Her Highness, the Crown Regent of Fussy Pants, decided to go
on safari after dinner yesterday.
Bettina requested an unscheduled potty break around
7:30p. This wasn’t at all unusual since
she is infamous for going out right after dinner, pretending to do her business
and then rushing back to be the first one inside. She then beelines to Blue’s dinner bowl and
cleans up anything Blue may have left, missed or dropped. The tiniest potential that she may score a
pea or a piece of dropped kibble will have her gladly neglecting unimportant
things like bodily functions.
Bettina with bite or scratch marks just after her bath. |
This is especially true when she can demand that Mumma stop
what she is doing and let her out again later on. Since Mumma isn’t always able to tell when the
demand for a potty break is legitimate and Mumma doesn’t like to play Russian
roulette with loaded bladders, I let her out and went on with my business.
She seemed to be outside for a very long time. This in and of itself is not unprecedented
but it’s more likely to happen at mid-day when she is in the mood for a sun
bath in the sand pit. After a little
while longer, I got up to check on her.
Being a worry wart I begin to picture terrible catastrophes like a
random trespasser stopping to open the gate to our yard for fun or maybe a tree
falling over and knocking my fence down without making a sound. True, this could only happen if both the tree
and the fence were in the forest and no one was around, but we ARE forest
adjacent. What if that is close enough?
I spotted Bettina heading towards the far corner of our yard
with a definite purpose. At the time, it
crossed my mind that she appeared to be tracking or hunting as she zigged and
zagged with her head low to the ground, sniffing the air occasionally. Seeing as how there are no real hiding places
in our back yard, and I could see the full expanse, there were no visible
targets anywhere within the confines of the fence. So I shut the door and decided I’d let her
tell me when she was ready to come back in.
Eventually she turned up at the back door waiting for the
door-Mumma to let her in. Almost
immediately I
Bettina's face this morning. |
It is not unheard of for Bettina to find a particularly
smelly spot and plonk herself down on it straight away and roll with
abandon. This has been the cause of at
least two unscheduled baths in the past.
I figured she must have found the mack daddy of smelly spots in our back
yard (still being concerned with the possibility of a wild, extremely lost,
civet cat).
At first I thought I could live with the smell until it wore
off. But with each breath the smell
wormed it’s way into my brain until it was all I could smell. I realized that living with it was not going
to be an option. Then picturing Bettina
jumping up onto my bed to sleep with me that night spurred me to immediate
action. Not being one to be too rash, I
broke out the grooming wipes and wiped her down several times. She soon stank of civet cat AND Mango Tango. Worse still, she began trying to rub and roll
on the carpet trying to get rid of that horrible mango scent.
Poor Miss Bean's face at lunch time. |
I had no choice but to wrestle her into the bathtub. There were multiple sessions of soaping and
rinsing. I would have soaped her a few
more times but she began to collapse against the side of the tub in a
faint. Now this would be completely like
Bettina as dramatic as she can be, but I had actually read about greyhounds who
faint in warm water baths. I had never
seen one. I certainly didn’t know I was
living with one. But then again, I also
didn’t know I had a civet cat in my back yard.
One that was very good at hiding.
As I was drying her off, I noticed she had a series of
scratches or bite marks on her cheek.
The warm water had caused them to bleed.
And to top it off, I could still catch faint whiffs of Eau de Civet
Chaton. The only thing that fully washed
off was the Mango Tango.
After wetting the entire house down after her bath, she lay
on the other end of the sofa and gave me the hairy eyeball while wafting the
occasional puff of weak civet cat in my direction. Somewhere in my backyard is a sneaky civet
cat desperately trying to rub off the smell of domestic greyhound. Bettina got to have the adventure and Mumma
had to write the essay.
Post Script: As a
result of her wild game hunt, Bettina’s cheek and eye swelled up quite
shockingly the following day. Mumma is
treating it with ice packs, anti-inflammatories and Stella and Chewy’s treats. Bettina is bravely holding her own. When she declined dinner tonight, Mumma started to really curse civet
Bettina's face at dinner time. (We apologize for the quality of these cell phone photos and Mumma's increasingly shaky, worried hand.) |
Post Post Script: We
have subsequently discussed this incident with Grammy. In her youth, Mumma was always told by Grammy
that there were fishers in the woods behind our house and that they ate little
kids. We always laughed at her and made
fun of her because fishers are not common and they rarely show themselves. For a long time we didn’t even believe that a
fisher was a real animal. Grammy has
conducted a little research and she feels she has now been vindicated and that
this unprecedented attack on Bettina was conducted by a fisher. We’re still laughing at her. Kind of.
The first thought that came to my mind was an opossum, and trust me, they stink like nobody's business!
ReplyDeleteAlso, not to alarm you, but one of our fosters came to us after a bit of a walkabout (it's a long story, but she was adopted as a puppy and found running loose a couple of times, after the last of which she was repoed and sent to my house as a twelve month old puppy). That night, I though her lip looked a little funny, but I'd just gotten her and didn't know her well. I chalked it up to my imagination that her lip was swelling up. In the morning, it was clear that I was not imagining it as the lip looked like a small orange had been stuffed into it and bloody pus was draining out. A trip to the vet after work showed that she'd probably stuck her nose into some small animal's burrow and got bitten. There were tiny teeth marks inside her lip and she had a nasty abscess. It was not fun! But after some antibiotics she recovered pretty quickly. Just be sure to keep the lovely Bettina's wounds clean and make sure she hasn't got anything on the insides of her lips! ;)