Despite her name, Fiji did not hail from the South Pacific. She was a medium sized German Shepherd cross of some kind, who was fun loving and sweet natured. We had no problems with her during the week she initially boarded with us. She belonged to a Canadian military family. Fiji’s dad was being posted to Edmonton. At the end of the first boarding, he asked if we would take Fiji for another five weeks, until they could get settled somewhere that allowed dogs. We were happy to agree.
Sweet Fiji. Quiet Fiji. Well behaved Fiji.
Unbeknownst to us, Fiji apparently had an evil twin.
She began by going outside into her run and incessantly barking at a noise level that suggested that she was trying to generate a sonic resonance that would disintegrate the fencing and set her free.
We had to close the dog door giving access to the outdoors.
Fiji was not happy with this unwarranted interference with her freedom. We made this clever deduction when we discovered that she had ripped the whole dog door out of the wall, frame and all, taking half the interior siding with it.
“Five weeks you said?” John inquired with a heavy sigh. I nodded.
“Right.”
He disappeared. Back he came with some plywood, screw nails and his drill. In short order, he had installed the inch thick, three foot square plywood slab across the site of the former dog door. He patted Fiji and intoned with conscious superiority, “Let’s see you get through that!”
Do I need to say that issuing Fiji a challenge was a big mistake? She obviously picked up some of the military ‘can do’ attitude from her family. She got to work on the plywood right away. Within a day or two, what had formerly been the nice back wall of a dog room with a dog door in the middle of it, looked like the boarded up shell of a building in a war zone. It was a plywood version of the Berlin Wall, without the graffiti and bullet holes.
And make no mistake, Fiji would have been more than happy to add those decorative flourishes if only someone had issued her a sidearm and a spray can of paint. As it was, she continued her chewing, pulling and wrenching. She gave it everything she had. If the guys in The Great Escape had had Fiji with them, they would have been out of that POW camp in half the time.
Two days after John installed the plywood, I was letting dogs out to play and got to Fiji’s room. No Fiji. My eyes immediately darted to the Berlin Wall. While showing daylight in places, there were no holes big enough for Fiji to have escaped through.
So she couldn’t have gotten outside. She wasn’t visible in the aisle, and the door to the rest of the kennel was shut. Had she been reading Harry Potter and learned to Disapparate?
I looked into the next dog room. It too was empty, but since Amber, the nice Australian Shepherd who occupied that room, was not a wild-eyed maniac bent on world destruction, the dog door there was open to the dog run. I cleverly deduced that Amber was outside. As I stood there, scratching my head as to Fiji’s whereabouts, the flap on Amber’s door moved aside and guess who came trotting in?
If you guessed Amber, you’d be right. She was, however, being shouldered through the door by Fiji.
My initial conclusion was that Fiji must have somehow picked up ninja wall climbing from her military household. Hey if turtles can be ninjas, why not dogs?
Then I examined the wire in the fencing at the top of the three foot wall between the two rooms and realized she had used much less exciting methods, having chewed a hole in the wire and then wriggled through it.
Right. On to Plan C.
We set up a dog crate in her room and decided that she would have to be crated when she was alone. We pushed a soft dog bed into the crate and threw a blanket on top of the crate to drape over the sides. When we next came back, she had pulled the blanket into the crate through the holes in the wire and was passing the time by ripping it into shreds.
John laughed when I suggested she was trying to make a rope ladder. Still.
We mostly felt sorry for her. She was clearly unhappy in the crate and neither of us could bear the thought of confining her that way for over a month.
Perhaps Fiji’s plan all along was to drive us crazy. Because, notwithstanding the insanity of the idea given Fiji’s behaviour so far, we made up our minds to take her to live in the house with us.
We crossed our fingers when we came downstairs the morning after Fiji’s first overnight sojourn as a houseguest. Peace and order reigned. Fiji had reverted to the nice, quiet, well-behaved dog we had first met.
She like her toys and her games.
For the most part, she was good as gold. If you don’t count the window screen that got pulverized when she saw that we were outside without her.
She came barreling through that screen like the Koolaid man crashing through the wall, and leaped on us with joy.
Her general message seemed to be that though we had inexplicably failed to take her with us, we shouldn’t feel too bad, as her combat skills were up to solving the problem.
After that, we took her with us wherever we went. After a while, we even stopped putting her on a stake-out lead. Attached to that tether, she would bark, lunge and make a fine attempt at strangling herself. Left free, she never roamed far from our sides. She loved to play with our dog Taffy.
At night, she would steal one of John’s gloves to take to bed with her.
She still practised her ninja skills though. One morning, I left a ball of frozen homemade pastry on the kitchen counter, intending it to defrost so I could use it for a pie crust for the quiche I planned on making for our dinner. When I started my preparation, it was nowhere to be found. I concluded that I must have just thought I had taken it out of the freezer. Such moments are, sadly, not uncommon with me. I shrugged, changed the menu and forgot about it.
Until I went to bed that night.
I pulled back the covers to find the ball of pastry nestled in my duvet. The plastic wrap was tangled up beside it and the pastry itself was scored with teeth marks. Luckily for Fiji’s digestive tract, it must have remained frozen long enough for her to have gotten bored with it and moved on to the next project. Or perhaps it was just a training exercise, to see if she could get away with it.
When I charged her with this crime, she looked so innocent.
When it came time to put her on the plane for Edmonton, we secured her crate extra well with bungee cords and duct tape, worried about her escape skills. Perhaps, for once, our skills were superior to hers. Or more likely she took to heart our explanations that she was on her way home to her family.
They called after she arrived to say she had gotten there safely. They asked if there had been any problems. They had taken note of the extra packaging.
“Not a thing,” we lied glibly. If Fiji wasn’t talking, then neither were we.