Hound dog guilty for doing what comes naturally

In all honesty, we set the poor boy up for failure. From the moment we discovered “coonhound” in the fortuitous stew of genetics that created our mutt Frankie, we've sought to honor that heritage by asking him to work his nose at every possible opportunity. One of our favorite drills is to command him to sit for a moment in the kitchen while we dash off to another part of the house to hide a treat. Once the prize has been set, we turn him loose with the command, “Find it!”

Our Border Collie Juni, rest her soul, would handle this same process by carefully observing in which hand we were holding the treat, watch the direction we turned while leaving the kitchen, tabulate the number of steps we took and take careful note of the creaking of floorboards as we traveled. She would then calculate the exact location of the treat before even taking a step. Frank simply glues his snout to the ground, closes his eyes and flips his nose to autopilot. He finds it every time.

He loves it, we love it and it’s become one of our favorite parlor tricks when guests are over or grandchildren wish to be entertained. I’ve tried to transition Frankie to locating things of value outdoors, in particular the shed antlers of deer on the forest floor, but so far he hasn’t made the connection. “Find it” has become little more than the precursor to a treat, and while antlers make for an entertaining chew, you can’t gobble them down in one pleasing gulp. One advancement in his training did become apparent over the Easter weekend, however. Frankie no longer needs to be cued for his start. If there is a treat to be found, he’s going to find it!

Staying the night at our daughter’s place, we watched Charlotte and her husband Andrew stuff plastic eggs with jelly beans and chocolates before they carefully hid them all about the first floor in anticipation of the wake-up and subsequent crack-of-dawn Easter egg hunt of our grandsons James and Max.

As Kristin and I prepared to head to the basement guestroom, Charlotte eye-balled Frankie with not entirely undeserved contempt. (Frank does possess a short, although colorful, rap sheet.)

“And how are you going to keep that mutt from eating all these treats?” she said.

“Are you kidding me?” Kristin responded. “Frankie never leaves our side during the night!”

“Right, well you’d better keep him locked in the bedroom with you just in case,” she warned. “I know what he’s capable of.”

Her house, her rules. We kept the door shut all through the night, even though Frank spent it as he always does — by taking up far more than his fair share of the mattress real estate between us. He remained in this spot until his routine daily wake-up at 6:01 a.m., at which time I trotted him upstairs, administered the requisite scoop of food and sent him out the door to take care of business. Barely awake for the ritual, I dozed at the door before ushering him back inside. Then I plopped down on the couch to await the Easter morning onslaught.

By and by I dozed off to dream of ocean waves breaking along a shore filled with seashells, hundreds of sea shells, loudly washing against each other with a clack and clatter oddly similar to the sound of plastic eggs being ham-handedly crunched open.

I woke to find Frankie stretched happily amid a sea of gutted plastic eggshells and foil candy wrappers — a still-intact purple egg sticking out of his mouth!

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.