Answers to All Your Questions about the Rez Dog

My post about Little Freakster, the wayward rez dog, generated a lot of questions from my devoted readers (also known as Allison and Sarah). So, in the interest of building rapport with my readers and wasting time that could be spent reporting on Maxwell Street Days, I thought I’d get all your burning questions answered in one fell swoop.

But first, here’s a photo outtake of the little snookums:

Little Freaky, my favorite rez-ranging pup.

First, fair Allison’s query:

Q: “They kept your shoelaces? Or did you tell Freaky to keep them to remember you by?”

A: I let Freaky’s family keep the shoelace leash because, without the makeshift tether, the little guy would’ve been loose again. Also, Freaky now sleeps with it under his pillow because it smells like me and he enjoys that.

Now for probing questions from Sarah (who’s hiding her real identity under the handle “Summer Post Forever,” a reference to our carefree, college-newspaper-correspondent days):

Q: “So Freaky had a collar? How did you find his owner so easily? What exactly are powwow grounds?”

A: Geez, Sarah; you’re really unleashing a torrent of tough questions! I’ll try my best to put your weary mind to rest.

For starters, Freaky did have a purple collar, but no identification was attached. I found his family so easily because the Red Cliff community — and by extension, its powwow — is pretty small, so it was just a matter of milling through the crowd for a few minutes before we found somebody who knew somebody who knew where Freaky resides.

As for what exactly constitutes a powwow grounds, from what I’ve gathered, it’s just a designated outdoor space upon which powwows take place. In Red Cliff’s case, this amounts to a few acres of green space that’s across the highway from their casino. In the middle of it all is a circular space in which dancing goes down.

At Bad River, the powwow grounds are nestled back in the woods, and they come equipped with gazebos and other permanent infrastructure.

Thanks for reading, ladies; will that do?

The Rescue of a Rez Dog

There’s a special spot in my heart for rez dogs, which is the term I use to describe the often-unkempt and sorta mangy mutts I frequently found cruising around the Bad River Indian Reservation when I worked there for a year in 2005. Most of the time these pups had a home base, but — because they were neither tethered nor fixed — they’d be off gleefully exploring the reservation’s wilderness, in search of a meal or mate. Being a bleeding-heart animal lover, I was compelled on several occasions to lure these dogs into my car and return them to their homes.

Meet the latest object of my rescue obsession, Freaky:

Freaky was found wandering on State Highway 13 south of Red Cliff.

I found Freaky about a week ago, when my new beau Mark and I were driving through the Red Cliff Indian Reservation on State Highway 13. We’d seen Freaky, who was loose and looked a little nervous, at the powwow grounds about an hour before. But when we encountered Little Freaky this second time, he was running down the busy highway, in danger of being hit by a car.

So, we pulled over to the side of the highway, put on the emergency blinkers and lured the little guy into my car, where at first he sat nervously on the floor, near the gas pedal. A few bits of kibble finally helped him feel comfortable enough to jump onto my lap, where he stayed and trembled nervously until we made it to the powwow parking lot. There, Mark made a makeshift leash from my hiking boots’ shoelaces and we went into the powwow grounds to locate his owner, whose tattooed arm appears in the picture above.

Actually, Freaky — who I presume earned his name because of his propensity to hump humans’ legs, although he can’t really be blamed for that, because he wasn’t neutered — actually belongs to Mr. Tattooed Arm’s mother, who evidently knew the dog was missing but wasn’t all that concerned about finding him.

I sort of wanted to keep Little Freaky, but I had to turn him over. Later, I caught this shot of him contentedly watching the powwow’s grand entry alongside one of his humans:

Little Freaky, back with his family at last.

Maybe I’m just projecting my desire to be needed onto this little mutt, but as I was leaving the powwow, I swear Little Freaky was looking at me with love and longing in his eyes:

"Karen," Freaky thought. "Won't you take me home?"

Score: I found a sweet vintage dog sweater for 50 cents!

After months of brutally cold temperatures, it is finally starting to stay warm up here in northwestern Wisconsin, ushering in days of beach-side relaxation on Lake Superior. But little Scoopers is already prepared for next winter with this sweet vintage dog sweater I scored for just fifty cents — provided to me by my kind friend, Kevin O’Brien — from a thrift shop in Marshfield, Wisconsin:

Scoops is ready for winter in this sweet vintage sweater.

I like this sweater because it adequately covers Scoops’s long Bichon body, something not done by most dog sweaters, which end up looking like weird, saucy half-shirts on the ample-torsoed Scoops. And, because its argyle print is comprised of bold, primary colors, this sweater may help signal to otherwise-confused onlookers that the fluffy, cute creature within is of the masculine sex, if not gender.

Adventure to Horseshoe Lake

Over the holiday weekend my friend Janelle and I traveled with Scoopers to Horseshoe Lake in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. We went on a 3.7-mile loop hike through the lovely but tick-infested woods, and at the end of the journey we finally reached this oasis:

Janelle Cole snapped this shot of me and Scoopers at rest along Horsehoe Lake beach.

It took about 45 minutes to get to the Horseshoe Lake parking lot from Ashland, but the hike and resulting beach-side relaxation were both worth the trip.

On a side note, while Janelle and I pulled no fewer than 30 ticks off our bodies that day, little Scoopers — protected by his Vectra 3D prevention medicine — deflected all such intruders. No ticks even went near his fluffy white fur.

While I was glad he wasn’t infested, I wonder if the ingredients in the medicine, which is not approved for human use, are super-toxic. Does anyone know of a more natural but still effective way to keep ticks off of dogs?

In the aftermath of a dog attack

I’m feeling a bit traumatized by something that happened today to me and Scoops. We were jogging down the Fifth Street Corridor bike trail, headed east and about to cross Willis Avenue, when two big Boxer-type dogs came out of nowhere and started circling Scoops. They began to chase him in a circle around me, and poor Scoops was petrified and trying to outrun them. I started screaming at them to go away, and leave us alone, but it didn’t work. It was like they saw Scoops as a rabbit-like creature, and they were instinctively focused on chasing him down to kill him.

I finally reached down to pick up Scoops but the Boxers lunged and Scoops got loose from his collar. One of the boxers hovered over him and started to attack. At this point, I got down on the ground and starting hitting the Boxer and trying to pry it off of Scoops; I was screaming for help. I thought my little Scoops’ guts were going to be splayed open and I was terrified of seeing my best friend die.

Finally a man came running up and helped me pry the dog off Scoops, who was left physically unscathed by the incident. I asked him if the dogs were his, and when he responded in the affirmative I promptly began hurtling a slew of expletives his direction. He muttered something about his not realizing the dogs had gotten out, but by this point, I was crying and a total mess, and I carried Scoops away from the scene.

The man went off to wherever he resides, and someone who lives in the neighborhood approached me to ask if we were OK. She said she had seen the incident, and that one of those same dogs had recently cornered her child on their porch.

After hearing this, and once I regained my composure, I called the Ashland County Sheriff’s Department to file a report. An officer met me at the scene.

The afternoon’s sole moment of levity came when the officer — a very nice man by the name of Gene Brinker — hopped out of his squad car and asked, “Well, what’s the scoop?”

He chuckled when I told him that was my little dog’s name.

After I went on to tell Officer Brinker what had happened, he said he would to try to find the man. He asked me if I wanted the guy to get a citation, and I responded in the absolute affirmative.

I am very lucky that the incident ended how it did and that Scoops wasn’t hurt. But yet I am still feeling a bit perplexed, scared and sad about it. I have only seen a dog act like that toward Scoops once before, and that was when he met some sort-of feral sleddogs. I don’t know what it is about Scoops, or about the way in which I handle Scoops, that makes certain larger dogs want to devour him.

The officer did give me one useful bit of advice: He recommended I purchase some pepper spray to take on our walks, so I can spray the hell out of those bastard Boxers if they ever come near us again.