Icelandics Sheepdogs and when Come means! COME

Hello folks

We are trying to still unpack boxes from our move and get settled in, as some of you know, it took a year to get our house from Iqaluit, Nunavut after we moved down, and by that time, in truth we were used to living with the min look..

Anyway, Last night we found a box of photos, and among the treasures where these two photos, I had this up on the old website, and just had to share them all with you, I figure there are lots of new folks that have never seen them.

So this is the story, we always took the dogs out for their runs on the tundra behind our house, we were right at the edge of town, and so you just crossed the road and you had a couple thousand km of open goverment owned land to camp on, hike on, and at the local sandpit, do Agility at (it was the only place that we could find that was safe for the dogs to jump and land on), so in the tundra, its all valley's and hills, and one of the games that J and I have always planned is fine mom or dad, and or to call the dogs back and forth with their names and come.. its great for teaching a good recall right from puppyhood.

Ok, so we are out hiking, with Lily of the Tundra (our lovely purebred yellow lab), Bella (our Yellowknife all canadian northern Rescue pound puppy) Pineridge Vaskur (Black Tri) and Tofra Tobba (who I had flown to Norway to get the year before), and I am on one side of the valley, hiking the top and Jason had been hiking the bottom, and then came up the trail on the side of the valley, and he realized that he had lily with him but not the other three, so called their names and come.. I was taking pictures of the local area, and just happened to have the camera in my hand, and was able to snap these two photos,

The first one is Vaskur, leaping straight up the side of the valley to go to Jason, and of course this did not work so well, as it was a fairly stiff large cliff, and so, he comes down at a run, does a big circle, and head straight back up, I was so surprised but was able to get one more photo of him 3/4 of the way to the top, and yes, he pulled and scrabbled himself all the way to the top for his pat and cookie from Dad. Bella and Oppa, went to the trail and followed it up to the top..

I am going to put these up at the largest photos setting so that hopefully you can see him in some detail. I have always thought, that surely he used his double dewclaws that day, and showed just how agile the Icelandic would be in Iceland, as the landscape is very much the same between Iceland and Nunvut, Canada.

Barks