This nest-builder is not a bird

On the Trail



 

 

When I was speaking with the former owner of the dog I recently adopted from the Agoura Hills Animal Shelter, she mentioned the dog was a “nester.” She was talking rather hurriedly on the telephone, moments ahead of leaving to move with her family to Colorado, so I didn’t have time to ask if I’d heard her correctly.

You never really know what’s going to happen when you bring a new pet into your household.

My first dog, who was a puppy rescued from the Harbor Freeway by a good Samaritan, grabbed the end of a roll of toilet paper and raced all over the house, weaving in and out of rooms and around furnishings until, some 280 sheets of white squares later, she discovered all that remained was the cardboard roll, which she promptly tore to bits.

So I was wary about this “nester” business. The new dog is very peppy and excitable and can often be encountered dancing on her hind legs in the hallway or pouncing on a toy in the living room like a tiger gone after its prey, with lightning speed and some seriously savage head-shaking.

But then she’d tire of her game and retire to my bed. She had quickly adapted to my lenient rules about who sleeps where, and I’d have to tussle with her for my share of the covers.

One even ing when I was brushing my teeth it felt as if my house had been struck by an earthquake. My bed was shaking so hard it made the medicine chest’s mirrored door rattle and reflect a funhouse image of me with toothpaste-slathered lips puckered in puzzlement and alarm. I peered into the bedroom and saw covers and throw pillows going airborne.

And there in the middle of the bed was a 19-pound dog operating in some sort of eggbeater mode, that is, an eggbeater on the berserk setting, whipping up the bedcovers the way a tempest whips up waves to slam a beach.

She attacked them with her long, pointed nose, pausing to snuffle in discontent, then pawed wildly like a prospector who thought he’d spied a vein of gold.

The little dog was so absorbed in this she took no notice of me, except for a second to dart at my face, lick off the toothpaste slathering my lips, then, wearing a toothpaste moustache of her own, she resumed the frenetic assault on the bedcovers.

I flipped on the light. With a protracted sigh of contentment, the eggbeater dog settled onto a rounded, rumpled mass of covers that resembled . . . wait a minute, that was it! She’d built a nest and placed herself in the center of it. And every few hours she’d awake and revamp her nest until it cozily engulfed her tiny form.

Glasser is a writer fascinated by all manner of natural phenomena surrounding her home in the Santa Monica Mountains. Reach her at ranchomulholla@gmail.com.


 

 

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