Ghost likes to keep an eye on his stuff.

And our whole hollow is his stuff. It keeps him busy.

As far as I can tell, Ghost turns eleven sometime this year. Might possibly be twelve. He’s not a very big dog, he’s not a very purebred dog, so ordinarily I’d expect to get another three or four years relatively active life out of him easy. But he has had a lively life, and it’s starting to show. His shoulders pain him if he lays down for a few hours, especially after an active day. He can walk it off and he never whines about it, but it’s there. Age is creeping up on my buddy Ghost.

I saw him on his favorite wash-watching perch, an old straw bale next to the driveway, while I did my morning chicken chores. Then while I took in the last of yesterday’s laundry, he came over to keep me company in his favorite ridge-watching perch.

Usually he moves around the property without making a sound, in the sun or the shade as the mood strikes him. Sometimes he spots something that needs to be chased and/or barked at, but then he comes back to the yard.

He used to be a lot – a lot – more aggressive about it, to the point where I worried about him. He was a bull-baiter, a truck-chaser and a tire-biter and he loved to fight. Injury meant nothing to him. Back when there was a pack of dogs, he was the one who couldn’t be counted on to come when called. He still can’t, though he’s more likely to now. In truth he wasn’t always the ideal watchdog but he did have the virtue of always coming straight home after the adventure. He was never an idiot about it like somebody else I could name, so it wasn’t necessary or even desirable to keep him confined.

Except in one particular: When he was young, he hated being under the thumb of Magnus, the undisputed Alpha Dog. Really hated it, to the point where he would actually resist discipline with violence. Given that Magnus made about five of him and brooked no insubordination, this did not work out well. Ghost settled the issue by provisionally moving away – when our weekender neighbors S&L came up to work on their homestead, Ghost would nearly always sneak off to spend the days with them instead. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his people or even his packmates, he just wanted to be the dog and over there he could.

He’s been doing that since before I moved here, and he does it to this day. And now, after more than ten years of preparation, S&L plan to actually move in. We’ve discussed the matter of Ghost, and decided that there’s really nothing to do but let him decide what he’s going to do. There’s no stopping him in any case, other than locking him up permanently and it would be kinder to kill him. It does no harm, they don’t mind and as far as he’s concerned I don’t really get a vote, so there it is.

It’s possible he’ll turn it into a commute, but really I expect to lose him in another month or two.