Ghost the Paripatetic

My weekender neighbors S&L came in last night around 10. Ghost and Fritz have been spending major portions of their nights outdoors and raised hell when they passed, which is how I know. So I wondered if Ghost would be around when I woke in the morning.

Ghost has been funny lately, what with the puppy. He never offered any social commentary on Little Bear's arrival, as all the others did. He seemed to accept that the pup was here to stay no matter what he thought about it, and that was that. But he doesn't like it.

At first I thought it was just dislike of the new and annoying. Little Bear can be annoying, of course: He's a puppy. He loves to play, he doesn't yet understand or accept the conventions, he's compelled to chew. If you're an older dog and his idea of fun at the moment is to chew on your tail, well, you might not find that as heart-warming as your human would prefer. That's life. But Ghost's dissatisfaction seems to go deeper than that. At first, whenever the puppy would come around Ghost would just get up and leave. But then Little Bear started paying special attention to Ghost; I don't know, maybe it's because Ghost is smaller than Magnus or Fritz, but Little Bear seems to have adopted Uncle Ghost as his special friend. Since then, whenever Little Bear gets in a "play with me, Uncle Ghost!" mood, Ghost comes to me. Sometimes he climbs right into my lap, giving me the sad eyes routine. At first I interpreted this as "make it stop, Uncle Joel!", something I have no power or inclination to do. But last evening I had a bit of an epiphany concerning his behavior. Ghost likes to be special; he is as I've said very territorial but not really as part of the pack. He wants his own territory and the pack doesn't offer many opportunities for that. So yesterday evening, harassed by Little Bear, he gave me the whine and the eyes and then he went into the lair while we were all outside and climbed on my bed. When I went in a little later for something, he wanted attention. He wanted a lot of attention. And I decided that what he'd really been saying was "you still love me best, don't you, Uncle Joel?"

Now, Ghost makes the trip to S&L's house nearly every weekend but it's usually around mid-day when he hears the power tools and learns or remembers that they're there. This morning he was gone when I woke up. Since I wake up before daybreak, this worried me. He shouldn't be off the property in the dark, for Here There Be Monsters. I saddled up the Jeep and drove out to make sure he was okay. And sure enough, L told me that Ghost had shown up there around 2 in the morning. That's something he's never done before, and I don't much like it.