Limping Badly

January 5, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Again work for a couple hours, get home around 3.  When I walk in the door, the kitchen is dark and empty.  I assume that Moi and Mway are again taking a nap, and I’ll have to wait an hour or so before they’re up.   But as I’m hanging up my coat and keys, Moi appears at the bottom of the stairs, and shortly after, Mway clunks down the stairs, eyes me as she circles me once, then plops down beneath the kitchen table.  As I’m putting on my snow suit and boots, she does not arouse herself as she usually does.  I have to call her to the door.

State of the Path:  Mway and I walk into the walled garden, then turn onto the path and pass the pig pen.   I see Mway limp once or twice, but don’t think too much about it, for she has taken complete walks before when her paw has been hurting her.  The snow is still a powder on the surface, but the path itself is fairly beaten down, the prints melding into one another into one fairly continuous hard packed surface.  Mway starts heading down the branch of the path toward the clearing, but I want to take a full walk today, and even go down the side path along the old orchard, so I call her to follow me.  But when I get about ten yards down the side path, I see Mway is lingering behind me, limping along aways, then stopping, and looking up at me.  I figure her paw is hurting her more than I first thought, so I turn around, and we head straight for the clearing.   To take it easy on Mway, I decide not to throw the stick into the goldenrod, but to stay within the boundaries of the clearing that was mostly just grass all year long.  I throw the stick once.  Mway runs after it, limps once or twice as she approaches, stops at the stick, then turns around and looks at me.  I’ve never seen her not fetch a stick before, no matter how bad she is limping.   I walk over to the stick, pick it up, and throw it in the opposite direction.  Mway limps over to it, stops, and again looks back at me without picking the stick up.  I walk over to the stick, pick it up, and do not press the matter any further.   Mway follows me back to the house, as I lead the way to the back door, using my walking stick and carrying along the fetching stick.  This has never happened before – Mway has always returned home before with the fetching stick.  This might not be strictly true; I might have had to bring the stick home once or twice before, but I can’t quite remember now what the reason would have been for – the point is that, except for once or perhaps twice before, Mway always brings the stick back home, and I do not remember her ever not fetching the stick.

Addendum:  Starting tomorrow I will be working a regular schedule of five nights a week, and I don’t know how many days out of the week I’ll have to work during the day too, so I’m not sure if I’ll be cramming walks in before work, or having to skip them altogether, or what.  In case I end up getting too busy in the weeks to come, I just want to add a little bit more background information right now while I have the time.  Moi got Mway about 7 years ago for her birthday, shortly after our first Australian blue heeler, Spot, died.   I remember the first walk we took Mway on.  She was just a little pup, and she was following along with our other dog, Blue, getting stuck frequently in the high weeds of summertime, sometimes getting tangled and having to back up and almost losing her way and tripping over weeds, but she followed along the whole time with a great smile.  Eventually the walks included fetching the stick, and this has become a daily routine, with Moi generally taking Mway out in the morning, and me taking her out in the afternoon.  In the morning Moi does not always take Mway for a full walk, either because she’s in a hurry or because in the summertime the weeds are soaked with dew; in the afternoon sometimes I have to cut out a complete walk too, either because it’s starting to rain or getting too dark.  But I estimate that in 7 years I have taken Mway for a walk on an average about 5 days out of the week, and I have only taken one one-week vacation in that time, so I figure that I have taken Mway for about 1,813 walks on our property.  Today is, if not the first, certainly a rare time, when Mway has not brought the stick back, and I am concerned enough to mention it to Moi.  But Mway doesn’t seem to be in pain or anything, and I trust she’ll be better by tomorrow or the next day.