The Old-Time River Rats: Tales of Bygone Days along the Wild Mississippi by Kenny Salwey

Author:Kenny Salwey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Voyageur Press
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4. TRAVELIN’ TRAVIS MCTAVISH

“Jumping Jehoshaphat! Is that a dog or a pony?” The animal ran gleefully around the corn crib, past the milk house, down to the garage, then up the hill to turn tight circles around the base of the old, gnarly box elder tree at the entrance to the garden. His long golden hair rippled across his huge, powerful body like a flag on a pole.

I was standing in my future wife’s farmyard in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, when I asked that question.

Mary Kay turned to me and said, “It’s a dog, silly man. His registered name is Traveling Travis McTavish—I call him Travis—and he’s a golden retriever. He’s my little boy, you know.”

Little boy? This dog was a monster! He had to weigh over a hundred pounds, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. His ears probably weighed two pounds apiece!

When Travis finally ran off some pent-up energy, he came over to us. I held out my hand for him to sniff, but he was wary and avoided my friendship offering.

Oh, how he loved Mary Kay. She knelt down, and Travis nuzzled headfirst into her open arms, his big feather-duster tail whipping from side to side. She whispered sweet nothings into his ear, and he smiled happily over her shoulder, big tongue hanging out the side of his mouth trying to get at her cheek.

It was the tag end of summer when I first met Travis. Maybe a week or so later, we loaded Travis and my black Lab, Spider, into the topper-covered back of Mary Kay’s pickup truck for a trip to Rome Pond, a short distance from her farmstead. The day was warm, so we thought the dogs would enjoy chasing a few dummies—the retrieving kind—and a good swim.

At Rome Pond, the tailgate of the pickup dropped and a black and a golden streak of fur hit the ground running. There wasn’t an idle paw to be seen for the next twenty minutes. The two dogs made their selected rounds to stumps, tall clumps of grass, and other points of interest, where they would sniff, pee, and scratch—generally in that order. First one, then the other, over and over again.

Mary Kay and I both wondered, Where do they store all that pee? Then we noticed they were just going through the motions. It was time to call the meeting to order.

We brought out the orange retrieving dummies. Spider knew all about this game—she was a field trial dropout. She jumped up and down in anticipation. I took hold of the foot-long cord on a dummy, wound up, and gave it a heave as far as I could out into Rome Pond. It landed with a splash, and Spider took a running jump off the bank into the pond, laid her body flat out, and began churning water toward the floating dummy.

Meanwhile, Travis had started for the water when he saw the dummy splash; however, he must have caught the black blur of Spider going past him out of the corner of his eye and decided it was too late for him.

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