Gibby has a new trick

Gibby the snow plow, has a rather frightening new trick - when I'm standing on the back step, he flies around the yard with snow flying everywhere and then aims straight at me at full speed and stops by leaping straight up in the air-right in my face! Whew! If his aim was a little off... ninety pounds flying too fast to imagine - if he hit me at shoulder level I'd be going back into the house through the porch door, the kitchen door, the dining room doorway, and I'd probably end up falling over the coffee table in the living room - or, if I was lucky, I'd land on the quilts and pillows and couch cushions Gibby has piled on the living room floor.

The dogs were all sniffing around very seriously today and I didn't know why until I ran into my friend Bobby in the grocery store. Bobby is the man who hunts with his grandson in my woods. He was very pleased to tell me he was at the farm today and walked all the way back to the woods - it must have taken forever because the snow is at least knee deep and more like waist deep where it's drifted. He had his big black dog with him - Scrappy is sort of a rotweiler/pit bull and a marvelous dog. They got within about five feet of a deer and the deer didn't notice them, and the dog didn't notice the deer. That happened twice before they got to the woods - and then, in the woods, he saw at least a "thousand deer tracks". I thought deer "yarded up" when the snow is deep, but apparently that's not always true.

I can't get back to the woods these days, so it's nice to have a report on it - and now I know why all the dogs were so "sniffy". At one point, when I came out of the barn, I thought I had lost Gibby. He wasn't barking and I couldn't see him anywhere. All kinds of horrible thoughts ran through my mind, the worst being that I had left the driveway gate open and maybe Gibby had run out to the road. The other dogs were perfectly calm, which didn't make sense if Gibby was somehow running around loose. I looked all over, then it turned out he was sniffing the ground over on the other side of the old horse trailer. He must have known Bobby and his dog had been there. I wonder how much of the story the sniffing could reveal.