Tuti Meets Wenzel (Part 2)

The vet estimated Tuti’s age at around 15 weeks. That meant I found her in her 14th week. That meant, as a weaned puppy, she was out in the world for 6 weeks, most of it presumably on her own.

The amount of fear in this little white puppy was immeasurable but very high. Training her to be a respectful and obedient dog was difficult because anger and punishment could play no part. If I called her and she didn’t come and I raised my voice, Tuti as a puppy would run straight for the bushes and crawl under them and curl into a little tight ball and hide. If I came to the edge of the bush and called her out, she would not come, hearing the frustration in my voice.

Eventually, she would win and I would crawl inside the bush with her and sit with her, accepting that she wasn’t always going to do what I wanted and calming down and now just being with her, and she would unknot and her tail would thump once or twice and she’d talk to me, telling me how I scared her and would I please stop doing that.

Within a few weeks, I started taking her to work with me, placing her on my lap as I drove, coffee on the dash, driving with a knee, scratching and scrunching all the soft furry skin around her neck. The boys were surprised. Surely that wasn’t the same dog they saw weeks ago? My friend Charles broke through to Tuti right away and they became life-long jobsite pals. For the rest of the boys, Tuti kept a shy distance most of her early years.

Tuti was a dog who needed rituals to be content. The riding on my lap one, she liked. When I drove, there was only one place for her to ride- in my lap. As the owner of a frightened puppy, I thought this was a good place for her too. As she grew into her fourth month, she was starting to get too big to be there, but she was stubborn that way. She had needs that helped her stay sane. This was one of them.

Our job ended and I headed back down to California to help out my sister and do some things on her house. She had bought the ultimate in a fixer upper and then found a brotherly sucker to do the fixin’ for her. I took Tuti along, and introduced her to my sister’s brilliant Border Collie mix (The Dude, or “Dudi”) and the two became wrestle-mania friends.

I discovered Tuti just loved to wrestle. Maybe it was the fighting Akita in her? She wrestled rough and aggressive and harmless and Dudi, being almost a year old now, really got into it. The two became almost inseparable, tussling on the lawn, tussling on the carpet, tussling in the folds of Dudi’s dog bed.

After two weeks of being here, Tuti had made a good friend and I felt sad for her as it was time for me to go.

On the drive back up to Oregon, I stopped by a Ray’s Supermarket in Garberville, went in and bought some traveling food. On the way out, two young girls asked me if I wanted a puppy.

“Oh no thanks,” I said. “I already have a puppy.”

“Is she lonely?” asked one of the girls.

“You know, she just might be…” I said, thinking.

I looked at the three puppies they had in their box. Two were blue-healer-crosses and the third had a collie look. “They look rambunctious.” I said.

“These two are. But not this one.”

One of the girls held up the collie and handed her to me. "Somebody dumped them in a ditch on the side of the road," she said.

"That's horrible," I said. I knew about abandoned puppies.

I now had an eight week old puppy in my arms, and I was thinking about how Tuti didn’t have any friends to wrestle with, and I thought about how I never meant to have a dog because it was a responsibility I wasn’t sure I wanted…

When I got to my truck, Tuti climbed back into my lap and I rested the eight week old puppy on top of her, and all three of us drove this way up Interstate 5. At one point, a highway patrol officer on his motorcycle pulled along side of me and saw the dog pile in my lap and smiled and shook his head, then sped off.

I showed up at Mum’s house with a new little puppy girl, and all my Mum wanted to say was “I want her!”

Within two days, the little collie peed on one of my old sleeping bags. I looked around for a label and found one, finding her name in the process.

“Wenzel”.

If ever a name fit a dog in content and temperament, the sound “Wenzel” fit my new collie.

Wenzel turned out to be the perfect sister dog for Tuti. Where Tuti was shy and withdrawn, Wenzel was gregarious and assertive. Where Tuti embodied the pain of abandonment and possible abuse, Wenzel was a tail wagging, happy as a goofball puppy. Wenzel learned to love to wrestle, though it wasn’t her first choice in games, and she wrestled with Tuti whenever Tuti was in the mood.

Wenzel and Tuti became one word for me, and I sorted out the seating arrangements in my work truck by adding a bed behind the seat, in the king cab area, and Tuti took this over as her own as she had plainly outgrown my lap and its subsequent comforts. The one thing Tuti demanded, though, was that I reach back while I was driving and continue to scrunch the rabbit-fur-like skin around her neck, which I did as I drove until my hand became too cramped to continue.

The one dog with eight legs went with me everywhere. Dog hair became a new fact of life. I learned to clean out my truck with a leaf blower- just open two doors, and blow the white balls of hair into the glistening sunlight…

I found the house I thought I had been looking for, and, with my step-brother as a partner, bought it. A fixer-upper on five acres in Grants Pass up on a ridge with sunrise and sunset views and an odd, monster-sized hippy house in need of some do-overs.

Lots of do-overs.

Tuti and Wenzel now had a giant construction site to play in, and five acres to roam around on, and NO FENCE, which proved to be a battle I didn’t know I was willing to fight.