When Gretchen first saw Booboo at the Dutchess County SPCA, she was the one dog who was being quiet among the many dogs in the outdoor pens. Something about Booboo spoke to Gretchen, and she brought me and our old dog Sally over to see for ourselves.  She clicked with all of us, and we ended up bringing her home that day.  On the drive, we pondered various names and soon settled on Eleanor.


Eleanor was not much of a snuggler but she lived a life of fierce loyalty and obsession with security.  When we would walk through the forest, she would usually walk parallel to our path 50 or 100 feet away in case a wily sasquatch was trying to sneak up on us from the side.  One time I saw her halt in the trail and look with suspicion at a tree root that resembled a timber rattler.  Another time she led me to a buried leg-hold trap intended for a coyote. It was invisible, but I could see something was there and triggered it with a stick.  

There was no danger too scary for Eleanor to engage with.  If tyrannosaurs still walked the Earth, you can be sure I would've at some point encountered Eleanor holding on for dear life to a massive thrashing dinosaur tail. One time a racoon tried to come through the pet door in the middle of the night, and Eleanor racked up a $700 vet bill fighting him off (I later heard that racoon cussing at us from under our house's entryway).  Another time she wrestled with an immature bear momentarily left by his or her mother (that was a considerably less expensive vet bill).  There were also three or four incidents with porcupines and one time in the Adirondacks she encountered a skunk which left the permanent fragrance of burnt rubber on the top of her head.

This is not to say Eleanor was completely serious about everything. One of her pleasures in life was to watch for cyclists climbing to the top of Dug Hill Road.  Our driveway marked the spot where the steep one-mile-long grade suddenly flattened out a bit. Just as cyclists would arrive at that glorious spot, Eleanor would give chase, and the cyclists would have to find another reserve of energy to draw from.

Eleanor always appreciated a good ruin, whether it was an abandoned hotel with an empty pool in the middle of an abandoned bluestone mine or an abandoned auto body repair shop back behind a trailer my mother bought in rural Virginia.  Such places are full of threats that need to be guarded against. One of the last things I did with Eleanor before she died was to explore the ruins of the old IBM facility in Kingston. In among the piles of BNC connectors and eight inch hard drives she found an old glove. Perhaps it had belonged to a sasquatch.