Ferocious Furball

 

The ferocious furball

I know a lot of very tough guys with very big scary dogs. All teeth and muscle and tattoos, large trucks and spiked collars. I also know that if you give a tough guy a few moments alone with their big intimidating dog, they turn into overly sentimental, snuggle fests. I know because that is my life, well, minus the spiked collars and tattoos.  

As a manly man, I enjoy four wheeling in my scratched and dented Tacoma, eating large quantities of meat and anything to do with power tools. I have a blonde husky who has personally killed fifty two chickens, five cats, two raccoons, three porcupines and (accidentally) one yappy dog. He has survived being kicked by a moose, clawed in the neck by a bear and being thrown from the back of a moving pickup three times. He is an alpha dog with a stubborn streak a mile long and he has the scars to prove it. Though his scars are hidden by his thick fur, this is a dog who has been in more scraps than most in his fourteen years. 

He is also the biggest snuggle bug I have ever met. He has spent most of his fourteen winters outside, so he wears the thickest fluffy fur coat, blonde in the summer, golden in the winter. Layers upon layers of poof and fuzz perfect for burying your face in. Lounging on the couch in the evening, he will clamber up beside me and burrow into the crook of my arm, the little spoon with his eyes closed, content to get belly scratches until the end of time. 

It has always baffled me how a creature that can be so ferocious when running down and subduing a fisher cat can be so gentle and docile beside a human. In fourteen years, despite the long list of criminal indictments, he has never bitten or intentionally harmed a human. He will take down a deer one day and allow a three year old child to tug on his tail and follow him around and nag him incessantly the next. 

I am not much different. Emotionally detached in public, I hide my own share of scars. Hair unkempt, face unshaven, dirty clothes torn up from battles of my own with various foes, be they construction work or pick up sports games. Eating ravenously and claiming shared space as my own. Comfortably asserting control over pieces of territory with slightly more human methods of marking. Cautiously navigating the pecking order of the human tribe that is my community. 

And yet, after a day of digging in the dirt, doing manly man things, with flecks of concrete and spray foam still on my face, I collapse onto the dog bed with the fluffball and bury my face in the fur, scratching between his ears as I mumble sweet nothings about the fluffiest creature in the whole wide world. Gazing deep into his baleful mismatched colored eyes, seeing my own reflection and remembering our decade and a half of memories. This is a dog that has traveled with me to forty four US states and seven Canadian provinces. We once had to go on the lam for a month after he killed all the neighbor’s chickens and was at risk of being euthanized. He stepped in front of me to intercept a feral German Shepherd in Portland and took it down. He disappeared from the side of a high mountain pass and arrived at camp nine miles away ten hours later as if nothing ever happened. I once spent seven hours picking out three hundred and fifty two foxtails that had embedded completely into his skin with tweezers. He didn’t flinch. I cried plenty because I had just googled “foxtails in dogs,” which I highly recommend you do not do because it is terrible. And that’s just the stories I can remember this morning. 

I am not sure how or why wolves were domesticated by humans, but I am thankful that man has his best friend. I doubt most tough guys would ever write an ode to their big tough scary dog like this, but I bet you they have all thought about it.