Sam has almost made himself at home here, and it looks like we’re going to end up keeping him. I would never have believed we would end up with three dogs. I have always been a one-dog person, despite having two Dobermans for about a year back in the late ‘90’s.

When my mother died three years ago (Leah and I both have trouble believing that it has been that long.) we inherited Lucy. So, at that point we had one and a half dogs, or, adding up legs and dividing by four, two dogs on average. And now three.

As I have mentioned, Sam came to us a nearly wild dog. He retreated if anyone approached. Zeke brought him up to our house and must have convinced him that we wouldn’t hurt him, because he let us pet him. He literally didn’t have enough sense to come in from the rain. I had to train him to go into a dog house, back when we thought we would have him transported up north for adoption.

For a long time he didn’t seem to understand anything we tried to teach him. It wasn’t like he just didn’t understand, it was like he didn’t even realize we were trying to communicate with him. I have never really trained a dog. My dogs seem to have learned through osmosis. They just seem eventually to get the idea. And, slowly, Sam seems to be getting the idea. And he was house trained from the beginning.

Strangely enough, he is turning into a good dog. When we go for walks, he ranges widely but remains in contact, and he comes when I call (which is more than Zeke does). It’s been so long since I had a dog that I could trust off the leash that Sam seems remarkable. When he first showed up here, he had a bad habit for this household of chasing cats. Now, if he looks a little too intently at a cat, or starts trotting towards one, he stops and comes back when I call him down.

He loves to be petted so much that I can’t give Zeke any individual attention; Sam always figures out and comes trotting in to get his share.

In some ways he behaves better than Zeke. In fact, Zeke is a bad influence. A few days ago Zeke managed to escape through a door that was left open. A little while later we got a call from someone a mile and a half away on Huffaker Road, down at the bottom of the mountain. A woman had found Zeke and Sam running loose on the road. I drove down and met her where she stopped when she saw the dogs. I was amazed that they had approached her and stayed with her, a complete stranger, until I got there. Fortunately it had not been raining, so they weren’t too dirty, but they still needed a bath.

So Sam is getting to be one of the pack, but he still has some strange behavior. If we let him outside by himself, he seems to revert. We have trouble getting him back inside. Sometimes I can get a leash on him, after which he follows meekly behind me. Sometimes I have to take Zeke out kind of like a Judas goat to get Sam to follow us back in. But once inside, he’s back to the same loving dog.

I can’t tell how Sam’s life is going to unfold here, but I guess we’re going to find out.