We arrived at Shoal Lake, Manitoba at the Lakeside Golf Club and Campground at a pretty reasonable time. Shoal Lake is a tiny little community of about 700 people but has a nine hole golf course and boasts the province's official museum of the North-West Mounted Police. It is a cute little log building on the banks of the lake which replicate the original barracks built in 1875. Unfortunately the museum was closed when we were there so all we could do was imagine what it may have been like back then.
As I mentioned previously, we had been warned by John, The Cranky Trapper, that there were a lot of ticks around. The one and only one we found, (embedded in the back of my head), as we said our goodbyes was simply an omen of the horrors we were about to experience. As we prepped our site at Shoal Lake, Julie discovered one of the "seeds of Satan" crawling on the screen door of the trailer. She flicked it out. As I was moving our garbage bag to take it to the trash can I noticed another one on the edge of the garbage bag (could have been the same one Julie flicked off the door, but I suspect it was another). I flicked it off the bag. Then, as we were unloading the dogs, one by one, Jake had one planted firmly square in the middle of his head. I flicked it off his head. We were starting to get a little wigged out at this point. A short while later Julie found one on her leg. As the dogs had all been treated with Simparica (and in my panic stricken state of mind), I was seriously contemplating throwing the ticks onto the dogs, knowing that this meant certain, impending death for them and I would have been doing the world a favor, one tick at a time. However, the still somewhat sane and rational side of me reminded me that this was inherently so wrong on so many levels, and so the frantic flicking continued. We eventually, over the course of a couple of days, found several dead ticks that had obviously bitten the dogs and shriveled up into little, flat pieces of scab-like debris (yes, people, treating your dogs with Simparica does work and I would highly recommend it), found one more live one on Kimba, another on Bandicoot's ear and finally one on Julie's belly! In all our lives Julie had actually never seen a tick and the only ones I had seen were the odd ones that were brought into the clinic to be removed from clients' dogs. And all of these ones had been found in two days!!
The calm nature in which I reacted to the very first tick surprised myself, Julie and anyone who knows me. I am not usually that nonchalant with any kind of bug, especially when it is on my person. When the reality of our situation kicked in and we realized that we were suddenly infested with ticks, this then spurred a more appropriate response. Every tickle, pinch or itch (real or imagined) elicited a blind frenzy of slapping, swiping and generalized chaos (and, yes, a hole in our filters) only to find out that it was a blade of grass or the necklace that we had worn for years and years or the strings of our hoodies. . . Our lives were in a state of constant high alert and hypersensitivity. We then decided that in our hunt for a location to relocate, Manitoba was definitely off the table!
Despite our anxiety, we managed to get in a round of golf. The Shoal Lake golf course is a small, fairly simple 9 hole
course without much golfing expertise required (which is good for me, Julie is a much better golfer). It was a nice hot day and we enjoyed our time walking from hole to hole.
The next day we elected to take all of the dogs for a quick walk. I took Kimba, Jake, Aussie and Mia while Julie had Reba and our old 16 year old Bandicoot. Bandicoot has been starting to show her age over the past few years. She sleeps more and more, is somewhat stiff and shaky at times has gone nearly completely deaf and doesn't seem to see well either. Because of this we were concerned that she wouldn't be able to keep up on walks for very much longer and so a little while ago we bought a small backpack type of pack for her to be carried in when she had enough walking. During our walk around the golf course, Bandicoot started off strong, loping along at the end of her leash, doing more than just keeping up with the pack and even pulling on her leash at times. Julie felt that she would be quite content off leash and run along happily with everyone else. I thought otherwise and warned Julie that should she take Bandicoot off leash, she should be prepared to run. Obviously Julie was channeling her inner "Usain Bolt" when she unclipped the leash. . .
Initially Bandicoot continued on with her little galloping gait. However it seems that this had been somewhat reined back by the attachment of her leash. She happily and obliviously loped ahead, past Reba, past me and all the other dogs and on down the trail. It was cute watching her little 16 year old butt canter off into the distance. We were laughing at the comical way that she was aimlessly running and I then suggested that Julie should go catch her because she was getting a little far away. We were both still laughing, which apparently meant that Julie had less strength and energy to her legs. With Bandicoot's loss of hearing it was necessary to ensure eye contact with her before expecting her to comply with any requests. When she is in a full arthritic gallop some distance away there is no likelihood that you are ever going to make eye contact with her. Julie's only hope to stop her was to be able to physically touch her. I couldn't take the initiative as I was already tasked to the max with the other four leaping and pulling in their harnesses, essentially playing Cat's Cradle with a bunch of Minions, so it was all on Julie. My heart began to sink as I realized that despite her best efforts Julie was being outrun by a 16 year old, arthritic, deaf and mostly blind little Tenterfield Terrier and that said 16 year old TT was oblivious to where, or even why, she was running. To make matters worse, apparently Julie's bladder control was if-y and she was desperately trying not to pee her pants during her pursuit, further depleting her legs of much needed energy. I told Julie to drop Reba and send her back to me so she could focus all of her remaining energy on catching the little free spirit. When all seemed lost and it appeared as though our little old-timer would disappear into the setting sun, something caught her sniffer and she suddenly stopped to smell a small bunch of bushes. It appeared as though the chase was over. . . NOT! Julie had slowed to a walk in anticipation that Bandicoot would look up and realize that she had gone far enough, which she did, and Julie was able to make the much needed eye contact with her. Bandicoot abandoned her sniffing and ran back towards Julie but rather than stopping she deked around Julie's open arms and was off running again! Even if she could have run back to the main pack we had already turned off of the trail she was on and there was no way that she would be able to see us or know where we had gone. It appeared as though the immediate past was about to repeat itself. Fortunately it was a little more short lived and I was able to cut the little devil off at the pass.
That day we realized two things . . . the little carrying pack we bought for Bandicoot was now a useless piece of baggage and that we had just witnessed the emergence of our own little "Baby Gump"
(Click here to see our little Baby Gump - the little blip disappearing into the distance is her)
