“The Tormentor of Nellie.” When Deb and I traveled to Vancouver Island in early September, we did so with a bit of trepidation. When we planned the trip months earlier, we thought our dog, Nellie, would be fully recovered from the TPLO surgery to give her a second bionic leg. Unfortunately, the X-ray showed that the refitted bones in her right-rear leg hadn’t fused together as fast as the refitted bones in her left-rear leg had done when she had the same surgery on that leg three years earlier. Nellie’s surgeon okayed the trip, but only if we kept her on a leash and were careful to keep her from jumping.

My initial thought was “that will be easy.” The reality was much different. One time, we found a private beach on the Johnstone Strait, hemmed in by a high wall of boulders. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to unleash Nellie and let her explore with us. Instead, Nellie climbed the boulders when I wasn’t paying attention, and when I went to carry her down, she didn’t wait and jumped eight feet down to the rocky beach!

We had a secluded campsite right on the Johnstone Strait. Nevertheless, we kept Nellie on a tie-out cable attached to a tree whenever we didn’t have her on a leash. The squirrel in the photo and a few others shared our campsite. For our first day, everything was fine. Nellie accepted her limitation and mostly barked at the squirrels if they entered her territory. The next day, she couldn’t take it any longer and charged the full length of the cable as Deb and I shouted, “Nellie! No!”

She hit the end of the cable at warp-7 and flipped onto her back! After our initial horror, we broke into quiet laughs when Nellie returned to her feet and shook herself off, apparently uninjured from the experience. Fortunately, the cable was attached to her harness, not her collar.

As Deb commented, “It was like a scene with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.”

Need I say that Nellie never charged a squirrel while on her cable again?

Nellie had an X-ray scheduled for a few days after we returned home. I breathed a sigh of relief when that X-ray showed her leg was continuing to heal. A month later, a final X-ray showed she had fully healed, and her surgeon cleared her to run free.

The squirrels in the forest surrounding our house have been put on notice.