Many years ago while I owned a trio of beagles and lived in Wyoming, my then-wife and her sister and I loaded the hounds into the back of my pickup and headed for the Snowy Range, almost 100 miles west of Cheyenne, to cut a Christmas tree.
Imagine our shock when we arrived at the Snowies, opened the camper shell door and looked upon a scene where a hand grenade might have exploded. The beagles had managed to pry open the cooler, and had eaten our lunch and scattered the wreckage of sandwich bags, paper bags and chip bags throughout the pickup box.
Still, they sat and innocently looked at us. The pup burped loudly.
"They are mere suspects," I said, trying to add a bit of levity to the situation. "They have not been proven guilty." My then-wife was not amused.
A decade later I was living in Great Falls and married to Laurie. Only one beagle of the original trio had survived, but we had a new puppy - our first Labrador named Bruno.
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When Bruno was four or five months old, Laurie baked a cake and put it on top of the cedar chest. I had an evening appointment, and everyone was in bed when I got home. The cake pan was empty. Gads, they ate the entire cake and didn't leave me a single piece, I remember thinking.
In the morning, everyone had the same sentiment about me. It didn't take us long to figure out what had happened. Bruno had climbed on top of the cedar chest and eaten the entire cake and didn't so much as drop a crumb. He didn't eat his dog food for several days after that. And for the remainder of his 11-1/2 years, he would be known to us as "Bruno-Hog."
Josie, who lived to be 14 years and two months old, came along on fishing trips to Canada on a couple occasions. One time she came to the cabin with a note tucked under her collar. On it was a long distance phone number. When I got home I called the number, got hold of a woman from South Dakota who said her husband was fishing in Canada ... she didn't even know which province, let alone the lake.
She gave me their mailing address, so I dropped the guy a letter and told him about finding the note under Josie's collar. He wrote a letter back to me. I remember part of it: "It is probably best that we did not meet. Your damned dog climbed up onto the picnic table and ate our entire supper!"
That was Josie's final trip to Canada.
Otis, our next male Labrador, was a long-legged fellow so adept at stealing food off table tops and stoves that we called him "The Counter Cruiser." One time Laurie laid out some chicken breasts on a bread board to thaw. She left the kitchen, came back and found four chicken breasts. "I could have sworn I'd laid out five," she said. Twenty minutes later she found three remaining chicken breasts.
"Now wait a minute!" It was indeed, Otis, "The Counter Cruiser" at work.
Lucy has been just as bad, only she doesn't have quite the reach that Otis enjoyed. Lucy loves baked goods. She will steal bread, hamburger or hot dog buns, take the bag to the love seat, rip it open and eat the entire contents. Laurie calls her the "Four Bs" - "Black Bread Bandit Bitch."
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Not long ago I came up the stairs and almost collided with her, sneaking a loaf of bread toward the living room. She cowered when I scolded her and took the bag from her, but she is unrepentant.
Last Christmas our neighbor brought us a banana bread loaf and a cranberry bread loaf. When I went to sample some later that day, Laurie said, "Sorry, Lucy reached up on the counter and stole them. She ate them both. I set them too close to the edge."
I would have liked to know which of the loaves she preferred, but even though Lucy understands a lot of English, she never has learned to speak the language.
