“Foster and Elmo” by Randi Evans

 

I was dreading picking our kids up from school. Our 14-year-old border collie had been missing, and the Humane Society had just called saying that he had been hit by a car and hadn’t survived. I knew the kids would be devastated, as were my husband, Bill, and I.

We had recently moved and thought we had secured our yard. But this was the second time he had found a way out, painting our sadness with a layer of guilt. The worst moment was that evening, when our 12-year-old son tearfully confided, “I don’t ever want another pet. They just die.”

It was seven years before we felt ready again. We had recently lost Bill’s mother, and everyone was in a funk. A puppy might be just what we needed.  We chose an 8-week-old tri-black Australian Shepherd. He had the beautiful full coat of his father, Bud the Spud of Bootez, a fly-ball champion. His mother was Spark of Light, a red merle and a herder. We thought a great name would be Bud Light, but settled on Foster, thinking an Australian beer would be more appropriate.

We diligently took him for obedience training, even entering him in competitions. That ended when Bill came home from a show chuckling and saying that Foster scored top marks, but the handler (Bill) had made enough mistakes to bounce them out of the medals.

Foster

We learned that Foster had inherited his mother’s herding instinct the day we heard shrieks of terror and went outside to find our daughter and her friends being held captive in a corner of the yard. Foster was nipping at their heels if they tried to leave the “herd”. Sadly, we had to quell that natural talent with intense training.

Foster’s best friend was Elmo, a big German Shepherd with a friendly face and one floppy ear, who lived just around the corner. All of the neighbours knew Elmo.  He’d learned that if he jumped against his fence, he could pop the gate open. He would take off for hours until he was led home by a neighbour or returned on his own dripping wet from the nearby creek. 

 I was nervous when we introduced this huge dog to our puppy, but it was immediately clear that they were going to be pals. They had playdates where they ran in wild circles around our yard, attacked our twirling sprinkler and played keep-away with balls and Frisbees. We were amazed to watch Foster brilliantly dodge Elmo’s attempts to catch him.

We learned just how agile Foster was the day he jumped our five foot fence from a standstill. Ahhh. . . agility training might be fun. We were proud of how quickly he progressed, but soon realized our mistake. The better he got, the higher our fence needed to be. 

When he started inexplicably getting out of our yard, we wondered, could he be jumping our new 6-foot fence? The man across the street solved the mystery. He had watched one day as Elmo ran to our fence, jumped against it popping our latch, nudged the gate open, and freed Foster. The two of them headed straight to the creek.

When Elmo was seven, his owners were moving and couldn’t take him. Bill (unbeknownst to me) offered to adopt Elmo. I wasn’t happy, as the dogs’ playtime put my prized azaleas and tender sedum in grave danger. I knew that would now be a daily occurrence. But Elmo needed a home. I rationalized. He was seven. Not that I wanted him to die, but I knew he probably wouldn’t be with us more than another five years. I convinced myself I could live with that. 

Elmo

Besides, it was good for Foster to have company when we were gone all day. And the two of them were great babysitters. The first time we left our 11-year-old daughter home alone in the evening, we returned to find her on the couch watching TV sandwiched between the dogs. Of course, I eventually came to love Elmo as much as Foster, which was a good thing, as Elmo lived to be eighteen.

As compatible as the dogs were, there were major differences. Elmo was a natural predator. We had to check that no squirrel, rabbit, or other creature was in our yard before letting him out. Foster had no such instincts. One day he was under our deck, growling ferociously every time Elmo or Bill got near. This was totally out of character. 

We went onto the deck and looked down between the floorboards to find Foster standing protectively over a rabbit’s nest. There were five babies with their eyes barely open. If one started to wriggle away, he gently nudged it back into the nest with his nose. The wild animal rescue told us to bring the kits in. We locked Elmo up and coaxed Foster away with raw meat long enough to snatch the babies.

One warm summer night, Foster and Elmo had the adventure that eclipsed all others. Our teenage daughter came charging up the basement stairs yelling, “SKUNK! SKUNK! A skunk sprayed the window, and it’s gross.” We rushed outside to see the dogs running around, agitated and confused. The smell was so strong we couldn’t tell if they had been directly hit or it was just in the air. It was too late to buy deodorizers, so we locked them in the garage for the night. 

The next morning, Bill went to let them out and found them sitting motionless exactly where he had left them. Their expressions asked “what were you thinking?” Then a slight motion caught Bill’s eye from the far end of the garage. He was horrified to realize that we had locked the dogs in with the skunk all night. It took us two days to get the skunk to leave, which was a month sooner than the smell.

Of course there were the vet bills, chewed shoes, mammoth hair balls, happy tails wagging mud onto the walls, holes in the yard, trampled tulips and the occasional stolen hotdog. But, as long as we had Foster and Elmo, all of us felt safe, unconditionally loved, and of course, well entertained.

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Randi Evans enjoys travelling, gardening, classroom volunteering and being a grandma. She has always enjoyed writing, but for years found little time to do more than edit or write an occasional article for the company newsletter. In retirement, Randi has written a few picture-book stories for her young grandchildren and is now experimenting with other genres, including memoirs, short fiction and poetry. Randi lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

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