CANINE INTUITION

A dog has her day and saves our day of fishing.

Why it’s always good to bring your dog on board.

Hope springs eternal in the canine brain. Each morning, I stand at the kitchen counter and open two cans of cat food, and without fail, Mr. Darcy, our white standard poodle, trots over and gazes up with lip-smacking expectation. He has never been served the cat food, and he will never get the cat food. But he’s there every morning, because this might be the day.

My good friend Chuck Larson has a jet-black 130-pound Newfoundland named Tula. A Newfie loves the water, and hope springs eternal in Tula’s canine brain every time Chuck drops the boat trailer on the hitch ball. He’ll walk into the house and return to find Tula waiting in the truck bed. Poor Tula is usually ordered out of the truck because a 17-foot boat can’t easily accommodate two human anglers and a large dog. But I have a soft spot for Tula just because she’s not a narcissistic poodle, and last week I convinced Chuck it was a good day to take a dog fishing.

Once the Yar-Craft was launched, it was my job to stand on the dock and secure the bow line while Chuck parked the truck. But then my phone pinged, and I decided to reply to an editor’s email so as to appear to be at my desk and hard at work, and at my age, it’s hard to focus on two tasks at once. I snapped to when Chuck yelled from across the parking lot. “Hey…the boat!”

I thought I was standing on the bow line. But I guess I wasn’t, and now the boat started to slowly drift away. Dang.

Woof! Tula barked, looked at Chuck and then at me. Sensing we were helpless—or hopeless—she trotted down the ramp and into the water, swam out to the boat and took the bow line in her mouth. She began a slow and steady dog paddle, her best stroke, back toward the dock with 1,500 pounds of boat in tow. I swear I am not making this up. We were astonished, to put it mildly. As my grandmother used to say, “Breeding will show.”

Chuck will need a bigger boat if Tula becomes a regular member of the fishing team, and I don’t think that’s in the cards. But if every dog has her day, Tula had hers. As for Mr. Darcy, what kind of dog likes cat food anyway?

She began a slow and steady dog paddle, her best stroke, back toward the dock with 1,500 pounds of boat in tow.