Taking days off is important, so I make one day a week a day I don't take the dogs for a long walk and sometimes, not for any walk at all. It's a rest and recuperation day, like I take for myself or would suggest for any client. The day off provides time for muscles and joints to perform cellular repair and thus get stronger.
Today after a leisurely morning, followed by a few appointments, I was just finishing mixing up a lovely salad of garden fresh lettuce and collard greens, dark green and purple kale, carrots and cauliflower, when Nicholai jumped up, growled, and charged off the back porch and out the back door. In a moment, I heard a commotion of barking and whining outside of the sunroom office. Curious, I wiped my hands and crossed the room to look out the window, where I could see Nicholai crouched on the ground with a keen stare fixed at the highest branches of a small shrub. He lunged at the shrub's trunk, shaking it with both front paws. Suddenly, a squirrel tumbled down, was pounced on by the big dog, but slipped out of his grasp and darted under the deck. "Leave it!" I shouted, but my words evaporated in the air as Nicholai and Izzy, who'd been close at hand, gave pursuit. Izzy crawled under the deck and flushed the little guy out right into Nicholai's waiting jaws. A couple of vigorous shakes later, the squirrel was still, its little black eyes staring up at the gray sky.
Nicholai gingerly grasped the squirrel in his teeth and carried it to the lawn. There he set it down and studied it, nudging it with his nose. Afraid he might eat it – that would be exactly like him – I shouted. "No, Nicholai!" After moles and rabbits, fish guts, deer carcasses, and bloated dead nutria, I was worried the squirrel might be bad for him. He glanced up at me, then without a sound lay down by the side of the little dead thing and regarded me calmly, not looking like he planned to eat it, but like he claimed it as his kill, his prize.
I can't be mad at Nicholai; he just is who he is, a rabbit one day, squirrel the next. This dog makes me believe Farley Mowat's claims about wolves – they subsist mainly on small animals – rodents, even mice. Mowat himself professes to have lived on mice for a month to prove that a large animal could do it.
However close to the end it might be for Nicholai (or not), he is still a wild boy.
Who's the man?
Hero definitely supplements his diet with field mice - I'm not even sure how often as he only lets on what he's up to when they get away. Anything bigger he thinks is a playmate or a trespasser.
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