PALESTINE — Millie the wonder dog barks at everything. She will expend the same energy and effort barking at a leaf as at a lion so we don’t know how to gauge the threat level; all we know is she has seen something, and she wants us to know about it.   

If we have been gone a while, Millie sees us driving up from her lookout on the porch. She stares a long time, trying to figure out if we are friend or foe. Soon as she makes sure, she comes bounding down the steps, but does not come straight to us. Instead, she runs around to the end of the house by the garage and just barks like the very devil in the direction of the woods out back. I interpret this to mean: “I have been on duty the whole time you abandoned me here. I have seen large hogs and wolves, coyotes, badgers and skunks coming up the hill but have turned them all back. It might have only been a wood rat or a trash bag, for all I know; but worry not! I will never be caught off guard. I will never abandon my post, even if you leave me here for a century. Millie the Magnificent is on the job! I never sleeps but with one eye open! Hurray for Millie!! The house and surroundings are safe. Ain’t that worth a biscuit?”

I don’t know much about what goes on in the minds of other animals, but I do know Millie remembers all sorts of things, and can call them up whenever she wants. She thought all animals were her friends until play time with the new donkey turned into ‘swing the dog by the tail’ time. Since then, she is the most courteous animal you could imagine where it comes to donkeys. She would give them seventy acres of pasture and throw in a free cat, if they were to ask. Millie avoids tangling with donkeys, and will always defer to them and take the other side of the road, given the chance.

She likes to visit the neighbors when we go feed cows. She trotted off from me and squeezed under a gate across the road the other day, seeing somebody was at home. It’s no use calling her in these situations. She will stay until she is good and ready.  This sort of selective hearing is just like some people I have known, principally wives. I saw the neighbor had two new horses.   Neighbor was out on his porch watching the horses racing this way and that across the field as they explored and  got settled in their new, as yet unfamiliar home. I also saw Millie, blissfully ignoring everything as she wagged her tail at the neighbor’s feet. She was just saying hello, I guess, in dog talk; hoping for the possibility of a pat on the head and maybe a biscuit or two. But the man was not watching Millie, he was watching the two horses who had stopped their cavorting and pulled up short because they had spotted Millie. The horses ran the shape of Millie the white Labrador through their horse computer brains and did not come up with ‘Friendly domestic hound, likes to play and eat biscuits’. All they had on their hard drive was “White wolf -- stomp to smithereens on sight”. I was on the other side of the road and way up in our pasture whistling and calling. In the distance I could see the neighbor on his porch, hands in his back pockets, oblivious to Millie as he watched the horses. Millie was at his feet, grinning up at him and wagging her tail. She didn’t know there were any horses. She didn’t even know what a horse was. But she was soon to learn.  With a snort and a whinny the two animals came thundering across the pasture, noses flared and tails up like flags, dog murder on their minds. Millie spotted the horses and you could see her tilt her head to one side as she contemplated this new distraction. Her internal hard drive worked out the shapes, sizes, noises and smells, as well as calculations of trajectory and arrival as she sat there on her haunches calmly looking. Her canine brain eventually came to the only conclusion memory and instinct could relay: “DONKEYS!  RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!” There was no pause between realization, goodbye, and full throttle. Millie went off like a shot without so much as a wag of the tail to the neighbor.

She made her dash for the safety of home as if a shrimper running for port ahead of an approaching hurricane. She ran like Lassie in the movies, flat out, ears back, belly down close to the ground to present the smallest resistance to the wind. All you could see was a cloud of dust with a blur of paws stretched out through the front of it, a red tongue lapping beside white teeth and the sound of pounding hooves fast approaching from behind.  She ran like her tail was on fire. Her back feet were reaching out farther than her front on each rotation. Millie never slacked nor slowed as she went under that gate at ninety dog miles per hour and shot down the road like a kid coming out of the tube ride at Wet ‘n Wild. She flew right past me standing there calling her like she was deaf and I was invisible. She raced up the road flat out, with never a backwards glance. I saw her make a looping, sliding, drifting left turn at our gate, scooted under, and ran until she was out of sight away down the drive up around the garage. I found her on the back porch, safe in her little doghouse by the utility room. How she got the storm door open and then closed behind her is anybody’s guess, but like I said, she’s a smart dog with a good memory and has watched us open and close it a million times. I reckon she figured it all out on the fly.