By Joel Thurtell
Our star columnist is on the disabled list.
Peppermint Patti
We’d been in Canada for a bit more than a week, opening our cottage. The daughter of our good old friends in Charlevoix was having a graduation party, so we decided to attend. As long as we were back in Michigan, why not head for Detroit and home? We could pick up some things we forgot to bring.
Seemed reasonable, even though the drive from home to cottage is 10 hours if all goes well. Who would have thought our little pup would have been in danger at home?
At the cottage, I’d digested the news that bears still are breaking into camps, sometimes when people are in them. I’ve been coming to the Bay since 1972. In 38 years, I’d never seen a bear. Couple of seasons ago, bears broke into forty-some cabins, depending on whom you talk to. Sometimes the number is 35, or 48. Oh well, I’ve seen the photos, and bears can turn a cottage into an insurance adjuster’s nightmare. Still, bears were an abstraction to me. Seeing is believing, and I’d never seen a bear up here.
Cottage on the Bay. Joel Thurtell photo.
On our first day in the Bay, I was having trouble getting our pump to keep its prime. I’d left my tool box in the car, a 9-mile boat ride one way. I jumped in the “Slick,” our Crestliner with 60-hp Johnson outboard, and took off at 30 mph for marina. On the way back, about six miles into the Bay, as I passed a place called Harrison Rock, I noted a dark shaped leaving the sheer rock face and launching itself into the channel. I was fairly close in the boat and throttle down. Pretty big beaver, I thought. But there was no paddle tail. Instead, I saw a brown nose leading a black form as it slowly swam across the channel. By now I was in neutral, drifting and watching the bear as it ignored me and swam for the other side of the channel. It climbed up on the rocks, its fur plastered to its sides. Could have been a big black dog.
Now I believe in bears.
For little dogs, bears are not the only threat. There was the raccoon that confronted Patti on our deck. A raccoon three times Patti’s size, yet our little mutt was ready to have at it. Karen somehow persuaded her that the better part of valor was discretion and got her — Patti, not the ‘coon — into the house.
Thus, it came as some surprise that five minutes after taking over her back yard in Michigan, Patti was limping badly and staying off her left hind leg. There was no cut. We took her to the vet, who diagnosed a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
Our older son, Adam, tore his ACL during a high school soccer game. To repair the damage took surgery. So will Patti’s injury require surgery. Right now, Patti’s on pain-killing aspirin, or something, dispensed by her veterinarian. She’s sleeping a lot and when she walks, she does it gingerly. She mostly waits for Karen or me to lift her to a couch.
How did it happen? I don’t believe Patti was playing soccer, though you never know with these creative types. Maybe we’ll find out if she gets back to writing her column. So far she’s keeping quiet about the modus operandi of her injury.
We feel very badly for our little puppy. She’s set for surgery in mid-June, so that means another trip down-country and then a leisurely drive back North.
Six weeks of recuperation, the vet says, during which she will have to stay off that left hind leg once the orthopedic surgeon has worked his magic.
Luckily for the JOTR staff, Patti had penned columns before her injury. We will run them, but she’s made it clear to me through woofs and growls that she plans to put paws to keyboard again, possibly with a new awareness of the delicacy of life.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
