Hangin With Harry

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and my wife Terry and I are spending a week with our grand-dog, Harry.

Harry is a handful, to say the least. He is an adventure waiting to happen. The 1987 movie Harry and the Hendersons comes to mind, but instead of being a Big Foot our Harry is a Ridgeback.

He is energetic, trouble-prone, mischievous but well-meaning.

I feel like I am good ole Mr. Wilson and Harry is Dennis the Menace with four legs and a tail.

That tail, that long, muscular, heavy tail never stops wagging and is usually banging up against a wall, or your leg. It can clear off a coffee table. When his tail bangs against our bedroom closet door it sounds like someone just got voted off “The Gong Show.”

As if you couldn’t tell by the constant tail-wagging, Harry is a very happy dog. My son rescued him about four years ago. I couldn’t believe the ordeal my son had to go through. Background checks, site visits. Interviews. He was just obtaining a rescue dog, and an expensive one at that. With what he had to go through you’d think he was a defrocked priest/disgraced Boy Scout leader/former assistant football coach named Sandusky trying to adopt a 10-year old boy.

My son, who is none of those, is currently camping in Western Canada this week with Claire, an old college friend, so like we do about 10 times a year, Terry and I are watching Harry.

Harry likes our house and yard and he is very good company for Terry.  Terry’s Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease has now made it difficult for her to read, and she no longer knows how to use the television remote control, so Harry’s company while I am at work is great for her. Harry is entertainment.  Harry makes Terry laugh.

Harry is very affectionate.  For no reason at all he will come up to you and if your face is reachable give you a big kiss. If it is not within striking distance he will lick any part of you that is.

Harry is also a killer, but not in a bad way (says almost no one). Around small children, Harry is as docile as can be. Kids can pet him forever, pull his ears, pull his tail, he doesn’t care. Other dogs, he ignores unless they mess with him. Then, look out! He almost ripped the head off (literally) a big dog that out-weighted Harry by 40 pounds. Another time a Great Dane about a foot taller than Harry snapped at him once and with the quickness of a small collegiate wrestler Harry circled around the big dog, got on its back and put his jaws around the Great Dane’s great neck.

Pin! Or at the very least a technical fall. The Great Dane tapped out.

But those occurrences are rare. Like I say, Harry ignores other dogs for the most part.

Harry’s prey pretty much runs the gamut from house fly to deer, and just about everything not domesticated in between.

Harry is a Rhodesian Ridgeback with a mix of Coon Hound. He’s a beautiful burnt orange color with short hair that looks like he has a natural Mohawk. He has very long, strong legs with giant paws. His back hair, from his shoulders to his tail, has a stretch on his spine that grows backwards. It resembles what dogs and cats look like when they get angry and get their fur up.

Only when Harry gets angry and gets his fur up he looks like a stegosaurus. (for those of you that did not study paleontology, [or in my case, play with toy dinosaurs] the stegosaurus is the dinosaur that has the tail spikes and heavy plates along its spine.)

Unlike the stegosaurus, which used to eat plants, Harry is a hunter. Ridgebacks were originally bred to hunt lions. They are site dogs and rely on their keen eye site to hunt. But the Coon Hound in him is a scent dog, and that is what gives Harry the edge. If he doesn’t see them, he still won’t lose their trail because he smells them. That’s how he can catch deer. He gets so excited when he sees or smells deer, because he knows he can catch them.

Obviously deer are much faster than Harry, but deer get tired quickly. Ridgebacks can run up to 20 miles without stopping. That is why my son got Harry, as a running partner when he is training for his Iron Man triathlons.  Harry can run forever and won’t lose the scent of the deer so when the deer practically runs itself to death and can no longer go on and collapses in exhaustion, Harry arrives on the scene and puts his powerful jaws around the deer’s throat and just lies there with him. Wagging that big tail waiting for his owner to finally arrive so Harry can show off. He thinks he is like one of his ancestors catching a lion.

Harry has caught many rabbits (they lay in high grass hoping Harry does not see them, but he smells them), ground hogs, opossum, a few birds, but his prize trophy was a squirrel. Squirrels are very hard to catch, because there is usually a tree nearby to run up. This particular time, that squirrel got a little too far away from the tree. But give Harry credit, when he lowered his body into pounce mode and took off like Usain Bolt (for those of you who do not read the sports pages Bolt is an Olympic Champion and the world’s fastest human) he didn’t run straight toward the squirrel, Harry ran toward the tree and cut the squirrel off. (he then cut off more than that but let’s not get too graphic).

Let’s just say, as far as that squirrel goes, ‘Bye Felicia.’

Harry is very entertaining. My son has taught him many tricks. The most popular one is when he puts a treat on Harry’s long snout and says “wait.” Harry will sit there for minutes with that treat two inches from his eyeball, waiting until he is told “okay.” He could probably go longer but it begins to get gross ‘cause Harry is salivating like a leaky faucet while “waiting.”

Harry is very athletic. In addition to his distance running, Harry is a jumper. When my son first got Harry we had a six foot frontier fence in our backyard and Harry could jump it. We had to keep him on a wire despite having a fenced in yard.    Now Harry’s hips are not as good as they used to be so we no longer tie him up. He loves roaming around our back yard. Rolling in the grass. Lying in the sun. Chasing the birds and squirrels who dare to venture into our yard.

If we have to leave Harry in our house alone, however, even for the shortest amount of time, we put him in a four foot by three foot by four foot high cage with a water bowl.

The very first time we watched him we didn’t know any better and we didn’t have a cage.  Now we know.

That first time we left him alone in our house Harry totally destroyed it. EVERY blind in EVERY window of our house was destroyed. Either pulled down or ripped apart or eaten or all of the above. I guess he wanted to escape, or at least look out the window. EVERY window.

One blind was pulled up before we left and Harry couldn’t get at it, so he bit the draw-string off of it.

That first time he was left alone in our house Harry jumped up on our kitchen counter and everything that was on the counter when I went to work was on the floor when I got home, including a busted blender and an expensive coffee maker in about five pieces each.

A week’s worth of Harry’s treats were stored on top of our kitchen cabinets, about three inches from the ceiling, and Harry got up to them and eat them all. They were in a plastic, sealed bag, but he knew where they were and got to them. How, we are not sure. The best theory is that he jumped up onto the counter, walked onto the stove, got up on his hind legs, and then jumped up to get the treats. Either that or he can fly. More on him flying later.

Harry is also entertaining for Terry when the two of them sit out back. Harry gets excited and runs under the tree when he sees a squirrel in it, I guess hoping the squirrel will fall. Once Harry was lying out back and a Mockingbird flew out of the tree and buzzed Harry, the way they often do to cats. Harry didn’t seem too upset about it but about 15 minutes later when the bird did it again Harry jumped up and caught the bird in mid-air, about 6 feet off the ground, and ate it. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Speaking of unbelievable, we are not sure but there is a possibility that Harry can fly.  

Last summer we had a family reunion in Montreal. My son brought Harry along, and he was a big hit with all of the nieces and nephews. There was a sit down anniversary dinner that Harry could not attend, so my son found some professional ‘dog-sitters’ in town to watch him. (I should point out that except for when Harry visits us he has Separation Anxiety when it comes to being apart from his owner.) Harry was dropped off at a third floor apartment. My son said goodbye, went down stairs and across the street to his car. Before he could open his car door he felt a familiar lick on the back of his leg. It was Harry, who jumped from the third floor balcony and crossed a busy street to be with his owner.

No one saw it so we don’t know if he first landed on the second floor, then the first, or if he just flew all the way down. But he didn’t have a scratch on him, didn’t limp or anything. When my son took him back upstairs the “professional” dog-watchers could not believe it. They apologized profusely and said that they had put him on the balcony. No more balcony time for my son’s best friend Harry.  

When our kids were little we had a dog, Brownie, a Border Collie/Beagle mix. She was Terry’s running partner. It was sad when we had to put her down, an old dog not able to do what she once could.

There are so many more things now that my best friend Terry can no longer do, due to her Alzheimer’s. Lately I’ve had to help her dress herself in the morning. Understanding instructions is a thing of the past for her. Simple tasks are no longer simple, some not even doable. She’s only 56 years old!  I want more time with my best friend.

I know my son wants more time with his best friend, Harry.

Ridgebacks that live a dozen years are like a canine version of Jeanne Calment. (for those of you who are not actuaries, Calment died in France in 1997. She was born in France in 1875. She lived 122 and a half years, more than anybody since Noah I think.)

I am no actuary, but according to all of the research I have done (too much), my son and I have about the same amount of time left with our best friends.

I’m glad the two of them (and I) are enjoying each other’s company this week.

Until next time, if you have a best friend who is a dog I hope he is as ‘grand’ as ours. If you have a best friend who is human I hope they break Jeanne Calment’s record.

Bud