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Part of watching a puppy grow up is observing how it deals with its fears. If Callie sees something she doesn’t understand, she usually freezes and looks carefully to try to understand. She’s been afraid of shadows in the moonlight, a water bucket in the back yard, a pile of boxes that didn’t used to be in that place, and other things that were simple enough for her to, eventually, figure out.

Last night, at our Lake Arrowhead home, Callie burst into loud barking, as if a stranger was entering our house, or at least walking by. She stood on the deck beside our house, looking toward the street, barking at the very top of her lungs — which have become pretty powerful. Callie has a great bark.

At first, I assumed that a neighbor, or a neighbor’s dog, was walking by on the street. Finally, starting to get worried about all the barking, I looked out the window. But I didn’t see anything. Callie’s loud barking continued.

So I walked out onto the deck beside her to see what she was barking at. At the edge of the street, near some steps that lead down into our property, was one of Barbara’s big (12″ in diameter) Fourth of July, red, white and blue, whirligigs going round and round. I finally put two and two together; a little breeze had just started to blow, and the whirligig had just started to go around.

Callie was just doing what she’s supposed to do: warn us and protect us from monsters.

I walked Callie out visit the awful fiend. She kept barking until I reached over and touched the colorful whirling wheel, to show her that it was harmless. At this juncture, she leaned over and sniffed the offending whirli-beast and decided it was probably not too threatening.

I think Callie was grateful that I helped her overcome her fear of the Dreaded Fourth of July Whirligig monster.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.