The Power of Biscuits

A few weeks after my conversation about dog training with Ann, I brought Willie with me on a writing retreat at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in Rodanthe, North Carolina.  One morning at sunrise the two of us left the cottage and walked across the dune to an empty beach where I let him off the leash.  He seemed delirious with this freedom — the wide expanse of sand and all the intriguing new smells.  Willie bounded away from me like a rocket; running halfway up a dune, then leaping back down to the hard pack sand below and heading for the surf.  Back and forth Willie tacked across the beach ahead of me, chasing sand pipers and eating bits of kelp, rolling in seagull guano and picking up sticks.  I continued walking south along the shore, just out of reach of the foam from the breaking waves, and while he was easily forty or fifty yards ahead, Willie kept glancing back to check my position.  His energy seemed boundless, but after fifteen minutes or so he was clearly slowing down.  So I called out to him.

“Willie, come!”

At the sound of my voice, Willie turned around and raced north, leaping high into the air as he reached me, like a circus dog trained to jump through a hoop.

“Good boy!” I said, reaching into my pocket and offering Willie a tiny corner broken off of an already tiny dog biscuit.  Still chewing, Willie ran away to chase a seagull, to pick up a plastic shopping bag, and to lick and bite the empty shell of a horseshoe crab.  He picked up the crab shell – nearly half his size — and carried it down the beach, looking as if he were carrying a medieval shield.   When he again reached a distance of about forty yards, I called to him again.

“Willie, come!”

With ears flapping and sand flying behind him, Willie ran back to me again, happy and nearly breathless, anticipating another treat.

We repeated this another twelve or fifteen times.  Was this really possible?  Could I have trained my dog in a single morning?

Or had Willie just trained me?