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One dark night I took Tecumseh for a walk on the golf course
that spread through the hills just a few hundred meters from our
house. When he disappeared into the darkness ahead, as was my
custom, I hid from him. Anytime we were away from home, if he
didn't know where I was, he became quite insecure. I used this
insecurity to train him to pay attention, to stay close, to keep
tabs on me. Usually it would bring him sprinting back to me in
just a matter of seconds. But this time it wasn't working. I
waited, but no Tecumseh. After five minutes passed I got up and
started calling for him. When in the darkness he finally
appeared I discovered what distracted
him. He arrived with a with a new friend, another dog that looked just like him.
I worried about where the owners were for his new found friend,
but within a minute or two they, too, materialized out of the
black night. That was how
he met Nick, and how I met Don and Christy. Nick was a Siberian
husky with pretty much the same colors as Tecumseh. Even though
Alaskan malamutes can doulbe the size of Siberian huskies,
Tecumseh, the runt of his litter, was unusually small for a
malamute, while Nick, on the other hand, stood unusually large
for a husky. Comparing them, strangely enough, both dogs weighed
in at about 60 pounds. With Tecumseh 11 months old, and Nick 6 months old, for the rest of their lives their lives
they would only be 5 months apart. We discovered that although
we lived on opposite sides a major loop road that ran through
the foothills of the Wasatch mountains, our houses were only
about 100 meters apart. Finding a dozen things deeply in common,
Don and I quickly molded into best of friends. To say that our
dogs became best of friends would be an monumental
understatement. Every time Tecumseh and I went over to visit, he
and Nick would go at each other as if they hadn't seen each
other in years. Just sitting at the kitchen window and watching
them was immensely entertaining. They would sprint at each
other, around each other, hurdle completely over top of each
other, joyously bark at each other, roll, wrestle, pin, chew,
growl, bite, and sometimes vigorously play for an hour or two without
even pausing for a breath. While they were puppy brawling and
tumbling around they looked so similar that at first we had a
difficult time telling them apart. Over time, though, we learned
to notice the differences rather than the similarities. We
possessed a couple of high spirited sled dogs that exhilarated
in each other's company and quite literally threw their
excitement at each other. Somewhere I still have a video of the
the crazy things they did in their unbridled exuberance, acts
that gifted Don, Christy, and I with many rounds of laughter. |
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