Last week, we took our dog Chester to be groomed. Because he is half poodle, he grows hair, not fur, so he needs to be trimmed every two or three months to not become overly shaggy and matted. He also gets a bath from his groomer when he is trimmed.
When he gets back, he smells very nice and is especially fluffy, encouraging humans to endlessly pet him and enjoy his soft coat.
The day after taking him to the groomer, we drove up to the Cloudcroft area to enjoy turning leaves and cooler mountain air. Chester went with us, always excited to go in the truck somewhere new.
We found a spot along a gravel U.S. Forest Service road that was great for a picnic. Chester leaped out of the truck and immediately began sniffing the area for new and unusual smells.
He first found what we think was a mound of elk or cow poop and began to rub his face in it before we scolded him to retreat from the spot. Within seconds, he found something else more amusing — a mucky pool of water from a nearby spring that had deep, almost black mud at the bottom.
He always relishes taking a dip and wading in shallow water, although he won’t go into anything deep enough that might force him to swim.
So before we could catch him, he sank all four feet into the muck, drank a sip of the turgid water, then emerged looking like this:
So much for our $85 grooming tab at the dog salon. It looks like someone dipped each of his feet in black paint or tar. Or, except for his floppy ears, he kind of looked like red fox, which has black legs as shown in the photo below.
At any rate, when he got home, he got a second bath in as many days and cleaned up pretty well. I think he enjoyed his first visit to the groomer. He was not happy about the treatment he got from me and my wife when we got home from the mountains. And I’m’ still removing clods of dirt from the back seat of our pickup truck.
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