kellan_the_tabby | dogs: lab meets water (Reply)

[ Remy, a big black dog with a white chest, is flopped in his crate, which is in the van. He’s wearing a blue halter and looking very alert. ]

Or not, because despite being approximately a quarter lab, Remy DOES NOT LIKE water.

But we were at Fountain Creek, & I wanted to look for creek glass, & Remy was bored, & it was too snowy & muddy for Loiosh (who was BIG MAD but wound up napping about it), so I stuck a leash on Remy & off we went.

They’ve done a lot of work on Fountain Creek in the last several years to help deal with flooding, & maybe half of that is still there (the rest got flooded away), so my usual haunts had gotten VERY rearranged. Add to that the part where, while I don’t mind walking in snow, it’s hard to find creek glass that way, there was really only one place I could get to, & even that spot was tricky.

Remy got his paws wet & also learned that the ground is not always the ground, by which I mean that sometimes trying to stand on snow can be tricky. Plus, you know, running water, & he was definitely at least unnerved. But he was also having a good time, so onward we went.

& finally got to a nice gravel bank, maybe fifty feet wide and a couple hundred feet long, just barely above water level, the perfect spot to find creek glass.

& the first piece I found? Rare blue, an EXCELLENT omen.

I showed it to Remy, so he knew what we were looking for. He tried to eat it.

He also found trash & tried to eat that, but I’m quick. (No I’m not, I took pictures & then hauled him away, I’m just glad he wanted to sniff it good first.)

[ Remy’s standing on a gravel-scattered mud bank, sniffing carefully at what might have once been an orange juice carton. That’s a guess. ]

Some of the time he was VERY EXCITE, smelling everything, pricking ears at birds and cars and the wind and the water, & generally having a LOVELY time.

[ Remy’s staring off into the distance. The distance consists of a broad, shallow creek, more mudflats, and, on the horizon, trees. ]

But several times he got kinda freaked out, & needed reassurance. He is easily reassured by shoving himself up against a human & getting squished. So I squished him. He made it easy.

[ Remy butt, seen from above. The blur across the bottom of the pic is my belly, because he shoved himself between my legs so I could squish him. ]

He made it easy enough that I could squish him AND take pictures, which is the best way for this kind of thing to go.

No pics of the way back to the van, because I was exhausted & it was through, like, a foot of snow. But Remy learned how much fun it is dancing through a foot of VERY fluffy snow! & then he was very tired & we all had a nap.

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