Category Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

IONA DEBT OF GRATITUDE

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Jack and I went to the shelter to adopt a dog. We walked into the cages, and first on the right was a medium black lab mix. She was not jumping, unlike the blue heeler next to her and the big boxer across the aisle. The one marked “Good with cats.”

Our life required a good-with-cats dog. We are a feeding station for a trap-neuter-release team working on a colony in our neighborhood. Our two house cats have a catio, but outside our back and side yards are little kitty highways with rest stops and diners.

Jack fell in love with the black lab stray, brought in with another dog already adopted. The pair had been running down a groundhog and eating it, and they were covered in ticks and fleas to the point that our girl’s neck was raw with removal and treatment.

We took her for a walk. We walked her around the cat shelter area, including letting her sniff a kitten in the arms of another volunteer. She licked the kitten. My misgivings went away and Jack smiled. He was deeply in love.

So we put in the adoption papers.  Under “any reason you would return the dog” we checked “aggressed or harmed another pet or human at our house,” after a bit of discussion with the two people at the shelter on whether this would slow adopting.

On Monday we waited to hear. Tuesday morning, we drove to the shelter and found our application had disappeared. But the lady working there remembered us. The shelter director had said since we checked that box, he didn’t want to adopt to us.

Well, okay, but….. the lady at the shelter said she was willing to call our references. I dialed both and handed the phone to her, and she gave me something between a bemused and baleful look. She had meant, “I will call them and let you know” but we wanted to take the dog home.

After talking to the references, the shelter worker said, “I’m gonna go with my gut and trust you. Obviously we don’t want you to bring her back.”

Home we went with the dog. In the yard, she moved so fast chasing a cat walking by that she slid out of her collar and leash.

Okay then….. a prey drive is activated by running. We recalculated a few ways to keep our kitty friends safe and made the adjustments. A height extension to the fence—which she jumped the first day. Keeping her on a leash in the house until our cats were accustomed to her, which worked. Keeping her on a leash in the yard until we were sure no cats or chickens were loose in it; we keep our chickens in a pen, but the neighborhood has two ferals who fly in occasionally. Checking the yard worked until Iona jumped up, ricocheted off a shed wall, and knocked a feral chicken down from her roost in a tree some eight feet up.

When I went in the house, Jack was distraught. “We can’t do this.”

The reckoning followed. Jack wanted to blame himself for choosing her. I wanted to delicately yet firmly factor in that Jack is 82. Our beloved previous dog, Bruce, a docile and adorable 70-pound hunk of “I live to please you” in a pit bull’s body, had pulled him over walking because a squirrel made Bruce lose his mind for a second. “Heel” kicked in because we had worked with him, but Jack came home muddy and annoyed, and once, bleeding.

At 50 pounds of livewire, Iona was going to pull Jack over multiple times before we could get her trained. And the training would have to be done by both of us, every day, for about a year. I have what could be described as a demanding job, involving a fair bit of travel. Also Iona was still in the puppy energy phase, yet old enough to have some habits, the worst of both training worlds. Kill to eat. Chase what runs. Jump on the humans and grab their wrists in her mouth to greet them—and she hadn’t learned to regulate bite strength yet.

None of it was her fault. The situation was our fault. Accustomed to having ample resources to take care of dogs (five-year-old Bruce required surgery when he came to us) we never considered that the resources of time, youth, and strength would be most important in training a younger dog.

We should have selected the six-year-old boxer marked as good with cats at the shelter. But we took Iona, confident in our abilities, not realizing that they had dissipated over the last six years as Bruce aged and left us, placid, docile, and cosseted.

So we had to face the reckoning: take Iona back to the shelter and say “you trusted us and you were wrong.” With the additional difficulty of Iona having killed a chicken hanging over her head. We would mark “not good with livestock, will chase cats” and Iona would die in the overcrowded shelter.

Nope.

Plan B: get online and admit failure and ask for help and accept that we would be yelled at for what we already knew was our mistake. We did Plan B.

And got the sweetest surprise of our lives.

Jack and I have rescued cats for about 15 years. All our dogs since our marriage have been rescues, in Scotland and in the States. So when we put our “we need to rehome Iona” message up, people inside rescues began sharing it. And saying things like “these people are smart and kind and wouldn’t rehome this dog unless they had to.” “These are two of the nicest people ever and they recognize the lab energy of this dog will not fit their homestead.” Etc.

We got 4x-removed shares from friends who shared on our behalf. And people were so kind. They identified the problem: these naïve well-meaning people got a lab. They can’t deal with a lab. They are committed to the lab getting a good home this time. They won’t take the lab back to the shelter.

And we got a text message from Barbara, musician and manager with the band IONA. (So maybe she felt a vested interest.) About a decade before, IONA had been featured at the Celtic Festival Jack and I organized in Big Stone Gap, where we ran a bookstore. At the after-party in our shop, their bass player Chuck adopted one of our kittens. He watched the dominant bully cat cuff the little orange butterball off a perch twice, and admired his pluck. Then the kitten walked across a sea of legs to sit on Chuck’s shoe. He had been selected.

The other band members rearranged their instruments and the tubby orange kitten (now named Dylan) went home with the band. Chuck and his wife Brenda (who had been consulted by phone during the afterparty) loved Dylan for years, until Chuck passed from cancer. Brenda continues to love Dylan.

And was prepared to love Iona, we were told by Barbara, and given Brenda’s contact details. A phone call later, we were convinced her fenced yard, loving heart, experience with dog training, and understanding of Iona’s loving heart and lab energy had landed our girl on her four feet.

We arranged for Brenda to come meet the dog, and if all went well, take her home. Enter the shelter. The woman who had believed in us told us we had to bring the dog back to the shelter. We understood: the pattern had a bad optic, someone adopting and almost immediately rehoming a dog. Not a good look.

But she was again gracious enough to listen to our explanation, to understand that we wanted to keep the dog out of the shelter as it was now crowded, and we wanted Iona to never have another chance to endanger her own life by going after livestock. She was going to be a pampered pet in a suburb with a high fence around her very own backyard, free from other animals. Dylan was a couch potato house cat and in no danger from her. It was, in a word, perfect.

For the second time, the shelter lady showed her commitment to animal welfare with flexibility.

Iona has a spay appointment and a thousand chew toys, and a mom who works from home. Brenda has joy in her voice as she describes adopting a dog named Iona from the people who gave her husband such joy with Dylan. (She told us the sweetest story about Dylan climbing onto Chuck’s chest during his final two weeks, comforting him when he felt poorly.)

Jack and I have learned our lesson. Lifelong animal lovers, we recognize the limits—not of our love, but our abilities. We’re gonna give ourselves a month to rest up, and then we will look again, with more discernment, for a dog to match our lifestyle: sedentary, spoiling-ready, small enough to not pull Jack over, with a big bark and a bigger heart.

It is a happy ending. With many options for a newer, smarter beginning.

Day 6: Fish and Ferry Fouls

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The Burns museum the day before set us up well for the shenanigans of Day 6. One of The Bard’s most famous lines says “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley.”

Before leaving Inverary I dashed to the SPAR shop for some Fishermen’s Friends cough drops, famous the world over. And who did I see coming in as I was going out but a familiar face from the Inverary Pipe Band video?! One of the drummers gave me a smile and nod. But there wasn’t time to converse. The tour was waiting for our day out in Glencoe and the long drive up to Oban so we could take the luxurious Isle of Mull ferry over to, well, the Isle of Mull, and spend the night in the harbor town of Tobermoray.

Glencoe is a world-famous story, but there’s a lot of rubbish added over the generations about Scots and English, Catholics and Protestants, and what a hero/cad Charlie (as in Bonnie Prince) was. It’s complicated; even in the 1600s being late for a meeting and not having your paperwork filled out could result in tragedy—in this case, 38 deaths.

Short version: all the Highland clans were required to sign an oath of allegiance to William of Orange (as in the guy from William and Mary College) by Jan 1, 1692. The MacDonald chief arrived late to the wrong place. He had to go from Fort William to Inverary (where we had spent the night last night) and got there Jan. 6, begging to sign the oath. Told everything was okay once he’d signed, he went back to his clan. A few weeks later, 120 soldiers showed up to be garrisoned in his town. Well okay, Highland hospitality is legendary and the soldiers weren’t causing any harm. The MacDonald chief took some people from the Campbell clan into his house. What he didn’t know was that on Feb. 12, a letter arrived telling the commanding officer to “extirpate” everyone under 70 years of age.

Here’s another thing about Scottish hospitality: it is sacrosanct. Nobody can survive outside on a mountain in the winter in Scotland; people were obligated to take each other in, and when you shared a fire and a meal with people, you were obligated to be at peace with them. Otherwise the world would fall apart.

Which it did, because at 5 a.m. the commanding officer killed the MacDonald clan chief and several of his sons; the wife and youngest son escaped as the garrisoned soldiers set the village on fire.

Many people escaped, although it’s not known how many died running through the snow up a mountain slope to get to Appin. Another group fled into a place called the Lost Valley and hid there.  

The ones that did escape were probably warned by the soldiers billeted in their houses. One story goes that a child heard a soldier telling the family dog quite loudly that he shouldn’t sleep in the house that night, it might be bad for him if it caught fire. Another story says a piper from the visiting regiment went out on a hillside and played a funeral dirge. Who knows, but the fact that 38 people were killed in a village of more than 200 suggests that even official orders couldn’t change the Highland code of ethics for some of those boys.

The aftermath of Glencoe’s Massacre was the destruction of the clan system, which had been the strategic plan all along. If you couldn’t trust Highland hospitality to hold, you may as well barbeque a human and eat flesh. Life as they knew it was over. So the Highland Chiefs did what American parents did during the Civil War: divided up their sons to ensure family survival. Oldest sons went to London to get educations and understanding of the new world order under William. The others stayed on the land, until their brothers’ sons came home Englishmen in thought and deed and told everybody to clear out and make way for sheep farms. The line from the Massacre to the Highland Clearances is a straight one.

The interpretation center tells the tragic story in more detail, but also highlights the Glen as a national historic preserve with unique layers dating back to the ice age. https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/glencoe/highlights/visitor-centre

Everyone was deep in thought as we drove on through scenic mountains to Oban, where we arrived early enough to catch the 3 pm ferry. Alas, the car before us got the last berth so we had to wait until the 5:30 sailing. No matter; that meant we could ransack the delectable chocolatier, plus the only charity shop Oban had. Cassidy and I spent a happy hour in there and returned to a van groaning with chocolate from the rest of the group’s purchases.

Which turned out to be fortuitous. The ferry broke down. Goodbye, Isle of Mull with its luxury bar and restaurant. Hello, small old rusting thing with a coffee vending machine grabbed from somewhere that transported fisher folk and sent to us for 6:30. By the time we got to Tobermoray, we were all a little tired.

So finding the hotel had muffed the room arrangements made me downright cranky. The 20-something behind the counter put on a facial expression that said louder than any words, “I don’t get paid enough to deal with American Karens” and the battle was on. Finally I said, as patiently as I could, “Madam, the bus driver you are trying to put in a double bed with this young lad has known him four days. That’s a little soon for them to be sleeping together, don’t you think?” And the tour members burst into laughter. So did the child behind the counter—and then she fixed the room arrangements.

We meandered Tobermoray for an hour since they couldn’t give us dinner until 8. Sigh… another hazard of the late ferry. But everyone was in good spirits when we sat down to—

–the worst meal in the history of Scottish cuisine. Five of us had ordered the hake. We received bowls of baked beans with a potato halved atop the beans and a whitefish filet on the potato. It was, in a word, vile. So vile, even Gareth wouldn’t finish everyone’s portions. We began to laugh and come up with names for this inventive dish. Sculpt it into shapes. Anything but eat it.

Fortunately, there was sticky toffee pudding for dessert. And everyone still had loads of chocolate from the sweet shop. And the hotel had a lovely bar.

People waddled off to bed a little later that night. Did I mention the hotel had a lovely bar?

And darkness fell about 2 in the morning, because we were farther north now, and we slept.