Spring                                      Awakening Moon

We have an injured dog.  Hilo, our smallest whippet, and a friend for many years, got in a scrap with an animal, a squirrel or a rabbit, and got a nasty wound below her right lip and another, larger one underneath her jaw.  She didn’t come for quite a while yesterday, we thought she had escaped, but she finally came in the house.  It was only this morning that I noticed a swollenness to her jaw, a sack that looked like a double, maybe a triple chin.  Infected.

Kate took her to the vet where they drained the infection, debrided the wounds and sent her home with antibiotics.  She looks better now and was happy to go in her crate for the night.  A safe, familiar place.

Dogs have their good days and their bad days.  I think yesterday was a bad day for Hilo.

Yesterday afternoon, when I went out to finish the boarding up of the chain link fence, Rigel sat out near the back Norway pine, a small floppy ear and a front foot stuck out of her mouth as she made crunching noises chewing on what could only have been some small animal’s skull, most likely a rabbit, perhaps the one that wounded Hilo.  The reality of the natural order goes on every day on this property, dogs and small prey animals, bees protecting their hive, gophers digging through the lawn, hawks diving and killing small animals, humans eating pork and beef and god knows what else.

Our world has two lives, the one of artifice in which we humans take a shot at controlling the weather, food supply and safe drinking water while just outside the carapace of our homes, any home, anywhere, the world of violent struggle, a world without artifice, goes on about its traditional routines.