Unfortunately, The Boss often throws the word ‘dumb’ around when he’s looking at me. I am sorry to say he is even given to laughing at me, rather than with me.
It’s one of his less attractive character traits and it happened again the other day, soon after I had deployed my expert scenting ability to discover a long-lost ball on the river bank.
Naturally, I brought it straight back to the house to tease Queenie, my mum, with — she is instantly beside herself when I have something that she wants — so she followed me around, barking, for half an hour.
Eventually, she pretended she wasn’t interested. I saw through her ruse straight away — so I casually dropped the ball into the rectangular fish pond beside the house, which I knew would attract her interest.
Sure enough, she was glued to it again, fixated on the ball as I amused myself, pawing it and pushing it out again — but in the sheer joy of the moment, I accidentally shoved it out a wee bit too far for me to reach. I could have pounced on it in a flash but the Missus gets upset if I jump into the pond, so I had to gently paw the water to suck it back to me.
Which I was doing so intently I didn’t notice Queenie get up and walk around to the other side of the pond, which, unbeknownst to me, was closer to the ball. Close enough for her to snaffle it — in her mouth, in fact. Very disappointing.
While I am certainly prone to occasional errors of judgment, it is purely due to my boundless enthusiasm rather than any measure of stupidity. It was unnecessary and hurtful for the Missus and The Boss to erupt into laugher.
So I felt better when I was down on the sandbar the next morning with The Boss and he said: “You might be dumb, General, but a lot of humans are dumber — and this bloke was among the dumbest!”
He was nodding in the direction of a recently departed camping couple we had bumped into a few days earlier on our morning walk. The man was an older feller and not particularly friendly, although he had a newish SUV and a fancy camping trailer.
He also had a boat tied up on the sandbar; the boat had a canopy on it and seats for two. Walking back home, The Boss mumbled that the camper obviously wasn’t a fisherman because "you can’t cast well or fight a big fish with a canopy covering the dinghy".
“Party boat,” he sniffed.
Anyway, it turns out the tree on the sandbar wasn’t quite to this feller’s satisfaction as an anchoring point so he found a star picket left by previous campers and banged it into the sandbar, right in among the tree roots where it wouldn’t move.
The Boss thinks the camper must have tried to get it out before he left and couldn’t, so he did “the next best thing” and banged the picket further in. Except he obviously couldn’t bang it all the way in.
He left a nasty stub of steel poking up, perfect for dogs to trip over. Or worse: the river has risen over it since the rain, so it’s lying in wait to disfigure a small child’s foot. The Boss isn’t sure he will ever get it out; he might try and grind it off when the river goes down.
It turns out The Boss has plenty of other words to describe the dumbest of the dumb. Woof!
The General is The Boss's dog. For more yarns, visit sheppnews.com.au/thegeneral
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