Goddess

The goddess has been here about six months now, but we met her several years ago at Jim and Phoebe Caldwell’s – she stood above our bed there, when we visited, for two week. By then I was in love with her. She is imposing, a vaguely disapproving look on her face – and two …

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Old Days

The piece on the girlss playing somehow reminded me of an older incarnation.This would be the late Lashyn and a much younger Ataika, in the spring woods with us the day we discovered the remains of a very large old bear who evidently starved before he could den up . I still have his huge …

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Freud’s Hounds & People

A peceptive Jenny French noticed that Stefan’s pic of me and the girls ersembled Clement Freud’s late dog and person pics.She was right:

Healthy Dogs

Both Reid and Matt reviewed Ted Kerasote’s first dog book, Merle’s Door, here. His newest book, Pukka’s Promise:the Quest for longer- Lived Dogs, nearly got by me as I worked on my own dog book, and that would be a shame. Less a narrative than his previous book, it uses his present dog Pukka to …

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Curs On Coyotes

We parked the truck under the crest of the ridge and the two yellow female curs jumped from the cab to the ground, sniffing around unconcernedly for ground squirrels. Jeff quietly called the dogs back to the truck so he could snap electronic collars onto their necks. The girls remained quiet and seemed calm, but …

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Guest Quotes– Teddy Moritz

Teddy writes: “Just finished a book by Christine Byl titled ‘Dirt Work, An Education in the Woods’. This woman worked summers on trail maintenance in Glacier National Park, and in several parks in Alaska. She talks about the grunt work, the digging and clearing and loading and discomfort of physical work. She loved it all. …

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South African AfriCanis

We met these AfriCanis dogs in one community in South Africa. Their owners are devoted to the preservation of AfriCanis, and these dogs demonstrate the beauty and agility of the animals found throughout the rural countryside. Blood samples from desert bred Saluqis in the Middle East and the native African dogs in KwaZulu-Natal of South …

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Big dogs of Lesotho

It’s taken me forever to sort photos from our Lesotho/South Africa trip, but now I’m going to flood the blog with images of dogs we met along the way. These are the bigger dogs or livestock guardian type dogs that we met in Lesotho. The primary predators in Lesotho are jackals, but these dogs have …

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