Sherman and Custer, an update

It's been some time since we've checked out the Generals, and much has happened.  In an eerie similarity to his namesake, Stonewall had to leave us.  He was an affectionate puppy, but he was too aggressive in his play.  He would go up to Sherman or Custer, grab one of them by the jowls and pull sideways with all his might.  He was no longer the cute little furrball we'd gotten.  He was their size physically even though his head was still the size of a headhunter-shrunken skull.  He was also a sneak-peer, meaning we always had too much to throw in the washer every week.  He also reverted to eating his own poop which, according to the vet, when taken together with his unnaturally small head, seemed to indicate some sort of true mental deficiency.  Fortunately, after much wrangling with the rescue outfit from whom we got him, we were able to place him with our old dog-walker, who says he's doing fine.  All we have left are the memories of him and this impossibly cute picture of him as a wee pup with his older brothers:

Meanwhile Custer, the big brute in the lefthand side of the frame above, all of a sudden stopped eating for Karen and, to compound the problem, starting ejecting green bile a la Linda Blair.  Or at least I think it was like Linda Blair.  A visit to our trusty country vet left us with the uneasy realization that Cus was going to need to be opened up because he had a blockage that was going to prove fatal if left untouched.  Poor Karen had to go get him after she had a procedure done that required her to stay out of the sun and came home with a boy with a zipper running up his belly.  He wasn't the worse for wear, although he could still die because he has some necrotic tissue around his pancreas, but he's getting back into fighting trim, even if he still cries a lot because of the pain.

This is what the doctor gave Karen as a memento of what Custer ingested:

It looks like he ate part of the lawn.  In fact, it's accumulated dog hair glommed onto part of some rubber chew toy that Custer ate.  Sometimes I wonder whether Custer's part goat.  More than a year ago he ate part of our walnut bed; a wag commented to Karen that we should buy him a 2"x4" for his birthday.  Had we just listened we might have avoided an expensive veterinarian bill.

Amid all this turmoil Sherman remained stalwart.  Well, that's overstating it just a tad.  In fact, Sherman felt liberated.  When Stoney departed, Karen said you could feel the tension leave the house, and she was right.  But for as stalwart as Sherman was, he was that much happier.  His nemesis had departed, leaving him to sleep his days away in relative calm.  But when Custer went away for his three day stay at the vet, Sherman was virtually a dancing bear.  He was so fun and active it was as if he'd found the canine fountain of youth.  He would belushi and wrestle and play.  He even pulled a Custer and ran up the stairs ahead of me to get to the landing so he could attack me playfully as I ascended the staircase.  Our neighbors, on the other hand, must have wondered if we were Korean since we went from three dogs down to two and then to one.

Sherman's world would have been perfect right then had it not been for his yeast infection that necessitated the one thing Sherman fears most:  Water.  More specifically, a bath.  At the best of times, Sherman grudgingly allows himself to be bathed, grunting his displeasure the entire time as if he's carrying a fifty pound weight on his back.  I was crafty this time and picked him up from where he was lying on his bed and carried him into the tub.  The last time I'd tried to bathe him, he would find any way he could to not walk to the bathtub, detouring to the bedroom door, then the other side of the bed and finally to the walk-in closet before being goaded into the bathroom proper.  This time he had no such opportunity.

But there was more in store for our water-resistant General.  Not only did he have to be bathed, he had to be bathed with a special anti-bacterial shampoo that had to stay on him for ten minutes.  For Sherman, anything over a second in the water is a hardship.  This was going to be pure torture.

I bathed him as quickly as I could to start the clock running and then got my book and sat down on the toilet to make sure the wily oldest brother didn't jump out of the tub.  He may not be that spry anymore, but he's crafty.  So there I sat on the toilet, the ludicrous tableau including a dog lathered up in the tub with his owner sitting on the toilet reading.  I kept checking the time to make sure it wouldn't last a nanosecond longer than ten minutes and when we got to eight minutes, Sherman started to cry.  He cried as if it was pure hell.  I tried to reassure him -- as if he understood a word I was saying -- and when we got to ten minutes, I rinsed him off, then dried him off and lifted him out of the tub to finish drying him.  Sherman commenced his ritual shaking to get the few ounces of water still lodged somewhere in his hair out and then ran around like a crazed dog, wanting his release from the torture chamber.  When I opened the door to the bedroom, Sherman tore down the stairs as if her were Custer.  Custer makes a sleek, almost graceful descent down the stairs.  As I always tell Karen, Custer has the best male butt in the family.  Sherman, on the other hand crow-hops his way down, usually waiting for either me or Karen as we follow them.  This time, Sherman ran down the stairs so fast I thought he was going to do a lipstand on the landing. 

For as traumatized as Sherman was, and contrary to all dog experts who claim dogs don't remember anything beyond fifteen minutes, Sherman awaited me in the family room with the expectation of his ritual cookie:  I did what you asked, no give me a darn cookie.  I earned it.

Proving once again that the tail sometimes wags the dog or, in this case, the dog walks the owner, I gave him the cookie.  He walked away from me as if I didn't even exist, happy, finally, to have little water on his back and a cookie in his mouth.

Cus is back home now.  With any luck, he's going to be all right and have just the zipper stitch on his belly as the cruel reminder of his folly.  Sherman's treating his younger brother like a baby, loving him up and enjoying the relative calm provided by Stoney's absence and Custer's convalescence. 

Life in Bullyland is back to almost normal.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles