Fragments From Floyd

Okay, Marie. Here 'tis. She challenged me to capture both dog and his butterfly-prey in the same image. Sounds easy. But hey. You try it! As you see, the boy is moving right along--so fast that his back end tends to run up on his front end. One of these days, he'll go arse over teakettle, you can count on it.

To Tsuga, butterflies are his sheep. They constitute his life's work, his purpose, his raison d'etre and the object of his herding instincts. As working dogs, who, as the dog books say, "want to be involved in all family activity", when there seems to be no family activity, Labradors invent something to be engaged in. In our dog's case, it is chasing away the butterflies. Or, as I've told you, it is not so much the butterflies that get him riled as their shadows. In the picture, look where he's looking. It is high noon. The shadow is at his nose, directly under the insect.

The most absurd part of his OPD is this: when he loses the shadow, he has this theory that the creature has gone underground just at that point. As you see here, out yard is pocked with localized excavations just exactly where those pesky burrowing butterfly shadows have disappeared from view. So far, he has not pulled one out from below the surface, where the grass used to be. But it's early in the season yet. You just wait.