I was putting on my boots Monday morning when Monroe started barking.
She is a 75-pounder with a deep voice, so when she starts barking five feet away it gets your attention.
This was a “protecting her territory” bark that seemed out of place in the bedroom.
The hair on her back was standing up, so I said to myself: “This must be kind of serious.”
Back when I raised chickens and turkeys, Monroe and Martin barked a lot.
The poultry attracted coyotes, coons, possums and a gray fox that lived between my house and the North Canadian River.
Whenever dark settled in and the birds roosted, we might have two or three predators a night swing by the house in search of a meal.
I deployed a live trap one spring and caught something like nine coons, four possums, two skunks and my neighbor’s pet cat in a matter of a few weeks.
I made eye contact with the gray fox and a couple of coyotes and there were plenty of stray dogs coming through, so there was a consistently large inventory of predators to bark at.
Martin and Monroe would sometimes forward a bark from a dog down the road, but you could always tell when they had what they considered an active predator on the place.
It was a much more serious bark, similar to the one Monroe broke out in the bedroom Monday.
She was looking in the general direction of the window,but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
It was then that I noticed she was staring at a bag that Kindra had brought.
It was a National Geographic bag and had a nearly life-sized photo of a polar bear’s head.
It was back-lighted enough to make the bear appear three-dimensional and it looked live enough to startle Monroe as she walked past.
The bear didn’t respond to her bark, so Monroe ratcheted back to about Defcon 4, sniffed the bag and went on her way.
I have thought about Monroe and her bear a lot in the last couple of days and have wondered how many times I have done the same thing, misreading a person or a situation and getting myself hyped up enough to fight a bear on a bag.
Probably more often than I care to admit.