When we were ranching, it was more than the horses that kept us on our toes. There were the dogs, too. Lots of dogs. Some were working cattle dogs, some were house dogs, a few were plain mutts and one was a livestock guard dog.
I got the guard dog to help keep the Boy safe. I had gone out on a story about a sheep rancher who used Great Pyrenees to safeguard the flocks from wolves. His dogs were great shy things that wore huge collars with spikes to keep the wolves from seizing them around the throat.
The house we lived in at the time was at the edge of a steep canyon with a tall rock wall behind the house. Early in the mornings before daylight it was common to hear mountain lions up there, grunting their unique sound on the way to the sunny flat spots where they made their day beds.
The Boy was about four at the time, restless and active like a country kid usually is and I worried that he and a cat might cross paths with a poor outcome. It occurred to me that if a dog would fight a wolf for a sheep, it would surely fight a cat for a boy. And the rancher had just been blessed with three litters of 15 pups each. It was a buyer’s market.
So, I brought Rosey home. She was about 10 weeks old, unsocialized and scared of her own shadow. That didn’t last long in our noisy, kidhorse- and-dog filled household. She socialized and grew. And grew. And grew.
We moved about from ranch to ranch, always taking Rosey with us. She was big and beautiful and devoted. She was truly a gentle giant, unless you were a coyote. Then all bets were off.
Her growth finally stopped when she reached 93 pounds. She could easily rest her head on the kitchen counter. Even at that size, she was a joker. I went out into a swirling snowfall one day to snowshoe. I remember thinking the going was awfully tough even in wet, fresh snow. Then I happened to catch Rosey out of the corner of my eye. Her front feet were resting on the back of my snowshoes, essentially skiing along at my expense. I swear she was laughing.
Rosey never wanted to come inside during foul weather. Once, in a sleet storm, the Stranger and our daughter decided to force her indoors. She snarled – the only time anyone remembers her doing so – and went off to sleep in a snowbank.
She was kind and gentle with the barn cats, too. Once, a cat decided it was going to eat from her feed pail. She grabbed it by the head, which disappeared into her mouth.
I said calmly “Rosey, please don’t kill the cat,” and with a look of much disgust, she spit it as far as she could before returning to her feed.
In the spring, Great Pyrenees shed one layer of their double thick fur. Often Rosey would lie on our deck, head in my lap, while I tugged and pulled at her hair with a comb. When she had had enough, she would everso gently take my wrist in her huge mouth and place my hand in my lap as if to say, ‘We’re done for today.’ The process would repeat itself until the heaviest part of the coat was shed.
Her favorite form of entertainment – besides fighting coyotes – was playing with the mice who got drunk on the distiller’s grain kept to feed cattle.
Rosey would lie near the bunk and capture a tipsy mouse between her front feet. It would wobble and stagger until it was almost out of the dog-paw corral, then she would gently rake it back to start its journey all over again. The game would go on for hours until she inevitably put down a paw too hard and the mouse died from the fun.
Pyrenees are by nature roamers and patrol dogs, and Rosey was no different. One day, as she was out patrolling, a snow mobile struck and injured her severely. Somehow the driver got her onto the back of their pickup and back to our house – they were riding with permission on our range – but she died soon after, no time to get to a veterinarian.
She was buried out back of the ranch house, with a big boulder on top of her resting place. For days the Boy and the working dog would sit on the boulder, sobbing and comforting each other as best they could. Even the cats looked sad.
Yet as they sat on that rock marker, it lifted them up to see where the coyotes might be, where the danger was, and it protected them by its very bulk and presence, much like the dog it represented. That rock was almost as big as Rosey’s heart.