I should have noticed this earlier, but yesterday I discovered that my dog is also afraid of the patio.
Now by this I do not mean that he’s afraid of the patio, as in the back garden. No, he’s not afraid to go out into the back yard, because of some unseen, and thus unnoticed by me, trauma experienced recently. Instead he’s afraid of the physical patio. By which I mean the concrete slab that you walk on when you go out ‘onto the patio.’
For some time his trips to the bathroom, which originally were exuberant sprints all the way to the column at the end of the house, have become progressively shorter. Last week he peed on the barbecue that I’d moved under the patio (as in the awning attached to the house, I did not move anything underneath the concrete slab itself) to keep it out of the rain. I’d assumed that he didn’t want to go out in the damp, it really was little more than a mist, but apparently he was avoiding that long, and now frightening, walk across the concrete.
So yesterday I was puttering about, on the patio, as the nervous canine sat in the open doorway and watched me. At this point the dog next door, whose name is Chew-Chee, (the spelling of which is obviously wrong, check previous posts on the English tradition of mangling foreign names) barked at me through the side fence. This initiated the Sunday afternoon tradition of Feeding the Neighbor’s Dog. I went back to my kitchen, removed a bread crust from the refrigerator, and returned to the back garden where I sat on a low stone wall and produced tasty treats for the appreciative dog next door. After pressing the third piece of crust through the chain link fence, again following longstanding tradition, I broke off a piece for the Little White Dog, turned to receive his supplicating paw shake, and… nothing. He wasn’t there.
Now it wasn’t as if his bark actually revealed his hiding place. He was four feet north of his traditional location on the patio, in the garden, sitting in a bushy green shrub, with his head sticking out of the top.
So for a bit we reenacted a scene from one of those silent comedies. I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at the spot on the patio where he normally would have sat to receive his bread crust treat. I looked at him some more. Then he barked at me again. Clearly there was something very important going on that I just didn’t understand.
I tried luring him out of the garden and back to his traditional begging spot, but no dice. The best I could produce was one forepaw barely touching the concrete with his neck extending in the fashion of a white, fluffy, 12 inch tall, giraffe.
So I alternated between presenting pieces of crust to the very cooperative, and confident neighbor dog – who would have squeezed her snout through the chain links if possible to get closer to the bread in my hand – and waving crusts, near the shrubs, while my dog whimpered for me to bring them closer to the garden and farther away from the concrete.
When we were done Chew-Chee returned to the back door of her house, and I walked across the patio to my back door. The rustling noised to my right revealed that my dog had begun a sort of jungle trek through the garden, rather than follow me across the concrete. When I reached the door I turned around and saw the nervous little creature trapped at the end of the garden, it stops some 6 feet from the back door, eyeing the concrete with great trepidation. He then hurled himself through the air in an attempt to vault from the garden into the house. He didn’t quite make it, and ended up hopping twice rather like a fluffy white kangaroo. Once inside the house he sat at my feet, looked up at me, and smiled (It may not be anatomically possible, but I swear he looked up at me and smiled.) as if he had just succeeded in tight rope walking across Niagara Falls.
So, he’s now afraid of the back patio and the kitchen. What do these two areas have in common? Well, they’re both flat, and you walk on them. Then why is he not afraid of the sidewalk out in front of the house when we go for a walk? I’m afraid that this remains to be seen. Stay tuned for more, frightening, developments.