The outing started off with gleeful wild turkey chasing (that speedy upright turkey running is a sight to behold) and ended in near disaster with one pooch stumbling around in a droopy-eyed daze. I took the dogs out to Ken-o-sha early this afternoon, but got sidetracked off of our usual dog run when a pack of shrieking eight year olds wandered through with their teacher in tow. We took a left instead of the normal straight and headed toward the mucky backwoods.

All-terraining it through fields of poison ivy in my trusty Homer Simpson “endless bummer” flip flops I goofed around with the dogs for about thirty minutes without incident. The trouble started when on the way back Trammell lagged behind a little ways and didn’t zip up to us like his usual self when I called for him. When he finally did catch up, every five seconds he’d stop and paw frantically at his right eye brow (which looked like it had a small bug bite, but not much else). After a few more minutes I was all but dragging him along by his leash and after he repeatedly lay down in the grass at the woods edge, I carried him the last hundred feet to the car.

Swung by Walgreens on the ride home, ran in and picked up some “Wal-dryl.” Drove home, lay Trammell in the backyard, shoved a couple of pills into the back of his throat and dumped a couple cupfulls of water in his mouth. After fifteen minutes he was still pretty listless, with super white gums and lips so I brought him to work with me just to make sure. He seemed to notice the breeze and tried to stick his head out of the window, but just kind of ended up flopping against me, panting.

Anyway, the short ending is that he made through the night no more problems and I think the lesson learned will end up being no more trips to bug-infested woods for my allergy prone dog until it cools off a bit.