Taking Care of Ginger Blue the Beagle
The first time my husband and I saw the dog we now know as Ginger Blue the Beagle, she was in a twelve-by-six-foot cage just off our walking trail. She was dirty. And she was crying. The only way she could get out of the rain was to creep under a piece of metal that had holes in the top. I went over to pet her, but my husband didn’t want to come with me. He was afraid he would come to love her. And then what would we do?
After that, I started visiting this little dog on a regular basis. Sometimes, when it was raining, I went at night to comfort her. She had dug some holes in the dirt to lie in, but they got muddy in the rain. The rain coming in through the holes in her metal house just made more mud.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was so skinny. And she had ear mites. She was never let out of her cage, and it was quite a mess. So I asked animal control to take a look at where she lived. I was sure the city would ask her owner to make some changes. But animal control said she had food, water, and shelter. That wasn’t good enough for me.
One day, about two weeks later, I bought a doghouse and put a clean blanket inside it. Then I took it to the man who owned the dog he called Penny. He and his wife were watching a game show on TV when I came in, and it was very hard to talk over it. I told him we had made friends with his dog on our walks and that we had a doghouse we weren’t using. We would be happy to give it to him. Would he accept it? After pondering the strangeness of this offer for some time, he finally agreed.
Penny’s owner wasn’t a mean man. He said his son had found the dog, and he was taking care of her. He didn’t know where she came from. He had named her Penny, but I knew right off that name didn’t suit her. One thing bothered me a lot after that visit. The man had said he wanted to breed Penny. I couldn’t bear to see a bunch of puppies living in that dirty cage as well.
Penny’s owner left the doghouse sitting outside her cage for many days. My husband and I continued to walk by the area, and I felt increasingly miserable. I continued to visit the dog and pet her through her cage. Her soft whining broke my heart.
One day the owner put the doghouse in Penny’s cage. I counted it a small success, but the feeling didn’t last. The rain and mud continued to pour into the doghouse, and the once-clean blanket got dirty and wet. I felt like Penny’s circumstances hadn’t improved much with my intervention.
Every time it rained I thought of her, and finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. One day I got my checkbook and some cash. I bought a dog leash. I made an appointment with the dog groomer. Then, unbeknownst to my husband, I headed back to see Penny’s owner. He was eating lunch when I sat down to talk to him in his smoky kitchen.
I told him how much I had grown to love his dog. I asked him if he would sell her to me. And then I waited. The man took a long time to think while he ate his meal. Finally he said, “I don’t think I could sell ’er . . .” (My heart sank.) “I don’t think I could sell ’er . . . for anything less than the $45 that I’ve put into ’er.” It took me a moment to recover, but recover I did. I had been prepared to pay almost any price.
After I paid him, the man helped me get Penny out of her cage and into my car. “She’s not leash trained,” he said. I could see that immediately by the way she ran in all directions now that she was free. She was like a wild animal, sniffing everything. And as I would later learn, when a beagle’s incredible sense of smell engages, everything else turns off, including their willingness to do anything you want them to do.
Finally, I got Penny into my car. She looked scared. I immediately drove her to the dog groomer, a bustling place filled with a cacophony of dogs barking and the smell of wet fur. This was a whole new world to Penny, and she started to shake. I did the best I could to comfort her, then handed her over to the technician with strict instructions to give her a good bath, cut her nails, and get rid of her fleas. I returned a few hours later to find a transformed dog. The dried mud was gone. In its place was a pretty little black-and-rust-colored dog with a white-tipped tail, white paws, and a little white dot on her left side. She sat there uncertainly, a small yellow bandana around her neck.
I then marched her to the veterinarian, where I needed no appointment. He gave me ointment for her ears and gave her a series of vaccinations. He said she was in pretty good health. And judging by her teeth, he thought she was about two years old. The vet talked to her kindly, but Penny was shaking again and wanted only to leave. She was eighteen pounds of determined muscle working her way to the door while I paid the first of what would be many veterinary bills.
I brought her home, but once inside she made a mess on the living room carpet. Given the poor quality of food she had been eating, her deposits were like rocks. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. How often would this happen? I showed her to a sage-colored, oval-shaped dog bed that I had bought for her and placed in a corner of the living room. There she staked her claim, curled up, and went to sleep.
By the time my husband came home, I had moved Penny and her bed to the bedroom. My husband said later that he had suspected something was up. The house just had a different feel to it. Sure enough, as I began to prepare him for our life-changing addition, a little dog with very big ears peeked tentatively around the corner at us.
My husband wasn’t sure we could keep Penny, but he called the apartment owner and we got the green light. After all, we had been good tenants. They even changed the rental agreement to include “one little dog.”
“What shall we call her?” I asked my husband. He thought for a moment. We remembered a dog named Ginger in a cartoon, but we thought that name wasn’t very original. “She is partly ginger colored, though,” I said.
“Remember that little resort town in Missouri that we drive through on the way to Kansas City?” my husband asked. “Wasn’t it called Ginger Blue?”
It was perfect. And from then on “Penny” was officially Ginger Blue the Beagle.
That first night I had to leave to teach a class at the college, so I left Ginger Blue with my husband, not sure what would happen. When I came home three hours later, I found her on my husband’s lap.
“Could you please take this dog off me?” he asked. “She’s been sleeping here the whole three hours.” She had just climbed up and made herself at home, seeking the security she had not had and cleverly cementing her relationship with my husband.
After that, Ginger Blue the Beagle became my husband’s dog. And the chair my husband had been holding her in became her chair. Five years later, we still can’t part with it, dilapidated wreck that it is.
One day, while my husband petted Ginger Blue’s long silky ears (now free of mites) and the rain poured outside, it occurred to me: You know, you can’t take care of every problem. But in this world, it’s a good thing to take good care of one little dog.
Ginger Blue might have agreed, but she was asleep on our bed, warm and dry.
