Elihu Entertainment

Our exciting summer venture in 1995 was to take our puppet company to the Sunshine Coast and spend July and August at the Pender Harbour cottage where Hugh’s parents had lived during their retirement. After their death, the property had been left to Hugh, but as it was too expensive for us to maintain two homes, we had rented the cottage to a local resident. However, our tenant had given notice, so we decided to combine a cottage holiday with a tour of our Babes production in the three main towns on the Coast.

The preparations for this had kept me busy all spring: choosing dates and investigating facilities, not to mention creating posters and promotional material. We needed publicity pictures, so I did several photo shoots. For this, the puppets were far more co-operative than Max, who tended to fidget and get bored after a couple of takes. He was very good at the commands, sit and stay, but would plop into position with such a petulant look on his face that the results were hopeless for a brochure.

The arrangements could not be finalized without a day trip to the Coast, which we made in early June. Caroline and her friend, Marcella, came along, offering to walk Max while Hugh and I negotiated terms with the venues at Gibsons, Sechelt and Madeira Park. It turned out to be a good day, with all appointments going well. Max enjoyed his walks with the girls, though they reported that he was hopeless when they tried jogging as he kept stopping to christen the bushes. We had a nice lunch at a sidewalk café in Sechelt, with Max sitting decorously beside our table and enjoying tidbits from the various plates. While we ate, we saw a film crew working on the street. We had no idea what was being filmed, but years later, when we watched a Knowledge Network program about the Sunshine Coast, we suddenly gaped at the screen and cried, “There’s Max!” Sure enough, there he was at the Sechelt sidewalk café, immortalized on screen.

The visit to the Coast was lovely, and when we returned to town, we were restless for the month to pass so we could head away again. However, we were anxious about our tour because the expenses were adding up; Max mugs and T-shirts, posters and theatre rentals did not come cheap. Then, to our delight, a wonderful surprise came in the mail with a letter from Hugh’s aunt in England. Aunt Gladys had corresponded with me over the years and she wrote to say that she would like to sponsor our Pender Tour to the tune of one thousand pounds. This was more than two thousand dollars at that time. We were overwhelmed: such an incredibly generous gesture; Auntie was an angel in every sense of the word.

Aunt Gladys wasn’t the only person to encourage our new venture. At the year-end Vancouver Guild of Puppetry party, the other puppeteers were delighted that we were stepping up our performance activities. It was especially delightful to meet veteran puppeteer, Fran Dowie, and his charming wife, Louise, both of whom were full of valuable tips, which we appreciated knowing their impressive history of performance. Fran was a well-know name in the entertainment industry and Louise had danced in the original Broadway production of The King and I with Yul Brynner.

We were further encouraged the following week when we were offered a paid gig to perform Guard Dog on Duty for the Pender Harbour Lion’s Club. Now we had two productions going to the Coast. It seemed an opportune time to fulfill an outstanding obligation. We had offered Guard Dog on Duty as a BVA auction donation when I had been running for Council, and the family that had purchased it was finally trying to set a date so the show could be performed for their son’s birthday party. Although it meant we would have to perform the show for free, it still gave us the chance to have a pre-tour rehearsal complete with audience.

All through June, we  rehearsed both shows, and Max became very excited by this activity. He recognized the music that signalled the end of each show, and even if he had not been in the room during the rehearsal, he would race downstairs to join us, and start bowing and doing tricks as the curtain fell. On the day of the donated performance of Guard Dog on Duty, the show went very well, but the highlight was Max himself. He performed wonderfully at the end of the show. He recognized his theme song and couldn’t wait to do his trick and take his bow. We decided that we would have to rename him, “Max, the Ho Ham Husky.” Afterwards the birthday boy came forward and presented him with a Meaty-Bone Cookie. Max was the star of the show, and there was no doubt he was ready to be Dog on Tour.

That year was the beginning of difficult times for me and Hugh. I was missing Luigi and worried about my father, and on top of that, we were dealing with the start of teenage rebellion and often joked that Max wasn’t the only one who needed a long line. I have always dealt with stress by keeping myself busy, so poor Max must have thought his mistress had turned into a workaholic during the months ahead. Suddenly, I was multi-tasking multiple projects, and Max soon adjusted to the fact that  morning-coffee time after our walk was now in the study rather than the living room. Philosophically, like the ho hum husky he was, he became used to curling up under my computer desk and napping on my feet.

One project that was proving challenging as well as diverting was the completion of my play, Casting for Murder, which at that time was still under its working title, To Catch an Actress. The work I had previously done was fine for the first two acts, but the third act wasn’t working. Writing a mystery play was a lot harder than I had anticipated. With my mind so focused on untangling my plot, we found ourselves attending a lot of mystery plays to analyze what worked and what didn’t. One evening, Hugh and I took the girls to the Richmond Gateway Theatre to see Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee. The actors playing Poirot and Hastings were delightful, but some of the other characters were less appealing and there were sections where the dialogue went on rather long. Five minutes into Act One while one of the actors was delivering what seemed an interminable monologue, Katie leaned over and whispered: “You know, Mummy, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were the one who gets murdered.” Wisdom out of the mouth of babes—I made a mental note to check my script for overly long speeches.

The next three months were a struggle to reshape the piece, and by the beginning of May, Act III had been changed beyond recognition. However, there were so many other family commitments and puppet activities happening that it was hard to find time to complete the task. My opportunity came on the May long weekend, when Hugh took Katie on a fishing trip. Caroline was busy with her own friends, so having seen Hugh and Katie off in the motorhome, Max and I had three days to do our own thing uninterrupted. Walkies and writing galore! Each day, we went for long rambles through the woods, then came home to spend companionable hours while Max played with his toys and I hacked away at my computer. Max also seemed to enjoy having me read him sections of the script. He would sit up attentively and hang on every word, his wolf smile showing approval at hearing his mistress’s voice changing to accommodate the various parts. By the Monday when Hugh and Katie rolled home, I had polished up the manuscript and was finally satisfied that I had done all I could. Max was thrilled to see his people back, and raced around, tail wagging a mile a minute. Happy dog and happy Mum. He had his family back and I was ready to begin the process of sending out scripts in the hope that someone would produce my play. It was actually five years before the play was staged, but since that first production, it has bobbed up in some part of Canada every other year, so the struggle was definitely worthwhile. As one of my writer friends commented: “That one has legs.”

Although Max had enjoyed his quiet weekend with me, he had been very indignant when Hugh and Katie had taken off and left him at home. In Max’s eyes, the motorhome was not supposed to move without him. Max not only believed he owned our motorhome; he seemed to think all such vehicles were his domain. Around that time, Edna and Dick acquired a new motorhome. Max was thrilled to see Brandy’s new ‘house on wheels’, which was very large and luxurious compared to ours. He leaped in, sat on guard in the doorway and tried to claim it as his own, even refusing to let Brandy on board. What he didn’t realize was that he was soon to have his own weekend away in our motorhome while we made some exciting arrangements for the summer. If all went well, Max was about to become Dog on Tour.

Max’s behaviour continued to be erratic, but as the weather became warmer, the increase in outdoor activities provided him with more outlets for his energy. He loved it when everyone was out in the garden, especially when the girls put him through his tricks. They had trained him to jump for Frisbees and other such items, the command being ‘Hup’, at which point he’d leap into the air and catch whatever they tossed. One day, when he was down on the lawn, Caroline called from the deck and offered him a cookie. She waved it in the air and said, “Hup!” Max looked perplexed, did a couple of leaps, then raced for the stairs and pounded up to her as if to say, “There, I did it!”

Unfortunately, the hot weather brought the usual mass of fair-weather walkers into the park, and the next thing we knew, there were anti-dog items in the local paper and complaints about the off-leash areas that we had worked so hard to attain. This type of press invariably triggered articles from pious dog-hating columnists who wrote diatribes questioning the validity of having dogs in the city at all. Predictably, the councillors took the side of the anti-dog brigade and started grandstanding on the subject at council meetings, a practice made even more annoying by the fact that I knew several of them never bothered to prevent their own pets from running free. On top of that, they had landed Burnaby residents with a 17% tax increase that year, and to add insult to injury, when I went to city hall to pay our bill, I met Councillor Doug Evans in the hall with his unleashed poodle trotting about enjoying the freedom of the building. Needless to say, when I returned home, I took time out to compose a broadside to the councillors who were stirring up the trouble, and also called Carson at the SPCA to ask him to rein in the pound patrols.

Still, out of aggravation came inspiration. I made a few notes about the things I remembered from the big pro-anti-dog battle of the eighties and filed them away for future reference. Later, this became the outline for my story, “A Political Tail”, in which a dog-hating bureaucrat was killed in the park and, in spite of the anti-dog brigade’s determination to blame a marauding canine, the killer proved to be unquestionably human. What fun that was to write. The story involved a group of dog walkers cutting secret trails where they could elude the pound men, pound trucks getting stuck in ditches, a search for a mysterious “Hound of the Baskervilles”, and a protest at a council meeting, complete with dog-biscuit shaped placards. Naturally, I will never own up to which bits are fact and which are fiction, but there are a few people living here in Burnaby who know the truth.

Of course, all the fair-weather walkers weren’t anti-dog, but some of them were problematic in other ways. Warm weather encouraged campers in the woods, not all of whom were as careful as they should be. One Saturday morning, Hugh and I came across a flaming campfire in a clearing. What was even more alarming, the fire had been set up against a log that stretched into the bush. We used the empty pop tins that had been littered about to get water from the creek and we doused it as best we could. Then we rushed home to call the fire department. Since the trail was one of the less frequented ones, we had to go back to show the firemen the way in and poor Max, though pleased to have a second walk, was very suspicious of the big men with axes and shovels.

As the weather improved, Edna and I also noticed an increase in the number of dubious-looking individuals on the trails. It seemed that crooks were fair-weather walkers too. Given some of the odd characters we came across, we were very glad to have our dogs at our sides. Once day, we met a woman and her dog coming along a well-hidden path that we considered our own private trail. Soon after the woman passed by, our dogs stiffened, barked and lunged ahead. Suddenly Edna caught a glimpse of a denim jacket in the bushes, which equally suddenly vanished from sight. We called the dogs, and they finally ran back to us. We saw no one as we moved ahead, but we couldn’t help wondering if the dogs had chased away someone who had followed the solitary woman into the bushes. It was no wonder that dog walkers loved rainy days; those were the only times we could be guaranteed a walk in peace. We, who were devoted to our four-legged friends, were no fair-weather walkers. We were all-weather walkers without a doubt.

With all the trials, tribulations and losses keeping our spirits low, we certainly didn’t need any more problems with Max. Therefore, when the community school announced an evening course on first aid for pets, I decided that this would be time well spent, given my dog’s propensity for injuring himself on a regular basis. Edna also attended, and we were both amazed to discover how much we already knew, due to having weathered so many ailments with Mr. Max. Edna cracked up the entire class by telling Max stories. It seemed Max was the class clown even without being present.

Performing of another kind was also keeping us busy. We tried out our new production of Babes in the Wood at St. Andrews United Church, courtesy of our good friends, Al and Sue Dahlo, who had arranged the booking there. The show went well, except for a complete halt in the middle when the resident sound techie who had insisted he could run the tape for us stopped it mid show because his wife came to speak to him and he thought the performance was over. After this annoying hiatus, we carried on to enthusiastic applause, although afterwards I was told off by a very austere lady who informed me that Dame Vera’s comic opera ‘Suicido’ scene was inappropriate for children. The church children, however, seemed resilient and did not appear traumatized, particularly the little boy who marched backstage, pointed at Robin Hood’s arrows that lined the castle battlements, and demanded to see the ‘missiles’.

We also had a new ‘Max’ show. This was Guard Dog on Duty, a cute romp that started with a village pageant and ended with a scene on the farm where Max and Brandy cornered a couple of crooks who had strayed from the pageant. Our first gig for this show was at the Teachers’ Credit Union in White Rock, and when we arrived, we found we were to set up our theatre by the front window, so as a result, although the families in the bank enjoyed watching the puppet show, all the passers-by on the street were treated to a view of our rear ends bobbing around as we worked the marionettes. Not our most glorious moment.

As the weather improved, there were more outdoor activities for the family, which Max thoroughly enjoyed. He was particularly happy when I took him along for Caroline’s track meet in Langley. To his delight there were lots of dogs watching the events. He especially liked a large, yellowish female Lab with pretty eyes and a friendly disposition. Max never passed an opportunity to flirt in Brandy’s absence. He also recognized the jangly music as the ice-cream van came by and towed me across the field, panting happily in anticipation of getting an ice cream. He also liked the concession stand. I lined up to get a hot dog for lunch, and when I reached the front of the line, the vendor said, “Who’s next?” and Max promptly stood up and put his paws on the counter. Her expression was something to behold.

By now, Max had mastered a whole raft of tricks, and he was quite the ham in front of a crowd. He loved to perform, and always ended up with his bow. He had even been featured on a local cable program along with his marionette. As a result, he was becoming quite the little celebrity with the people that saw him go out for his daily walk. One day, Katie’s class was going on a field trip to the Children’s Festival so she had gone to school early. The buses and children were already lined up along the road as Max and I set off on our morning walk, and Max received cheers from the students as we went by.

However, all this adulation seemed to go to his head and he started his bad-boy-rock-star behaviour again, one day scaring the life out of me by taking off after the coyote in the woods. I heard the most awful yelping sounds in the bush and thought Max had been hurt, but he finally came thundering back, glittering-eyed and unharmed, with the yelping continuing in the distance, so I realized that the noise was the coyote defending its territory. Then, on Mother’s Day, Max picked a fight with a dog in Lighthouse Park when we stopped for a walk on the way to visit my parents. Max seemed very pleased with himself after this encounter and was in high spirits all the way to Nana and Gamma’s house. Wearily, I called Gary Gibson for yet another chat and was told that this was fairly typical of dogs like Max. They would be good for a while, and then regress and begin to challenge their owner’s leadership. Max had to be put in his place again. Back to basic training for the Ho Hum Ham with an attitude.

The next few weeks were taken up with preparations for our new and revised Babes in the Woods production. It was good to be busy, since I was very worried about my singing teacher, Luigi Wood. He had collapsed and been hospitalized, and as the weeks continued with no lessons and no word of improvement, I became deeply concerned. However, soon he was allowed visitors, and when Hugh and I went into St. Paul’s hospital, Luigi looked frail but was pleased to see us and seemed to be rallying.

Max was also rallying and he was enjoying his walks again, able to run and play with Brandy. He wore his harness in the snow and loved leaping about while the children had snowball fights. He enjoyed weekend Foreshore Park walks, and on weekdays, trotted around Queens Park, sniffing new smells, while we waited for Caroline to finish her skating lessons. However, his good humour evaporated come the Saturday when we took him to the vet for a final check of his foot. Being the weekend, the place was dog city. Big dogs, little dogs and puppies galore filled the waiting room. Max was overwhelmed and sat quietly in his corner, watching as the other dogs were called in turn. Every time Dr. Zinger appeared in the doorway and called out a name, Max looked anxious at first, and then relieved that the call wasn’t for him; however, when Max’s turn came, instead of looking at the file and calling a name, Dr. Zinger peered round the waiting room, spotted Max quivering in his corner, flashed a broad grin and simply beckoned our naughty dog. I expected Max to shy away, but to our amazement, he got to his feet, slunk into the examination room and then leaped onto the table all by himself. Was he trying to demonstrate that he was fine and didn’t need to be there, or simply expressing his desire to get it over with as soon as possible? Whatever the reason, we were all most impressed.

The month continued with a fever of show preparation. For a couple of weeks, all I did was cut out costumes for the new puppets and sew all day. When the costumes were done, it was time to create practice tapes for the recording artists: Bob Werner, Brian Leonard and Mike Scannell. To create the  tapes, I had to sing and record all the parts, no matter what the register; then mix the tracks and dub copies, complete with annotated notes. Once these were delivered to the singers, it was time to work on the sets.

Amid all this creative activity, we did find time to admire the work of another creative artist. Jim Keary, whom I’d met during a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, had started making collage prints with theatrical and musical themes. We attended his show at the New Westminster Art Gallery and were so enchanted with his work that we came home with two prints. This began a long and enjoyable relationship over many years as we attended Jim’s shows and added to our collection. His lovely opera collages are all around our dining room today, a wonderful reminder of a lovely person who is greatly missed today by me and many of my theatrical friends.

Once my vocalists had been given a couple of weeks to learn their parts, the recording sessions began, followed by weeks of mixing and editing. Hugh was busy too, creating two beautiful talking trees for the Babes production along with a new travelling theatre, one that was more lightweight and better equipped for our sets. To give the proscenium an old-world look, he use spackle to create depth and the result was truly charming. Luckily, we had no idea that we would lose this theatre thirteen years later when our trailer was to be stolen and never recovered, but at that time, we were full of enthusiasm for the project and had nothing but positive thoughts about our puppet venture. However, in spite of our upbeat mood, my world was about to take a devastating turn. One evening, I received a call to tell me that Luigi had had a sudden downturn and was in intensive care.  Within the week, my beloved music teacher had died. He was such a kind and wonderful man, much loved by all his pupils, and his death left a huge gap in many, many lives. A couple of weeks later, his memorial service was held. Not surprisingly, the music was glorious, for the church was filled with all the singers that he had trained. It was a fitting tribute for such a fine teacher.

Losing Luigi made my days very bleak in the subsequent weeks, and, as so often is the way of the world, other events were imminent that would bring hard times to our  family. My father’s health was about to take another downturn, and another crisis was looming that would cause several years of grief. Those were the years that Max, for all the ups and downs he instigated, proved to be a wonderful friend. When any member of our family, felt low, he would be there, tucked up at our feet or placing his head in our laps, soothing our nerves, forcing a smile and providing the unconditional love that only pets can give. Our Ho Hum Husky became a source of smiles when laughter was rare and proved truly worthy of the title, Man’s Best Friend.

Throughout January and February, the weather was cold and frosty, and, as it often is at that time of year, most of the family was sick. Caroline had a particularly nasty dose of flu, and Hugh was laid up with a stress fracture in his foot. Katie and I both succumbed to bugs, one of Hugh’s nephews had a lymphoma, my father’s health was failing, and my mother was having trouble coping. On top of all this, there was a spate of bad news. Bill Lewarne, the girls’ ‘Jellybean mayor’ died of a heart attack, and my beloved singing teacher, Luigi Wood, fell ill and had to be hospitalized.

Max, not to be outdone, managed to be invalided out again, first catching his eye on something sharp during a run in the woods, and later, more seriously, re-injuring his bad foot. During our morning walk, he ripped the high pad on his front paw. He valiantly licked his foot all the way home, but once I examined the pad, I realized it was beyond my skill to fix the injury. Max had nearly sliced the pad off, so another trip to the vet was called for. Max was not at all happy once he realized he was to be left there, but he had to be put under and stitched up properly. However, later that afternoon, when I went to pick him up, he trotted out, wiggle, wiggle, wobble, wobble, perfectly happy as he followed Dr. Zinger and his assistant into the reception area.  He was very impatient while I settled the bill, and clearly anxious to go home. Once there, he settled down happily, enjoying all the fussing he received from Hugh and the girls as they arrived home.

The next few weeks were labour-intensive, since Max was not an easy invalid. The day after his surgery, he managed to tread in a puddle as we walked round the block, and I had to spend twenty minutes blow-drying his bandage. That afternoon, I had theatre tickets for a matinee, and when I got home, Max greeted me with a big smile-face and a pile of gauze. He’d entertained himself in my absence by chewing off his bandage. Hugh and I carefully rewound the dressing, and the following day, I covered Max’s foot in saran wrap before going for the morning walk. This worked like a charm, although it made for prolonged preparation before each walk. Max accepted the extra attention in typical lordly fashion, quite happy to have his owner grovelling at his feet attending to his needs. He was not so happy when it was time to go back to the vet to have his foot checked. When we entered the office, the receptionist greeted us with: “Oh, I’ve heard about Max! Has he eaten any light bulbs lately?” Max quivered with fright while his bandage was being changed, but became very perky once he realized that nothing else was going to happen to him. He accepted a cookie and a pat from Dr. Zinger and positively bounced out onto the pavement. His good humour increased when he realized that we were going for a walk in Queen’s Park before picking Caroline up from skating. He sniffed all the rabbit holes and behaved graciously to the other dogs, and was quite on his best behaviour. Relief brought out the best in Max.

The next day, however, he lapsed again and led Katie a chase about the garden when she went out to leash him before school. She came in fuming, with a sheepish Max in tow, and informed me that I could tell the vet that there was nothing wrong with Max’s foot. Later that morning, I left Max home while I went out to do some errands—and returned to find he’d chewed off his bandage yet again. This meant I had to re-wrap his foot and take him along with me whenever I went out for the rest of the week. On the weekend, it was back to the vet yet again to be told that the stitches had to stay in for another week.

By mid-February, the snow arrived, sufficiently heavily that school was cancelled on the fifteenth of the month.  Hugh happily went back to bed with his cup of tea, but our comfort was short lived as Katie took Max out to play and somehow he slipped and ripped his pad open again. So while the girls went tobogganing with their friends, Hugh and I had to brave the weather and take Max up to Dr. Zinger to be re-operated on. The result was another massive bill and several more weeks before Max could run again. And given the snowy weather, it also meant that his paw would have to be triple-wrapped before every outing. But was Max unhappy? Not a bit. When we went back to collect him that afternoon, he heard our voices in the reception area and sang his little heart out. Then, having got all the other dogs howling, he bounded out, not in the least bit groggy, accepted his pats and cookies, and looked at the other waiting dogs as if to say, “No sweat, this vet stuff. I’m a pro. I’m Max, the Ho Hum Husky!”

Everyone was exhausted after the New Year’s party, but Max, who’d slept upstairs throughout most of the festivities, was wide awake and raring to go for his morning walk. Mum and Dad were heading home that day, so Hugh and I dropped them at the station and then took Max to the Foreshore Park, where his nose started to bleed and we had to take off his muzzle. Needless to say, he was very pleased with himself, so it was another victory for naughty Max, which was just what we didn’t need.

Max loathed his muzzle and he would duck and dodge, doing whatever he could to prevent me putting it on, even though it was the prelude to the off-leash section of his walk. As time went on, he became even more bothered by it. I hated making him wear it but dreaded him getting into trouble if something triggered his aggressiveness. I tried letting him run with Brandy in the bush trails first, and only putting the muzzle on when we reached the top trail; this helped a bit as he had burned off a lot of energy and had enjoyed some fun playing with Brandy. However, the day came that he hid when it was time to leave for our morning walk, and I realized that it simply wasn’t going to work.

We decided to try the promise collar again, but this time, to go to the SPCA and get Gary Gibson to help us fit it. When we arrived, Gary informed us that we had bought the wrong type, so were sent away with instructions to exchange it and to try a Velcro muzzle instead. On a positive note, Gary did manage to make contact with Max without getting bitten so it was a successful visit in that regard. From Max’s point of view, it was also a successful visit because it meant another visit to Tisol and more treats to compensate for the muzzle fitting. Once he was fitted with his Velcro muzzle, we tried it out on his morning walk. I was concerned that it would hamper his breathing, given that it had far less leeway for jaw movement than the cage muzzle. However, Max seemed not to mind. He came to his whistle when called and surprised us all with his angelic behaviour.

The next day, he was back to normal. Now that the dreaded cage had been discarded, he was a happy dog again. He came roaring down the hall when it was time for his walk, in his enthusiasm, managing to have a head-on collision with me as I bent to put on his leash. Since Max had a head like a boulder, I saw stars for the next five minutes. Once in the park, he took off after another dog, chasing it up the hill at high speed. Having caught it, he roared about, happily playing with his quarry, then thundered back, tongue hanging out the end of his muzzle. He screeched to a halt, leaped into a puddle and drank thirstily. So much for my concern that the muzzle would hamper his breathing.

However, it was a few weeks later that he really demonstrated how little he was hampered by the muzzle. Edna and I had walked the dogs through the lower George Derby Land trails, and when we came back to the top trail, I left Max off leash but put his muzzle on.  Shortly afterwards, we ran into Kelsey and her owner.  To our surprise, Kelsey growled at our dogs, but we soon saw the reason why.  Kelsey had a large bone.  Her owner explained that there was a camper in the nearby field and that Kelsey had pinched the bone from the dog that was tied up outside the trailer.  Edna and I moved on, and sure enough, as we rounded the corner, we saw an old beater of a trailer in the middle of the field. We couldn’t see a dog, but I thought I’d better leash Max in case it suddenly appeared.

However, at the very moment I reached for Max, he picked up the scent and darted forward.  In the same instant, a large dog appeared in front of the trailer. As I sprinted after Max, I saw that the dog had spotted us approaching. He was almost a Max look-alike, though as we drew nearer, I could see he was more Malamute than husky, and much larger than Max.  He was also attached to the trailer by a sturdy chain. Max thundered forward and then skidded to a stop.  He appeared to be sizing up the situation.  If I could have put a thought bubble over his head, I swear it would have said:  “I may be muzzled, but he’s tied up!”  I raced forward and reached out for Max’s collar, but before I could catch hold, Max loped over to the Malamute.  As I stood there, with baited breath, wondering what was going to happen next, they began playing head-over-head to see who was going to be top dog.  Max, with his short stubby legs, practically had to stand on tiptoe to do this, but he seemed determined to assert himself in spite of the Mally’s superior size and impressive jaw, not to mention the fact that his own jaw was wrapped in a Velcro muzzle.

At that moment, a man emerged from the trailer, but before he could rein in his Malamute, the two dogs started to fight.  It was amazing.  In spite of their restraints, they went at it hammer and tongs.  The Mally could bite, but he couldn’t manoeuvre, and Max couldn’t bite, but he could hop about and do body checks.  Seeing that the Mally’s owner was not going to make a move, I plowed in and pulled Max out of the fray, whereupon he made one last lunge, forward and down, before I managed to yard him back.  Having got my breath, I raised my eyes and saw that the other dog’s owner looked stunned as he stared at my dog.  I looked down, and realized the cause of the man’s amazement.  Hanging by a thread of meat out of the end of Max’s muzzle was a humungous bone – clearly the object of the fight.  Goodness knows how Max managed to grab it with a jaw wrapped in Velcro.  He must have pursed his lips up like a twenties vamp in order to grab it, but grab it he did.

Since the poor Malamute had already lost one bone that day to Kelsey, I was determined to return this one, though the glint in Max’s eye dared me to take it away.  However, after a few vigorous shakes of Max’s collar, the meat broke and the bone dropped.  I kicked it back to the dog and we went on our way. I was exhausted, but Edna was in convulsions. As for Max, he looked very pleased with himself and trotted beside me like a little racehorse. Velcroed but not vanquished. Muzzled, but most definitely not moderated. Max had conquered the muzzle.