We moved into a house this time, Grandma and Colonel moved into another house just a short distance away.  This was a great place, there were a few other dogs around but with Colonel’s assistance we kept them in line. It didn’t take me too long to locate the trail that John and his friends used to come home from school. I could rarely follow him to school, as almost always he would leave in a small motorboat in the morning. Once I got the timing figured out I would meet him along the trail and we would walk home together. I never took Colonel on these expeditions as I had found a couple of other girl dogs I sometimes liked to visit and I enjoyed the walk home with just the two of us.

  One day however when I met John, he acted odd, he didn’t do his usual little wrestle with me and when I did my special greeting he seemed preoccupied. Well when we got home the mystery was soon solved. He reached inside his shirt and he pulled out a kitten! A kitten for pete’s sake! What did he want with a kitten?

  I ignored it for quite a while and when it came near me I would growl. At first that worked pretty good but then after a week or so he (his name was Tippy) would arch his scrawny little back and hiss at me! So we had sort of a standoff for a while. Then one evening I was pretty tired and I fell into a really deep sleep, I woke up to find Tippy kind of curled up against me with his little head resting on my stomach. I started to jump up and get away but as I looked at him I remembered the time that I curled up with Bernice. I guessed that he probably had brothers and sisters and a mother somewhere, was probably lonely and he was looking to me to protect him.

  What the heck, I already had three to look after plus Colonel part time; one more was no big deal.

  Actually he turned out ok, occasionally we would get into a bit of a game of ‘you chase me’ and his relationship with John was quite different than mine.  As he grew bigger though he developed this habit when we were sleeping of kneading me. It would start out ok but then his claws would start digging in. The purring noise was ok but I never liked the claws and many times I had to remind him of whose bed he was sharing.

  As Colonel got older we kind of grew a part, we stayed friends but he went his way and I went mine most of the time. He had taken on quite seriously the job of looking after Grandma.

  John played with some kids that belonged in a nearby family, they also had a dog as part of their family, I never really liked him although I tried not to show it. He was part shepherd and reminded me of that bully from Lund. I guess you could say that for the sake of our families we kept things under control.

  I enjoyed our time at Garden Bay, I roamed free, I found several lady friends and no tough guys I had to keep an eye out for. Summers were especially great, but even the winters were mild and I don’t remember a lot of rain.

  Earlier I mentioned the Black Cod at Lund, well at Garden Bay once a year there would be a run of another fish that every one called Hake. There was a small bay right in front of our house, actually everyone called it a lagoon. Well those Hake would come in there by the thousands, at first I would pull a few of them out onto the sand, but there was no challenge because for the most part they acted like they wanted to be stranded on dry land. I gave up on them although Tippy would go down there with the seagulls and eat his fill everyday that the run was on. Mom always said that was why he got so big.

  One day when Senior came home I could sense that something was up and as he came through the door I couldn’t help but show some excitement. It seemed he had found us another house and we were going to move over to Irvine’s Landing! And so we did.