Doggie Endless Pool? Sunday Snap

If you've ever owned a Lab, you know one thing about them: they love water beyond all reason and sensibility. We've made a semi-regular Sunday tradition of hiking with some friends and their kids (and our dogs), which gets us all out of the house and into the forest, even on rainy winter days. Their dog is this wonderful big chocolate Lab/Cheapeake Bay Retriever named Sawyer. And of course he LOVES water. Beyond all reason and sensibility.

So today, when we started hiking along Shotgun Creek, he made a beeline straight for the overflowing-with-snowmelt creek. One of the kids threw a stick in and he was beside himself with stick-chasing and swimming joy. The problem was this: the stick got stuck on the bottom, sticking straight up out of the water in the swiftest part of the current. And that dog was going to get that stick, no question about it in his mind.

The other thing you might know about Labs is that they're very single-minded. Once they're fixed on a target (ball, stick, duck), you better not be standing in their way. You will be flattened, logs will be jumped, and raging rivers will be forged in order for them to get to their target. So once Sawyer started swimming for this stick, he was stuck in the current in a kind of doggie version of an Endless Pool. And he was not going to give up. A couple of times the family managed to call him away, even divert him by throwing in another stick. But just as it looked like they might entice him out of the river, back he went for that one lone stick.

Even after we finally got him out and were hiking along the trail, he ran ahead and then cleverly looped back around behind us and went straight back to the creek and that stick. So today's Sunday Snap is the adventures of Sawyer, the dog who puts the "dog" in "dogged determination".