One of my favorite parts of owning pets is observing their behavior.
Since I was a young child, I’ve been fascinated by the way my dogs play, fight, hunt, and even dream in their sleep. The pets in our lives and in our homes - whether they be hounds or cats, horses or rats - are a bridge between our domestic, “civilized” world and the realm of all wild things.
Lately, even though I’ve owned my Alaskan Husky, Borage, for six years, it’s almost like I have an entirely new dog in my life. This is Borage’s first winter as a retired sled dog. Now, he’s part of my daily routine - sleeping, exercising, eating, traveling with me pretty much full time.
Since leaving the sport of mushing, Borage has taken advantage of the freedom and spare time to hone new skills. These are talents no human could teach him; they are based purely on instinct. One of the amazing things that stands out to me is his ability to hunt and consistently obtain rodents in the exact same manner that foxes, coyotes, and even wolves do - a fascinating and hilarious behavior to witness.
Borage, my terrier Jigs, and I walk or run several miles every day. We live in a deep, wooded gulch where the winter sun’s rays rarely reach the ground. Even if it warms up “outside,” a layer of snow still remains on the floor of the refrigerator ravine; the ideal conditions for rodent-hunting if you’re a wild coyote or a inquisitive husky.
Borage’s favorite hunting ground is a small open hillside where a blanket of foot-deep snow is topped with a slick layer of ice. When we begin our daily walk, he makes a beeline to the sparkling frozen field and stops right at its edge. He carefully places one paw on the ice, testing the surface to make sure it will hold his weight, and then slowly tiptoes out towards the center of the frosty clearing. Once he’s in the middle of the meadow, he stops and looks down at the ice below his feet. He stares at what appears to be nothing but blank, glittering white, cocking his head back and forth, back and forth, with intense interest.
Borage listens, waits, and studies the sounds of tiny critters scurrying below the snow in their own sheltered microcosms; he continues to tilt his head to one side and then the other, over and over again, trying to pinpoint the exact source of tones only audible to animals with a keen sense of hearing.
When the time is right, Borage makes his move. He springs up into the air - sometimes three, four, even five feet high. With amazing accuracy, he lands with his front legs braced in front of him, pouncing and pinning his tiny prey with his paws and scooping the critter up into his mouth - all in one graceful motion.
Usually, before I can get close enough to define what type of creature Borage has captured, he’s already swallowed it and trotted off to another hunting area.
I watch Borage work the fields, pegging one burrowing rodent after the next, and am amazed by his success rate.
But one element tends to come between Borage and his preferred daily diet of mice and moles - my other dog, Jigs. The second Jigs sees Borage cocking his head back and forth at the ground, the impatient terrier comes barreling in for the kill, breaking through the crusty snow, sending every rodent within a mile scampering off to new cover. Borage gives Jigs a disgusted look and then runs off, trying to lose the busybody terrier so he can get back to work finding food.
It’s almost like Borage picked up a copy of Jack London’s, “Call of the Wild,” and studied it from cover to cover. In the classic novel, the main character, “Buck,” a Saint Bernard-mix, discovers his primordial instincts as he works as a sled dog in the rugged North.
Borage continually proves he could survive without me, snatching warm and furry varmints from the snow with ease - keeping his own belly full. But the hours and hours he spends snoozing on my couch, demonstrates he has no interest in totally returning to the wild like Buck chose to do.
Like most pets, Borage enjoys the best of both worlds.
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