling followed the contours of the black stripe along his muzzle, it looked even worse.

Just for reference, Lucy shows what a normal, non-stung muzzle looks like.

Now Oscar's nose was getting alarmingly large. And it was itchy too.

Luckily, Good Dr. Rosner at the Sonoma Veterinary Clinic was able to get Oscar in immediately. After a couple of injections, the extraction of a half inch stinger and an hour’s observation and Oscar was released into my custody.

But it's still not a pretty sight.

It's going to be a long night.

A famous critic (and I can’t remember who) once said that Dickens SHOULD be a bad writer, except that he isn’t. This was based on his incredible coincidences that always seemed to move the plot along just when you thought all was lost. Kindly Mr. Brownlow discovers at the last minute that Oliver Twist is his long-lost nephew. Lady Dedham suddenly figures out that Eleanor is the illegitimate daughter she gave up years ago. All fine and dandy to bring a novel to a dramatic conclusion, but things like this don’t happen in real life.

Or do they? Our terriers are the products of some of the most prominent breeders in Fox Terrier circles. In fact, if you watch the Westminster Dog Show and check out the Fox Terriers, most of them are cousins of our dogs. This is even more amazing because, Fox Terriers not being a popular breed of dog any more, breeders tend to range far afield (even as far as Sweden) to breed their dogs. That means, you may buy your dog from a local breeder, but the sire could be a hemisphere away.

In the case of our first terrier, our Terrier Emeritus, Charlie, his father was Champion High Mountain Bright Idea from Colorado. And the mother was owned by a Monterey breeder. Our next terrier, Lucy, was from a litter had by Charlie’s mother’s sister. When Charlie died tragically young from cancer, we were lucky to get hold of one of Charlie’s nephews, Little Oscar. We’d always assumed that since the mother and grandmother of our dogs was owned by the Monterey breeder, the dogs came from there. But we were aware of Charlie’s mother’s name: Morgansonne DairyDell Kiki. While Lucy’s mother was Morgansonne DairyDell Emme.

Not only are our dogs native Sonomans. They've got ranching in their blood. Doggie Dude Ranching.

Fastforward to yesterday. We’re toodling around on our way to the Sonoma County Fair and meandering through the back roads of the Valley of the Moon. Now besides good wineries, one of the the things we’re always on the lookout for are good dog boarding places. So we passed a sign that said DairyDell Dog Boarding. And, while we probably would have investigated it anyway, I told Andy we really had to check this one out since it had the same name as Charlie and Lucy’s mothers.

Long story short: we take the tour, see a picture of a champion Fox Terrier and find out the owner of the place bred Charlie and Lucy’s mother and Oscar’s grandmother. Cue Dickensian music. Where’s Mr. Brownlow? All is solved by a magical coincidence of relationship.

However, once the initial excitement wore off, we were left wondering how we could take poor Oscar to a place owned by a breeder when we’ve let his ears stick up in a way that would get him barred from 100 yards of a show ring. Not that he’s in anyway going to a show ring (that snip snip thing made him instantly ineligible).  But he’s just proud to find out that he really is a Sonoma dog born and bred. Incidentally, with more ranching heritage than either of us.