Sometimes Blanca looked like she was all legs & ears. As a pup she had kind of a skinny rat tail, but that changed over the months.
When I look back at these, it's hard to believe that it's all the same dog. She changes noticeably even on a single roll of film.
An Urban Park action shot. I think she's carrying a Coke cup (generally, plastic cups were a favorite with Blanca, 'cause she could sink her teeth into them and get a nice crinkle sound).
Some of these running pcitures look more like flying pictures- it's hard to tell whether her feet are actually on the ground. If you look closely, you can see a little white mark on her ear. It's a little patch of bare skin on the inside of her ear-flap, in an area that's otherwise furry. The importance of that little patch will be evident later on. You can also see it in her baby picture- there's a little notch right at the base of that ear.
Until I looked back on all of these pictures, I had forgotten how much running Blanca did when she was young. All dogs are like that, I know; they just have too many places to go. Most of their sidetrips are done just for the sheer excitement of going, and coming back.
Blanca the archaeologist. I originally decided on the puppy who would be Blanca rather than the puppy who would be Jett based in part on Blanca's general uninterest in digging, compared to Jett. Since I lived in town, I didn't want to have the worry of always wondering if my dog had burrowed under the fence while I was at work. And that's the way she turned out to be. Here, I think she's enlarging a hole made by some little critter, in the vain hope of finding it. Usually, she'd only dig if she was hot and tired and frustrated, and wanted to get at some cool earth to rest on.
But she did go on two digs with me. For her, they were just extended camping trips with less hiking and more company than usual. She was the darling of the dig. I often overheard people commenting to each other about what a wonderful dog she was, how sweet and well-behaved, she was, and so forth. And truly, she was.
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There was only one time that she made a commotion at a dig. She was tied up at the lunch area; I was up at the site itself. Some people walked by, told me my dog was barking. I kept digging. Another group came by, told me Blanca was barking a lot and seemed very agitated. That was unusual behavior for a dog that usually just found a shady spot to sleep; I went down to check on her. When I came into view, she almost lost it. I guessed immediately what was up, and snapped her off her leash. She tore across the ground, back behind the equipment trailer. And proceeded to have the most violent diarrhea I've ever seen. She must have been in agony, but was too demure to relieve herself in the common lunch area. They never understood just what a good dog she really was. Moral of the story: in a critical situation, never give your dog the cheap discount-store food that they love so much.
Fall, 1994
A romp through Canada Bonita nets a prize: a complete leg bone. Of what, I'm not sure- looks short for an elk, heavy for a deer, light for a cow. She can barely carry it, but she's proud to have it.
And sometimes the prizes were even bigger.
But usually the attractions on our walks were simpler: a scolding squirrel, a hole in the ground just the right size for a nose, a soft snow drift. And the simplest pleasure of all: a single twig or blade of grass, to be carefully sniffed along its entire length, each side individually.
Sticks of course were always A Fun Time. She got out of the habit as she got older (maybe she learned that the world held an inexhaustible supply of rawhide bones), but when she was young, any random piece of wood was in mortal danger of destruction. She had quite a trick for chewing the bigger ones (I'm talking about downed saplings and large branches, 6-8' long). She'd pick one up by the small end, lift it high, and swing her body under it. With the tree resting across her shoulders, she'd then reach over to chew the end. When her teeth got tired on one side (or she just needed a change, I guess), she'd pivot underneath the tree, switching it to extend over her other shoulder, and continue chewing away. It was quite a clever trick.
Not all sticks got the treatment that this one did- for some reason, she had to pick it up and throw it down on the ground. This is at Heron Lake, also the site of my first (and only) attempt to get Blanca to swim. (Also the first and only attempt to get her to ride in a canoe, which she resolutely refused to try.) I went out into the water, coaxing her out with sticks to chase and her undying need to keep me close by. Slowly, slowly, I got her out into deeper and deeper water. Finally I managed to get her out deep enough that she couldn't touch bottom, and she paddled around a bit, with a look of complete alarm. She found the bottom again, and refused to head out into the deeper water again. And that was that. The whole process took about 1/2 an hour, and Blanca's short swim gained her applause from a woman watching from the shore.
Reading the Sunday paper. I wonder how many scraps I had to pick up from this bit of play-time.
Blanca showed her real taste for literature a few months later. She had calmed down enough from her puppy-craziness that she had full run of the house while I was at work. I came home one day to find that she had chewed up every book she could reach. And the ones she could reach were all of the big, expensive coffee-table-type books. Actually, it wasn't every book: she only ate the hardcovers, and left the softcovers alone. That was about the only really rotten thing she did as a puppy.
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I couldn't stay mad at her for long, when she did do something bad. Example: once we were driving through the Black Range, returning from a trip to the Gila. The road was very curvy, and she'd thrown up a couple of times on the way out. She wasn't too impressed with having to do it all over again in the other direction. I stopped to take a couple of pictures. When I opened the door to the car, she bolted out, I guess figuring that walking back a couple of hundred miles was a better way to get home. The road was not only curvy, but narrow- at any moment a car could have come 'round one of the bends and wiped her out. We played keep-away for a while. I finally shooed her off the road, and collared her, when the game became boring. We marched back to the car, I shoved her in, and got in myself. She was sitting in the passenger seat, looking placidly out the front window. I was angry, and scared, and yelling and yelling at her about listening to me, not running away, behaving herself, etc., etc. Blanca finally turned her head toward me, nose about 6 inches from mine, and proceeded to give me one of those big, wide, open-all-the-way, count-all-the-teeth, have-some-dogbreath yawns that dogs so love to do. She then turned back towards the window, and went on staring down the road. All I could do was laugh at myself, start the car, and head for home.
This must be one of Blanca's first snowfalls, not counting that first 4th of July. She's standing still. but you can tell that she's just about to take off on a cavort, probably with that stick that's just ahead of her.
I have a couple of other pictures from this snowfall, that show Blanca with her first snowman. Yes, she built a snowman. By herself. I'm serious. Of course, it was only a one-ball snowman, as she still lacked the opposable thumbs needed to stack up a regular snowman. I don't have those pictures up, because the snowman was, afterall, white, and so doesn't show up well against the rest of the snow. And no one would believe me anyway.
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Often, while out on the trail, Blanca would flop down in any available patch of snow to cool off. We spent a lot of time out in the snow over the years, either hiking, snowshoeing, or skiing. She didn't care much for the snowshoeing, because that meant that she'd have to wade through snow deeper than her legs were tall. But I'd often choose skiing locations that had snowmobile trails, so she could trot along on a nice hard surface. If I happened to fall, Blanca would come bounding over through the deep snow, excited, and stick her nose right in my face, to make sure I was OK.
Blanca loved to eat snow to cool off. On our springtime walks she'd invariably head off-trail if she spotted one of the last little drifts, still hanging on against the heat and sun. She would often grab a mouthful on the run, leaving a little divot beside her tracks.
That habit made for one of Blanca's more embarrassing moments. We were visiting White Sands, and after a long car ride, the girl was ready to get out for some exercise. I opened the car door, and she took off running across the dunes- and reached down to scoop up a nice big mouthful of powder. Twice. It may not sound like much, but it was pretty entertaining to see her break stride and start sputtering out sand. Twice...
I don't think I can add much to this picture, except to say that it's one of my favorites.
Looking at those wild eyes and those teeth, I remember a trick we used to do. Blanca was very good about waiting for treats. I could hold food in front of her, but tell her "No!," and she would wait...and wait...you could tell that it took every bit of dog willpower to resist. Of course, I'd always give her the treat in the end, but even so, she wouldn't snap at it. But she never would participate in the standard trick where you put a treat right on the dog's nose, and tell it to wait, until giving it a signal to flip the treat into its mouth. So we developed our own version: I would kneel down, point my face towards the ceiling, and put a treat on my nose. I'd tell Blanca to sit and wait. Then I'd give her an "OK!" and she'd trot over, rear up on her hind legs, arch over me, and snatch the treat off of my nose. Always a crowd-pleaser. I caught a canine in the nostril on occasion, but no problem.
Fall, 2003 (?)
Like most dogs, Blanca was pretty demanding when it came to her daily walk. Unless I was out of town; then, sometimes, it just didn't matter so much. She was a shepherd through and through; I didn't have to leash her when we were out on the trails. She'd run ahead a bit, then run back to check on me; then run up the side of a hill, and run back to check on me. She'd never let us get too far apart. As she got older, it was me who had to stop on occasion, to let her catch up. She eventually decided that hills were just too much work, and our walks got easier and shorter.
Blanca was never one of those daring, devil-may-care dogs. As a pup she would occasionally refuse to climb up or down steep rocks, and I'd have to carry her over the rough spots. I know that at least once she froze while crossing this log bridge on the Eastfork Trail. I think she wound up on her belly, straddling the log. I'm not quite sure how I got her unstuck, since I couldn't do much to help without falling in myself. And at least once she fell off this bridge, or a similar one along the same trail. (That's better than her sister, who was devil-may-care and somewhat clumsy to boot, and once missed a jump and fell off a cliff after a short cartoon-like, claws-making-furrows-in-the-rock slide over the edge. Fortunately Jett was also a very tough dog, and walked away unscathed.)
Our daily walk through the canyons near my house passed over a 100-foot-deep gorge, via a wide, solid bridge. Although she'd crossed it many, many times, Blanca once decided that it was suddenly very scary, and refused to walk over it. She became rather agitated when I walked across and waited for her on the other side. Her need to stay with me finally overcame her fear, and she walked over with an embarrassing sort of waddle, feet wide apart. The next few times we crossed that bridge, she either waddled, or ran across fast. And then it was suddenly not scary anymore.
