Surprise!!

It was early, early spring in 2009. So early that technically, it was still winter. Clayton was working nights, so it fell to me to load hay each day to feed the cows. Feeding on your own is no picnic; there's no one to get out and open/close gates for you; plus, you have to park the truck, get out, throw off a bale or two, get back in the truck, drive a few yards, and repeat. Over and over. And when you first get there, the cows are excited to eat, and when you get out of the truck to throw the hay, the cows are right up in your face. A more timid girl would be intimidated by this, but not me. Oh no, I show those cows who's boss. I'm not scared one bit. Unless they look at me cross-eyed. And I definitely don't go behind them too closely where they could kick me. But I'm not scared. No, sirree. Anyway, it’s a lot of work to feed on your own, but it made me feel like I was contributing. When there was no one else around who could conveniently feed each day, and the need came up, I stepped up and took the challenge. Because that’s what you do in a family. And I got to experience lots of cool things, like tagging new calves ALL BY MYSELF. Talk about an adrenaline rush. But that’s a story for another day.

So anyhow, on this particular day, I’m loading hay onto the truck. Our haystack at that time was in a field in Erda on the west side of the highway. I take the dogs with me for company and for them to get some exercise, and because they enjoy coming. They particularly enjoy rummaging through the haystack in search of mice. My dogs can pounce on mice as good as any cat can pounce. When Cooper catches one, he’ll play with it, throw it up in the air, let it run away a little, pounce on it again, and will play with it until it dies. Or until it is broken and can’t run away anymore. Then he’s done with it, and moves on to find the next mouse. Baxter, on the other hand, will usually pounce, carry his prey off a few steps, and then crunch it’s little bones and chew it down. Sometimes he just crunches the bones and doesn’t eat it. But he does enjoy eating a good mouse here and there. As we get closer to the bottom of the haystack, the anticipation of finding mice gets stronger, because the mice generally hide toward the bottom. The dogs stand to my side and wait for me to lift a bale, and then they search eagerly for any mice.

On this particular day, we had used up almost all of the hay in the stack. A few months previous, we had found a dead skunk near the haystack, and consequently, some of the hay where this skunk had lived smelled fairly strongly of skunk-stink. As we got closer and closer to the bottom of the stack, the smell was stronger and stronger. But I paid it no mind and just focused on doing my job, stinky hay and all. Cooper was sniffing furiously at a certain hay bale, and I just knew that he had cornered a mouse underneath it. As I got ready to lift that hay bale, I got Cooper even more excited. “Ready, Cooper? Where’s the mouse? Where’s the mouse? Get it!” I lifted up the hay bale, and Cooper pounced. Right on top of a live skunk.

I immediately backed up, dropped the hay bale, and ran away several yards. Heck, I didn’t want to get sprayed! I yelled at Cooper to get away from the skunk, but it was too late. He had been skunked. Literally. The poor dog ran away and began retching. The smell was overpowering. If you’ve never been up close to a live skunk before, count yourself lucky. It was 10 times worse than smelling a skunk that has been run over by a car. Maybe 20 times worse. It was a horrible, horrible smell. And poor Cooper had gotten it right in his face. He threw up repeatedly, and his eyes were watering. Baxter saw the skunk waddling off and starting going after it, but luckily, I got him to stop before he got too close to the darn thing. Or maybe he smelled it as he got closer and got wise.

Sigh. I called up our vet’s office and told them that we were coming in. They have a spray called “Skunk-off” that is supposed to help with the smell. We drove up to Tooele to the vet’s, Cooper riding in the back of the truck, but even so, the whole truck stinks. Baxter stinks. I stink. I feel really cool and good looking as I wait in line at the vet’s, with my feeding gear on, which means dirty coveralls, muddy boots, and knitted hat, all covered with hay. People are looking at me funny, probably ‘cause I look goofy and smell gross. When it’s my turn, the vet comes out to the parking lot and takes a quick look at Cooper to make sure he’s ok. He tells me that they could tell when I arrived at their office, because the smell came with us. Gee, thanks. I get the “Skunk-off” and we douse Cooper with it liberally. It helps some. Then I cowboyed up, and drove back to Erda to finish loading hay and eventually got the cows fed. We all smelled pretty bad for a few days. Sometimes life really stinks. But you end up with good stories to tell.

Cooper has problems

Our dog Cooper has had the most random injuries. Our vet probably thinks that we don't take very good care of him. We do, but he just seems to get into trouble more often than not. For example:

Number one problem is his nose. About 2 or 3 years ago, we noticed that Cooper’s nose sounded like he was a little congested or stuffy. No big deal, we thought it would go away, but it didn’t. Took him to the vet, tried a number of different antibiotics, anti-histamines, various anti-inflammatories, etc, and nothing worked. In the meantime, his nose was getting worse and worse. Each time that he exhaled, along with the air would come out a bunch of bubbles. Not mucous-gross-snotty-nose bubbles, just like water bubbles. Weird, I know. Basically, his nasal passages were so swollen and inflamed that he was having a hard time breathing through his nose, and there was a lot of condensation built up inside that would come out when he exhaled. The veterinarian actually performed surgery, twice, to cut out some of the inflamed nasal tissue in hopes that it would widen the passages enough for him to breathe better. It didn’t work. Perhaps the weirdest part about this nose problem is that it kinda comes and goes. It’ll be tolerable and not very noticeable for several months, and then all of a sudden, Cooper will be snoring at night and it’ll sounds like there’s a bear in the house. He saws some serious logs with his snoring, to the point where we moved his dog bed out of our bedroom and down the hall so that we could get some sleep at night. If it does get really bad, then we can give him a Prednisone pill (anti-inflammatory steroid) and that will help clear it up back to tolerable. However, there was the “Christmas miracle” where during one Christmas holiday, his nose was 100 percent completely cleared up with no breathing problems whatsoever. We thought it was healed forever and always, but it only lasted for about two weeks and then went back to normal (tolerable). So strange. Anyway, the vet has no idea what is causing it and to this day, he still is snuffly and sniffly.

Number two problem probably comes by virtue of Cooper’s part-time occupation as a cowdog. Being a cowdog is not for the faint of heart, and for a 50-pound dog to go after a 900-pound angry mama cow, it takes a lot of guts (I was going to say that it takes a lot of balls, but Cooper’s neutered, so I figured that wasn’t a fair expression to use). And sometimes your cowdog gets hurt. Cooper has been kicked by cows COUNTLESS times. I hate it, it makes me cringe and my heart breaks a little bit each time it happens. As a result of being kicked, Cooper has had two front teeth knocked out. One of the teeth we never even noticed; it was just gone one day when I randomly looked at his teeth. The other tooth was broken and we had to have the rest of it removed. Other cow-related injuries mostly have to do with barbed wire, or so we think. Cooper will be off chasing cows, or we’ll be wandering through the canyon checking on cows, and he’ll come back with some gaping wound that we usually just attribute to getting caught in barbed wire, because we have no idea what else would have caused his wounds. So far he’s had stitches in his back leg-thigh area, his chest-belly area, and his front leg. Oh, and one of his toenails on his back foot was randomly missing one day. Like the entire toenail was completely gone. It eventually grew back, but it’s all misshapen and weird looking.

One time I was out with Cooper and Baxter checking on the cows, and Cooper got kicked, and I thought he was going to die. He came over to me after the cow kicked him right in the kisser, and he had a mouth full of blood, which was nothing new. I checked to make sure that all of his teeth were intact, which they were. Then his legs started shaking. He wobbled a few steps away and vomited up blood. Now he was shaking to the point where he couldn’t stand up. I sat down on the ground and held him, sure that he was on his deathbed or having a seizure or something horrible. I didn’t know what to do, being out in the middle of nowhere and a good half-mile or so away from the truck. So I just sat and held him and tried to comfort him. In the meantime, the cows are starting to get curious as to what we are doing sitting in the middle of the field and start wandering over towards us. Baxter, for once in his life, does not chase the cows and get them more riled up. Instead, while I’m holding Cooper on the ground, Bax crouches down in front of us and gives the cows the evil eye, daring them to come closer. They don’t. I find it so touching that Baxter instinctively knows that right now, I need him to keep the cows away, and he does it effectively. After several agonizing minutes, Cooper’s shaking stops. I wish that I was strong enough to carry him all the way back to the truck, but I’m not, so we take it slow and he wobbles his way back. If I wasn’t so worried about him having brain damage, I would have found it so funny to watch him stumbling around like a drunken sailor. We made it to the water trough, and Cooper took a long, revitalizing drink, and then was well enough to hop into the cab of the truck. We made it home and by the next morning, Cooper was fine. No signs of permanent brain damage that I know of. Thank goodness.

Cooper

Cooper is our Australian Shepherd; he was our first dog. Growing up, my older sister had a dog or two that I would dote upon, but my parents were anti-dog, and so I never had one of my own. This is Cooper's story.

Clayton, Joseph, and I were bored one Saturday, and decided to head over to Cal Ranch, where the local animal shelter was holding a pet adoption. We needed something to do, so why not go check out the animals? There were a bunch of cats in cages (I hate cats), a few kittens (kittens are cute, but they grow up to be cats), and several fenced-off areas with a variety of dogs. There were your typical shelter dogs: Labs, terriers, mutts. And then we saw a man & a woman petting a dog and talking to the shelter worker. The dog caught my eye, and I snuck in closer to hear what they were talking about. I heard the man saying that although this was a very good-looking dog, they really wanted a female dog, not a male, and then they got up and left. Now I felt bad for the poor little dog, denied a home because he was a boy and not a girl. He can't help that he's a boy, and boy dogs need good homes just as much as girl dogs do! So I went over to him and began petting him.

He had long, soft fur in a patchwork of colors that I would later find out was called "Blue Merle", but to me, it was just a mixture of white, black and gray all over. He was just slightly longer than he was tall, and had a short stubby tail. But his most captivating features were his eyes and his nose. I know, whose most captivating feature is their nose, right?? But this dog's nose was completely adorable: as pink as a new school eraser, with three or four black polka-dots thrown on. As for his eyes, one was brown with a blue spot, and the other was blue with a patch of brown at the top.

Clayton and Joseph began talking about Australian Shepherds; their grandpa Sagers had had one not too long ago, and this dog looked very similar. They discussed what good cowdogs Aussies were, and then an idea started forming in my mind. I took the dog on a walk around the store to test out his manners. The shelter workers noticed my interest and told me the only details that they knew about him; that he was a stray, probably about six months old, and he was smart. Then, they threw a low-blow: any of the dogs not adopted today would be put to sleep. Now, I'm sure this is a just a method that shelter workers sometimes use to pull at the heart-strings of potential adoptive parents, and whether or not it was true, I do not know. But it worked on me. I couldn't let this sweet, adorable dog be put to sleep!

I pulled Clayton and Joseph together for a quick huddle to convince them that we needed to adopt this dog. Here's the only problem: Clayton and I had just graduated college and didn't have a home of our own yet. We had moved in temporarily with Clayton's dad and stepmom, until Clayton found a job and we could get our own place. Before we could adopt the dog, we had to get permission. I called Joel and began sweet-talking; he was a bit reluctant at first, but I won him over. We bought a collar, a leash, and a food dish, and then we bought the dog. We named him Cooper.