October 1, 2008

• Yellow-jacket lessons

  On Sunday, Hagrid, our young Great Dane, was having his favorite kind of outing — at least it started out that way.
  After
  early church, we loaded him into the back of our little Prius and
  headed south, down to the Buffalo National River Park for a picnic and
  hike on a gorgeous early-fall day.
  We parked at the trail-head for
  Hideout Hollow and unfolded our chairs. Doyle and I soaked in the
  beauty of the quiet woods surrounding us as we ate a leisurely lunch,
  while Hags ran around, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing.
  You know, a Great Dane is really nothing but a big ol' hound dog, and he LOVES to sniff.
   I
  have a mental image of what it must be like for a dog, with his amazing
  sense of smell, to come from life in a closed human space, like our
  house, into the wild woods, full of all kinds of rich scents.
  Remember
  the old "Wizard of Oz" movie? It started out in black-and-white, with
  very stark cinematography. Then after the tornado had blown the
  farmhouse away from Kansas, and Dorothy opened the front door and took
  her first steps into the Land of Oz, everything changed suddenly from
  black-and-white to full, blazing Technicolor.
  That's how I imagine
  it is for Hagrid to go from being inside the walls of our house to
  being out in the woods full of all kinds of fresh, brilliant smells — 
  like going from black-and-white to Technicolor.
  

  

  So he was in Dog
  Heaven, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing all those delicious scents. How
  wonderful it all must have seemed to him — A Candyland of delectable
  aromas. I bet he smelled a  raccoon. A squirrel. A deer. A rabbit. A
  fox. Maybe even the wildest, strongest smell of all — a bear.
  As
  Doyle and I hiked the trail to the waterfall, our dog ran ahead of us,
  grinning his goofy grin, pink tongue lolling, sniffing, exploring,
  drinking out of the creek, reveling in his chance to frolic in his wild
  playground, free of leashes, free of walls and fences, surrounded by a
  garden of doggy delights.
  

  

  
  The trail through the hickory and oak
  forest eventually opened up and we found ourselves on top of a high,
  rocky bluff, with an expansive view of a deep wooded valley and the
  more distant  hills.
  Doyle and I shot pictures, keeping a close eye
  on our dog to make sure he didn't get too close to the drop-off. Hagrid
  seemed to instinctively know the edge of the bluff represented danger,
  and stayed well clear. Suddenly, he started yelping and frantically
  running around in circles on the rocky top of the bluff.
  Doyle
  hollered to me in a firm voice, "Celia, you go up there!" pointing to a
  clearing in the woods, off the trail and away from the edge of the
  bluff. "Stay back!"
  My husband was bending over our yelping dog, and
  I could finally get a good enough look through the trees, from my
  distant spot, to see that the back half of Hagrid's big black body was
  completely covered in a blanket of angrily buzzing yellow-jackets.
  

  

  The
  dog's instinct was to run, and Doyle told me later his fear was that
  our buddy would — in his panic — run over the edge of the high bluff.
  When
  I saw the insects all over Hagrid, my fear was that he might have some
  kind of allergic reaction to all of the stings, or even just die from
  the sheer number of stings I was afraid he was getting. It looked like
  there were hundreds of wasps on him.
  Hagrid's master went quickly to
  the rescue. Doyle tried a stick, but ending up using his hands to
  scrape the yellow-jackets off our poor dog.
  Man and dog moved on out
  of my sight, Hagrid trying to run away from the burning stingers, Doyle
  trying to get as many of the bees off as he could, and trying to calm
  the frantic dog.
  Left behind in the woods, I finally hollered to
  Doyle to find out what was going on. He said the yellow-jackets were
  gone, and it was safe for me to join them on up the trail, past the
  bluff.
  Hagrid was calmer, and no more bees were in sight. My husband
  trying to gently pull the stingers the wasps had left behind in the
  swollen bites all over poor Hags' hindquarters. We later discovered
  Hagrid had about 25 stings, and Doyle had gotten five or six himself in
  his rescue efforts. As I write three days later, both of them are fine.
  You
  know me. I've been mulling this incident over, and it seems to me I can
  draw a lesson for my life from Nature’s school. Maybe you can, too ...
  In
  his delight in exploring the big world, our dog stuck his nose in where
  it didn't belong. He wandered off the trail, and was soon covered up
  with stinging insects. His master had to step in among the buzzing,
  burning stingers to help his terrified pet.
  Same for us. We run
  ahead, get off the trail, and stick our noses in places they don't
  belong, and sometimes we release a nest of mad yellow-jackets. Finding
  ourselves covered in red-hot stingers, scared and hurting, we cry for
  help.
  And our kind Master — who loves us even more than we love our
  pets — rushes to our side and brushes the wasps off and picks out the
  stingers and rubs soothing ointment on our angry red welts and calms us
  down with His voice.
  And after that — like our dog has been doing
  since his scary run-in with the yellow-jackets —  we walk a little
  closer to our Master’s side.
  ----
  By Celia DeWoody
  Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
  Published Oct. 1, 2008
  
  
  

  • 9:13 pm
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