Happy - Part Six

Happy the dog had several things he loved, besides us of course.

He loved my cat, Kitty Puss. (You can read about the fabulous KP and see pictures of him too!) When we brought Kitty Puss home Happy claimed him by licking him until he was literally sopping wet. He carried the cat around by the head. I mean Kitty Puss's entire head was inside Happy's mouth....They often slept together. After KP died Happy never let himself get close to another cat. He tolerated others we had, but for the most part he ignored them.

Happy hated (oops this is supposed to be about things he loved...be patient) burrs. If he noticed burrs on our socks or pant legs he'd lie at our feet and patiently pull them off. He'd pull off a burr and shake his head to fling it away. The only problem in pulling off burrs is that it made his mouth water which meant wet socks. He loved pulling off burrs.

He absolutely loved to roll in smelly, stinky stuff.

He loved to sleep in the sun. He fall asleep sitting or standing up. Here are the pictures to prove it.
At about a year old.

At ten or eleven. Notice he is on his chain. Which meant he was off duty. Sometimes, particularly when he got older, he would go lie down by his chain and place himself off duty.

He loved to leap. He probably inherited his leaping abilities from his father, who as I mentioned earlier, could, without taking a running start, leap from the ground straight into the back of a dump truck (not a pick-up truck, a dump truck.)

Happy was quite the hunter and loved to catch rats and mongooses.

This leads into his greatest love of all, riding in the jeep. All we'd have to say is, "Jeep?" and he'd start to prance and dance and get all excited and leap into the jeep. He would drape himself across whoever was sitting in the front passenger seat, hind feet in the space between the seats, head and a goodly portion of his front half stretched outside sniffing the wind, floppy ears flapping, tongue lapping at the air. More than once he was able to combine his love of leaping, jeep riding and catching mongooses. More than once he launched himself from the lap he was draped across, flew through the air and caught a mongoose on the fly. No joke, it's true! Granted in those days we went between 15 or 20 MPH rarely doing more than 25, but still, he loved to leap from the moving jeep.

In time we all learned the "feel" of him when he was about to leap out of the jeep, something that happened so fast it was near impossible to stop it. His body would get tense, his hind legs becoming tightly coiled springs, his front paws pressed against either the side of the seat or the side of the jeep and POOF, he'd be flying through the air. It would have been dangerous to him if we had tried to stop his momentum, so we just let him go. Our task was to protect ourselves from his iron clawed paws that would dig into our legs as he sprang out into the air.

He was a flying dog. "Who needs wings when I can leap great distances in a single bound?"