As protective and fierce as Lobo could appear, sometimes he was a big baby.
He must have heard Thunder speak to him like a great god who came ripping over the mountain growling and barking with a voice big enough to send him under the dining room table or huddled behind my office desk. Our Tucson monsoons are convincing for sure, but no amount of reassuring made them easy for him.
Jon made a big mistake when Lobo was a scared puppy who refused to venture into our swimming pool: he threw him in. From then on, Lobo would run along the edge barking at the water we’d splash up at him. He’d wade onto the first step and lie down there at the end of a long, hot walk in the desert. But no amount of cajoling would convince him to go deeper. He never blamed Jon; the trauma had been inflicted by the Great Pool God, who had sucked him in and pushed him under. For some reason the Pool God did not scare humans, but that was probably due to their stupidity.
Unfortunately, one fear Lobo had to learn from experience was his fear of rattlesnakes. One day when Jon was fortunately home, he heard a yelp unlike any he’d heard before. Lobo came inside foaming at the mouth, and hid under the dining room table. Jon could see two fresh pinpoints of blood on his nose. Clearly, Lobo had gotten overconfident.
After a couple of phone consults with neighbors who had various home remedies, Jon called the animal emergency hospital. “Don’t give him any antihistamine. Don’t give him anything; just get him here,” they counseled. $1800 and two vials of antivenom later, I picked him up the following morning. In this case, weighing 120 lbs. had been an advantage.
We decided that just in case he hadn’t gotten the message (after all, he still chased coyotes, mother cows and the neighborhood hawk), we’d give him snake training. We met the snake trainer out in Oracle, where he parked his truck full of penned rattlesnakes he had de-fanged himself. We’re talking the wild west here.
First, he put one of those evil Collars on Lobo, so that he could shock him if he didn’t pass every snake test: sight, sound, and smell. He put a wriggler down and took Lobo on a leash nearby. He turned around and ran; it was a pass.
Then he put a rattler in a burlap bag and annoyed it somehow, so that it rattled. Lobo got it. (Anything to avoid that Collar!)
Finally, he hid the bagged snake underneath Jon’s truck and called Lobo, unleashed, over toward the truck. Lobo leaped into the truck’s open window. An A+.
After that, on summer evening walks, we’d have Lobo lead, which he always did anyway. If he veered off the path, we followed him. In addition to being an amateur cattle herder, a rabbit population control officer and a coyote wrangler, Lobo was now a certified snake guide. When we’d find one in the yard, Jon would use our long snake tongs to hoist it into a big bucket, and he and Lobo would drive it a few miles away to vacant land and give it a new home.
And Lobo wore his snake nose tattoo proudly, probably figuring it was a badge of courage. We never had the heart to tell him that we saved his life, probably for the second time.
