Flying beagles at the dog park

Weather permitting, I've been taking Bruno to the dog park for a spell every day. He's figuring out how to be a dog, after spending the first year of his life mostly in a crate.

He's made a pack of friends. There's Dexter the golden doodle. Buster the miniature terrier. Cooper and Lilly. And a couple of beagles, Tilley and Grover.

The beagles aren't a quarter of Bruno's size, and they are super fast. They delight in getting the big boy to chase them, and then deke him out at the last second. When he gets his 120 pounds to full speed, he's not very agile in the corners. This can lead to ass-over-teakettle tumbles.

After about fifteen minutes of non-stop romping, he'd had enough. He flopped, exhausted, on his side.

Whereupon Grover flopped right in front of him, nose to nose, pawing his snout, goading him into another run.

Meanwhile, Tilley circles wide, comes at them full tilt, and launches over the both of them. She must have caught a good four feet of air and cleared the two of them with room to spare.

I briefly owned a beagle, Nellie. She too was a rescue. She was a loyal and faithful dog... until it caught a scent. Then she was gone. We rented a cabin one year up on the French River. She disappeared the first day. 

We put up signs and asked around. She'd found her way to Port Loring, a good fifty miles away, where she spent a couple of days in the cab of a high-hoe, whose operator had found her at the boat launch near our cabin.

From there she found her way to an island resort. We were at the dock when a load of folks from Ohio disembarked. She'd been the toast of the resort for the past three days. They had re-christened her "Peaches."

So I was well acquainted with Beagle wiles. But I had never seen one fly until today.