Rufus and Stubbs, our sibling puppies, are burgeoning and diverging. Growing more up and growing more different, both in appearance and personality. It is hard to believe that we could ever have found it difficult to tell them apart.
Rufus continues to be Hyperactive Hound, living at the speed of light, and constantly moving, moving, moving until suddenly, for an eerily quiet period of time, he stops. Drops and flops and becomes comatose for thirty minutes or so. Totally inert. A heavy lump of floppy dog that can be dragged around on the floor by his lead, still asleep, (which is a highly amusing if somewhat questionable activity to watch).
He is always, like “Play with me! Play with me!” to anyone or anything nearby. Dogs, cats, pigs, llamas, people….he’s not fussy. Just so long as he is getting some ATTENTION! Positive or negative, it doesn’t seem to matter. Just so long as he is not being ignored and bored.
And he is very keen to play jump for the stick, chase the stick, fetch the stick, chew the stick. He just loves playing Sticks. The log basket next to the wood-stove, with its plentiful supply of kindling, is a bottomless pit of entertainment for him.
Stubbs, on the other hand, likes merely to find a Special Stick and carry it about for a Very Long Time – which is of course hard for him to do, with Rufus bouncing along next to him trying to play Grab-the-Stick and Run Away. Sometimes he will instead settle for an acorn, which is too small for Rufus to filch from his tightly-clamped jaws. He plods along sedately on his lead, rolling the acorn around in his mouth, like an old man sucking pensively on a boiled sweet.
Indeed Stubbs likes all sorts of small, hard things to nibble at. Little stones, small pieces of wall scrunched from the gap behind the skirting, and – his current favourite best-oral-stimulation-of-all-time – the grout from between the living room floor tiles. His single-minded insistence on digging in certain spots on the tiled floor had led us to speculate whether there might actually be a body buried beneath.
Stubbs is also a water baby. In the way that Rufus loves sticks, Stubbs loves water. He loves to drink it wherever and whenever he comes across it – animal bowls (his or anyone’s), streams, puddles, lakes – consequently pissing with the frequency and gusto of a beer-swilling yob after his seventh pint on a Friday night out with the lads. He is fascinated by it.
And in the small confines of our living room, while Rufus either plays sticks or plays dead, Stubbs either eats masonry or plays in the water. Yes…he actually plays in it. He drinks a little bit, then sticks his nose in it to chase around small reflections and bits of grit that have fallen from his submerged nose, and he BLOWS BUBBLES. Oh how I wish Simon could get a video of the action, complete with the snorkly, burbly noises. It is a Thing of Joy to behold.
