“There are two things you need to know about beagles,” a fellow beagle owner told me a couple of weeks ago. “The first is that they eat anything. There is just nothing that does not end up in their mouths. The second is fugue.”
“Fugue?” I thought. A psych concept…and isn’t it something like the flu, too? But before I could voice my confusion, an illustrative example presented itself.
“Like that,” the woman added, pointing. Off in the distance, our two beagles were racing ever further down the path, happily oblivious to the fact that they had already left us far behind. “And you’ll never catch her.”
Right, well, good to know. It was certainly on my mind both times that Juliette slipped out of the apartment and raced down the steps like a little maniac, as well as the more perplexing time when she fled up. It was especially striking in that her flights seemed far more instinctive than personal: every time she hit a dead end she was thrilled to see that I had materialized behind her. She just…had to go.
The worst part by far is that she’s a bad influence. Jolie escaped from the apartment exactly once as a puppy, and never tried again…until now. Last week, though, Nick took Juliette out, leaving the door barely cracked, since he has some bizarre reluctance to carry keys like a normal adult. Jolie whined a bit, as she often does when left out, but then she stopped, which she tends to do as well. When I finished whatever had my attention, however, the door was wide open…and Jolie was gone. I rushed downstairs, and saw that the outer door was open (the inner one opens on a motion sensor, which Jolie has learned to trigger in spite of being tiny). And there they were: Juliette, looking stubborn, Jolie, looking concerned, and my husband, looking white as a sheet. We exchanged horrified stares. The dogs trotted along. It was surreal.
Now, of course, he closes the door all the way. Do you think that that means he brings his keys?
Do you really?
He rings the doorbell.
Anyway.
Today I headed apprehensively off to the grocery store. Not because there’s anything particularly nerve-wracking about poultry, but because Juliette didn’t seem fully settled when I left. She’s been getting steadily better at being left in the Giant Crate of Doom with Jolie for company, but this time I took a little longer to leave, and came back in to stick their huge Kong in with them, and she apparently took all of this to mean that I might not really leave, after all. I did stay and listen for a while on the steps, and the whining did stop, but we’ve come home to such foul disasters in the past that it was hard to keep my mind on selecting tomatoes.
When I came back, all was quiet.
Too quiet.
Although I was in a hurry to stuff the most perishable of my groceries into the fridge before Juliette started trying to batter the crate apart from the inside, the odd silence made me glance around. Right in front of the dogs’ toy box was what looked like a half-chewed treat. In fact, it looked just exactly like the portion of Mon Bon Chien’s interpretation of an oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie that had been stuck in the Kong.
We don’t use those treats for anything else. I had re-lodged it into the Kong’s opening before putting it in the crate. I could swear that all of the “loose” treats had been eaten.
At a sudden noise right behind me, I whirled around…and directly into a very happy Juliette’s wet little nose.
That’s right: Harry Houbeagle has struck again.