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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2kQbWWX:
AWWWW! Babysitter pups! I love it.
I lived in the middle of nowhere and we took the dogs with us on hikes too, but they weren’t like… good babysitters. One was sort of small, she’d always take herself home like five minutes after we left the house, and then she was pretty old by the time I was really adventuring. The other was a German Shorthair and she’d just take off running and we’d barely see her. But we DID see her put up a coyote once, and chase it, and that was the only time we ever saw coyotes on our property– though we heard them plenty.
Now that same property is absolutely rotten with coyotes but my folks don’t have a dog anymore so the coyotes do what they want.
When my mother was a teenager/college student, she had a German Shorthair, and she’d take her on hikes with her up big mountains. There was one time I guess her mother had driven her there but dropped her off (in the Adirondacks, some of the great hiking trails start right from parking lots) and went shopping or sightseeing or something [Gram had bad knees by then]. She came back and was waiting in the parking lot for Mom, and was keeping tabs on her location by asking every party that came down if they’d seen a girl and a dog. Every one of them had seen Mom and Kuchen (that was the dog’s name) and happily filled Gram in on her progress.
a related but non-dog story i’ve told before behind the cut, about hiking and disasters and family
Decades later, my own mother was having problems with her ankle, and so dropped three of us daughters off to hike up Prospect Mountain while she drove up to meet us at the top. Unbeknownst to her, the previous night the youngest (FarmSister before the farm, then about 13) and I (about 18) had snuck out and gone night-hiking with some local hooligans, as was our wont at the time, and it was hilariously innocent but still, we’d been up until 5am and gone about ten miles overnight so we were EXHAUSTED. Oldest sister, home on leave from Army training, had no idea (she was a square, we weren’t going to tell her!) so she’s trying to Drill Sergeant us up this hill, and Farmsister and I are dr a g g i n g. And there’s no dog in this part of the story.
So we get lost. There’s no trail marker, and a worn path where people have taken unauthorized side-excursions, and we follow it, and we realize we’re not… on… the trail. And ArmySister is getting really mad because Farmsister and I are like, useless, and she’s yelling at us and we’re realizing now we’re not sure how to get back to the path, and following the slope upward doesn’t work because this is a lower peak of the mountain. There we are, at the top of this lower peak, in thick woods, can’t see anything, and we can hear the ice cream truck playing the Entertainer down in Lake George, and we’e cry-laughing because FarmSister and I are on the verge of collapse and ArmySister doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with us, and we’re going to die here, in earshot of the ice cream truck.
ArmySister and I fall down a small side-cliff trying to get back to the path, and she sprains her ankle and I scrape the everloving fuck out of my shoulder. So now she’s limping and I’m bleeding everywhere, and FarmSister has started to cry because she thinks we’re dying.
We find the road eventually. Did I mention, this is the kind of mountain that has a road going up it? It goes right up to the top, you can just drive. It takes like ten minutes, our mother’s been up there for like two hours waiting for us. We stumble out onto the shoulder of the road, and only then do we think, um, we should decide what to do. Well, if nothing else, we can just walk up the road.
We’re debating it when the very next car that comes by is our mother, who has now driven up and down the mountain five times and interrogated a number of people as to whether they’ve seen three girls together, and there were some who had, and then there was one group who said “oh yeah they were ahead of us, but then where are they?” !!! But there we were, limping, bleeding, and crying, her darling idiot little moppets.
Anyway. Mom never made us do anything like that again. Sure, we grew up in the woods, but orienteering, it turns out, when you’re used to a predictable terrain where every stream flows from east to west, kind of doesn’t prepare you for real wild terrain. (I kept being like, well, where are the streams? Turns out there weren’t any, it’s a mountain, the streams are down in the valley part. Duh.)
AWWWW! Babysitter pups! I love it.
I lived in the middle of nowhere and we took the dogs with us on hikes too, but they weren’t like… good babysitters. One was sort of small, she’d always take herself home like five minutes after we left the house, and then she was pretty old by the time I was really adventuring. The other was a German Shorthair and she’d just take off running and we’d barely see her. But we DID see her put up a coyote once, and chase it, and that was the only time we ever saw coyotes on our property– though we heard them plenty.
Now that same property is absolutely rotten with coyotes but my folks don’t have a dog anymore so the coyotes do what they want.
When my mother was a teenager/college student, she had a German Shorthair, and she’d take her on hikes with her up big mountains. There was one time I guess her mother had driven her there but dropped her off (in the Adirondacks, some of the great hiking trails start right from parking lots) and went shopping or sightseeing or something [Gram had bad knees by then]. She came back and was waiting in the parking lot for Mom, and was keeping tabs on her location by asking every party that came down if they’d seen a girl and a dog. Every one of them had seen Mom and Kuchen (that was the dog’s name) and happily filled Gram in on her progress.
a related but non-dog story i’ve told before behind the cut, about hiking and disasters and family
Decades later, my own mother was having problems with her ankle, and so dropped three of us daughters off to hike up Prospect Mountain while she drove up to meet us at the top. Unbeknownst to her, the previous night the youngest (FarmSister before the farm, then about 13) and I (about 18) had snuck out and gone night-hiking with some local hooligans, as was our wont at the time, and it was hilariously innocent but still, we’d been up until 5am and gone about ten miles overnight so we were EXHAUSTED. Oldest sister, home on leave from Army training, had no idea (she was a square, we weren’t going to tell her!) so she’s trying to Drill Sergeant us up this hill, and Farmsister and I are dr a g g i n g. And there’s no dog in this part of the story.
So we get lost. There’s no trail marker, and a worn path where people have taken unauthorized side-excursions, and we follow it, and we realize we’re not… on… the trail. And ArmySister is getting really mad because Farmsister and I are like, useless, and she’s yelling at us and we’re realizing now we’re not sure how to get back to the path, and following the slope upward doesn’t work because this is a lower peak of the mountain. There we are, at the top of this lower peak, in thick woods, can’t see anything, and we can hear the ice cream truck playing the Entertainer down in Lake George, and we’e cry-laughing because FarmSister and I are on the verge of collapse and ArmySister doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with us, and we’re going to die here, in earshot of the ice cream truck.
ArmySister and I fall down a small side-cliff trying to get back to the path, and she sprains her ankle and I scrape the everloving fuck out of my shoulder. So now she’s limping and I’m bleeding everywhere, and FarmSister has started to cry because she thinks we’re dying.
We find the road eventually. Did I mention, this is the kind of mountain that has a road going up it? It goes right up to the top, you can just drive. It takes like ten minutes, our mother’s been up there for like two hours waiting for us. We stumble out onto the shoulder of the road, and only then do we think, um, we should decide what to do. Well, if nothing else, we can just walk up the road.
We’re debating it when the very next car that comes by is our mother, who has now driven up and down the mountain five times and interrogated a number of people as to whether they’ve seen three girls together, and there were some who had, and then there was one group who said “oh yeah they were ahead of us, but then where are they?” !!! But there we were, limping, bleeding, and crying, her darling idiot little moppets.
Anyway. Mom never made us do anything like that again. Sure, we grew up in the woods, but orienteering, it turns out, when you’re used to a predictable terrain where every stream flows from east to west, kind of doesn’t prepare you for real wild terrain. (I kept being like, well, where are the streams? Turns out there weren’t any, it’s a mountain, the streams are down in the valley part. Duh.)
