Dawn & Penn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 14

Still Early July 2016

Now come the cute dog stories.

Joyce has two dogs, they are the light of her life. Peanut is a dirty white mongrel that weighs in at about forty pounds. She is extremely fast and has a nose and ears that pick up threats faster than NORAD.

Little Bit is a smaller, slimmer jungle dog. I mean he is a street dog. There is a species of wild dogs here called jungle dogs. The jungle dogs are heavier built than the street dogs and have shorter legs.

What I’m trying to say is that these dogs don’t have all the instincts bred out of them. Little Bit is a herder and Peanut is a hunter.

Joyce’s cat, Polly is an inside cat. When they first got her, they were living in a motor home traveling the country. The cat was not allowed outside because they thought she’d never find her way home.

When Wes and Joyce were building their plantation here, Polly lived with Dawn in Florida. Now Polly lives in the master bedroom complex. She is not allowed outside. To prevent her escape, Joyce has covered the deck railing with a plastic chicken wire.

One day, Little Bit got trapped in the master bedroom while we went to town. When we got home, Dawn found him with this head struck trough the chicken wire, but his body stuck on the deck. He wasn’t happy.

I tell you this to explain how the hole got into the chicken wire. Naturally, Polly discovered the hole, her ticket to freedom.

We were sitting on the deck of an evening when we spotted the cat in our front yard.

“We have to get Polly back in the house!” Dawn screamed.

At about the same time, the dogs spotted Polly. They took off down the steps after her, Dawn and I in hot pursuit.

“Get the dogs before they hurt her,” I yelled to Dawn.

I just don’t know dogs.

While Peanut watched Polly and barked, Little Bit’s herding instinct kicked in. He started barking at Polly and snipping at her. I was sure we were going to lose Joyce’s cat.

I ran down the steps and tried to corral Little Bit, but he was too fast for me. He chased Polly towards the bedroom.

Dawn started laughing. “He’s herding her.”

Sure enough, Little Bit drove Polly back up the steps to the deck on the master bedroom. Polly flew through the hole in the chicken wire to safety.

Job done.

Peanut spots a snake on our side steps.

Peanut is a hunter and protector. She spends hours making rounds of the deck, keeping undesirable creatures from attacking us. Often she barks, then she and Little Bit take off in hot pursuit of something.

We were going to hang laundry beneath the house and Peanut was in a frenzy of barking. I didn’t know it at the time, but now we recognize that bark. It’s her hunting bark.

A baby boa constrictor, about two feet long, was sunning itself on the pavement and Peanut was lunging at it and barking. The boa was coiled, baring its teeth, ready to strike.

It looked like a standoff to me so I decided to end the fight. I took a stick, hooked into the snake's coils and tossed it out into the yard.

I was amazed at Peanut’s speed. Before the snake hit the ground, she was there waiting for it. The snake had no chance to coil and protect itself. Peanut bit the snake just behind its head and started flipping it around in her mouth.
She let go of the snake, but it was badly wounded. She grabbed another spot and flailed the snake around again.

The battle was over. Peanut ate her treasure and returned to the house with a shit-eating grin on her face.

A few days later, we heard her hunting bark again. She was on the stairs between the house and the bedroom. There, at the base of the stairs was an emerald green snake about three feet long.

She barked and the snaked coiled. The standoff went on for some time. This time, I didn’t interfere. Eventually, the snake managed to extricate itself from the fight and disappear.

A couple of days ago, Dawn and I made a trip out back to pick limes. The ground was soggy from all the rain. Peanut was walking with us.

Suddenly, she lunged and pulled an emerald green snake from the grass. She flailed with it and tossed it in the air. The snake was in bad shape and couldn’t escape.

This one she left dead in the grass.

We can’t forget her protector instinct. She guards us from monkeys, birds and the like. She was lying in her bed in the living room when she sat up and started barking. She and Little Bit took off down to the beach. We decided to see what she was barking at, it might be more poachers.

When we got to the beach we found Peanut barking at a ship out in the channel. She barked and barked and the ship changed its course and headed out to sea.

Mission accomplished.

Twice a day airplanes fly over the house on their way to the airport. Of course, Peanut responds instantly, barking and heading down to the beach. So far she has been one hundred percent successful. We haven’t had a single airplane land on our beach.

Dawn and Little Bit relax on the deck

Peanut was the first dog in the house. While the house was under construction, one of the workers came to work one morning with a five-gallon plastic bucket which he presented to Joyce. In the bucket was a little white puppy.

The puppy was in bad shape. The worker told Joyce that it needed to go to the vet. Joyce agreed, took it to town and showed it to the vet. The vet worked on the puppy for a while, gave it shots, and sent it home for Joyce to nurse back to health.

Joyce did a good job. Soon she had a healthy, loving puppy she named Peanut.

When the dog was healthy again, the worker wanted to take her home. Joyce refused.

“You let her get sick, then you brought her to me for help. I saved the dog. Now she’s mine.”

So Peanut and Joyce lived happily ever after.

How Little Bit joined the family is another story. Wes and Joyce were sitting on the deck, watching the ocean and reading when a little dog showed up on their steps.  The wisdom on the islands is to drive off any stray dogs. If you let them stay, feed or give them water, they will think they belong there and you’ll never get rid of them.

Wes got up, grabbed the hose and drove the little dog off. As soon as Wes was settled in, the dog was back. After several attempts, Wes finally drove the dog off.

The next day, the dog was back. “We’ve got to get rid of that little shit,” Joyce said, thus he was named. For several days, they drove Little Shit off and each day he returned.

Wes decided to get rid of him once and for all. He enticed Little Shit to get in the truck with him, then drove up to Juanie’s café and dropped him off. He surely wouldn’t be able to find his way back.

By the time Wes was back, Little Shit was waiting for him.

The next day, Wes decided to take the nuclear option. They were going fishing and Enrique met them with his boat. Wes took the dog with them back down to Juanie’s. 

They prepared for their fishing adventure then boarded the boat and shoved off. Little Shit plunged into the water and followed them.

“Don’t worry about him,” Wes said. “He’ll get tired and swim back to shore.”

He didn’t.

Finally, Joyce threw in the towel. They picked up the dog and went on their way.

When they returned from their trip, they asked Enrique to take the dog. Enrique lives on the other side of the island. He took the dog home by boat so that it had no idea how to get back to Wes and Joyce’s house.

Or so they thought.

By four pm, the dog was back. Joyce gave up. “I guess we’re going to have to keep him.”
Somehow or other she convinced Wes to go along.

“We’re going to have to give him a new name. We can’t go around calling him ‘Little Shit.’”
Thus, his name morphed into “Little Bit.”

I’ve already told you about Peanut’s taste for baby turtles. She also likes to dig sand crabs out of their holes. Little Bit also indulges in this activity, but I’ve never seen him catch a crab. Peanut is way better.

She smelled a crab under the sand. She stared digging a hole to go after it. When the hole was about two feet deep, she popped up with a good sized crab in her mouth.

I decided to save the crab and took off after Peanut. This was a futile gesture. A two legger can’t catch a four legger on a good day, and this is without reckoning Peanut’s spectacular speed and my gimpy knees.

However, my chase did cause Peanut to drop the crab and before she could pick it up again, it disappeared into the water.

Dawn takes the dogs on two or three walks a day. Lately she has discovered the lazy woman’s way to get the dogs their exercise.

Miss Polly, Queen of the Jungle

Joyce told us that we had to lock the dogs in the house when we drove into town because they would follow us. She said we could take the dogs as far as the gate on our private road, but not let them past it.

There are all sorts of dogs wandering around in the jungle. I suspect that a great many of them are feral. Joyce doesn’t want her dogs hurt or killed by them.

You also know that we don’t have any cell phone service at the house. If we want to make a call, we have to walk or drive up the hill, past the gate to Rosemary’s or all the way to the public road to find reception.

I was driving into town but Dawn was staying home. We expected that the dogs would want to stay with her.

WRONG-O!

The dogs followed the truck. I drove the quarter mile to the private road and they kept up with me step for step. I should mention that on these roads, you’re never going to go faster than twenty kilometers per hour.

I tried to leave the dogs in my dust. Fat chance. Peanut ran alongside me and Little Bit was not far behind. I got to the road and thought I’d exhaust them before we got to the gate. Nope. They kept with me all the way. Finally, I had to turn around and lead them home.

(I wrote about the tropical storms earlier, right now it’s coming down so hard I can hardly think.)

So, Dawn’s method of getting the dogs their exercise? She drives up to the top of the hill a couple of times a day to use the cell phone. We let the dogs run with her. When she gets to the gate, she stops and lets the dogs into the truck. She drives up the hill and makes her calls then lets the dogs out again when she goes through the gate. Then they have to run after the truck on the way home.

When they get home, the dogs are breathing hard, but have big smiles on their faces and are wagging their tails a hundred miles an hour. They take long drinks of water and collapse on their beds for a little nap.

I could (and will) tell you a lot of other dog stories, but this is a long post for today. We’ll take it up again tomorrow.