Brandy's Adventures

Shortly after returning to Summer Sage from the coyote experience, Brandy was walking strangely with her body lowered. I thought that she was perhaps on the trail of a coyote. However, after brievly watching her, I saw a sand burr on her left, rear paw pad. I raised her leg, pulled out the burr and felt the the pad. I found a piece of the burr which had broken off in her pad. She let me work with her without complaint. The piece of burr was so short that I couldn’t get it out with my fingernails, so I picked her up and carried her home. As I came in the door, I called for Shirley to get the tweezers. I gently put Brandy on her side, took off my glasses (I have microscopic vision without my glasses), and pulled out the piece of burr. Brandy got up and was just fine.

As she was shortchanged on the previous hike, we took off again on a different hike, along the San Diego aqueduct.

We took our daily morning hike,  this time to the open space by the creek and remanants of old stone houses that are about a block away from our home. The access is a small creek that flows from under Summer Sage and that has trails on each side. The southerly trail is fairly wide and open while the northerly trail is very narrow and squeezed between the relatively dense foliage between the trail and the creek on one side and five-foot wood and chain-link fences on the other side.

We chose the narrow trail this morning and had just started down the trail when Brandy, on a 26′ leash, darted into the brush and I lost track of her. She was growling and tugging on the leash. Suddenly, she reappeared from the brush and ran down the trail. I decided to humor her and ran after her as she helped by pulling me along. We came to a clearing, she slowed and then I saw the lone large coyote, about 50 yards away, moving slowly away from us. We stopped briefly and the coyote stopped. We advanced toward the coyote and it moved away from us, keeping its distance.

We decided that there might be other coyotes nearby and Brandy weights about 27 delicious pounds, so we crossed the creek to take the southerly trail back to Summer Sage. The coyote was stopped, looking at us as we lost sight of it as we walked past the brush and trees between us and the coyote. When we got on the other side of the brush, there was either another coyote or the one we saw was paralleling us as we hiked. We found the southerly trail and took it, uneventfully, back to Summer Sage.

We frequently hike that “open space” because it is interesting with several very small creeks lined with trees and brush, open areas, pools, a dam, many gopher holes and the remnants of the old stone houses. Recently, we’ve heard the coyotes making a kill almost every evening. The coyotes seemed to have disappeared after the Cedar fire, although the Cedar fire, unlike the Witch Creek fire, didn’t come very close to us. We’re glad to have them back, but do want to be careful.

While walking (without a dog) on Summer Sage one morning several years back, I met two single coyotes and one group of three coyotes all of which were in the street. All five kept their distance of maybe 50 to 100 feet and just moved out of my way into side yards as I walked. I was a little nervous about the three together, and was looking for a tree to climb or a fence to jump. Fortunately, I needed neither.

Actually, it was our first vacation away from Brandy and Brandy stayed (and played!) with Woody, our son’s Labradoodle. We understand that they did well together for the week. We missed our Brandy and, since we had some of our pictures with us and to relieve our “separation anxiety”, made some Brandy wallpaper for our computer. (Picture is of Brandy and her Poway Dog Park friend, Dallas.) We were hoping that Brandy didn’t forget us and she didn’t! She was so happy welcoming us on our return. We’ve now had two walks and are disappointed to have found out that Poway Dog Park is closed for maintenance. Perhaps, RB Dog Park is in the cards for this evening.