First off, I should say that we have adopted a new puppy. I don’t want to say much more about that until our vet has checked her out–thoroughly–but I do want to make it clear that this–what I am about to do–is not all that we have been doing. In all honesty it was, at first, but people can’t live that way.
We didn’t really know what to make of Jalouse when we brought her home: she was shy, for one thing. We were used to Jolie’s constant, frantic demands for our attention; Jalouse’s willingness to curl up under an end table all evening and then stay quietly in her crate all night was downright unnerving. As the weeks went by, though, I noticed something: first she expressed a preference for furniture near us, then for the far end of the furniture that we were on. Eventually a paw might find its way over one of our legs, and then a casual roll left her side against one of ours. It was some time before she felt prepared to sprawl out across Nick’s lap or my torso at every possible opportunity, and so we felt sincerely appreciative of the trust that she was finally willing to give.
Also in stark contrast to Jolie, she was easy. Aside from an annoying (and fortunately infrequent) habit of “marking” our dog beds, she was essentially housebroken in a couple of days. I’m pretty sure that it took longer for Jolie to agree to pee outside once than the entire process took with Jalouse. She could be left alone (with Jolie) loose in the apartment after less than a week. She learned to walk on a leash after two minutes of practice, which, as you may recall, our previous experience had not prepared us for:
Jalouse’s favorite thing in the world, hands down, was Jolie. While her main breed “type” was a shepherd, she eagerly copied all of Jolie’s hunting dog mannerisms. She would sniff anything that Jolie seemed interested in, gallop blithely after pigeons, feign interest in thrown tennis balls. “Simple,” Nick called her, and he was right: she was perfectly happy to just go along.
Here is the last photo that we have of her:
As the weather started getting hotter, Jolie got to show off her utter inability to pace herself. She would race around in giant circles for nearly an hour under the afternoon sun, and then, eight shady minutes from home, flop down unceremoniously in any cool spot that appealed to her. Jalouse would try valiantly to drag her along before giving up cheerfully and sitting calmly until I could talk Jolie into pressing on.
By the time she died, Jalouse was nearly twice as high at the shoulder as Jolie, although I feel sure that Jolie still easily outweighed her. I can’t wrap my head around the idea that we’ll never know how big she was going to get, and that we will never have full-grown photos to show around and ask for guesses about her breed mix. All we will ever know is that she had gotten tall enough that both she and Jolie had realized that the path of least resistance was no longer around each other; over or under was quicker. Sometimes one of them would get distracted halfway through this maneuver and stop, leaving them stuck together like building blocks: hot cross dogs.
Jalouse had a skinny little body, huge long legs, a long, thin tail, and large, upright ears. From the back, she often looked like a cat, especially lying in wait for Jolie, who tended to lag behind her bounding friend–a perfect target for ambush. She had a delicate little face, bright, interested eyes, and a tendency to cock her head to the side when she was intrigued. She preferred to lie down front first, her hips staying high in the air before crashing down at the very end. She ran so eagerly that her strong back legs sometimes got ahead of her, so that she found herself running sideways. She could stand upright on her hind legs for really shocking amounts of time.
She used to lie flat on the kitchen floor and stare up at me. She followed us from room to room, no matter how often we assured her that it was just for a second. She loved to carry sticks, and took an obscure but sincere pleasure in picking up pebbles, gumming them for a bit, and then spitting them out. She kept stashes of our socks all over the apartment.
She was dopey and silly and sweet; she was uncomplicated joy. She was impossibly gentle and kind, and for a few short months, she was ours.