There’s this strip of undeveloped land a few blocks from my house. The road it’s next to was built a few years ago to feed into the new elementary school down at the end of the road, so there’s only traffic on it during school pickup and drop-off hours. On one side it’s all fencing for the backs of the houses on the next street over, and on the street side there’s a drainage ditch which doesn’t get mowed when the rest of the strip does, so it’s all tall reeds other such plants.
I’ve been using it as an off-leash run for the dogs whenever it’s freshly mowed for a few years, but I hadn’t yet let Artagan run there off-leash. At first because I didn’t trust his recall yet, and more recently because the fencing the first fifty meters or so, which is just a divider before the houses start and has a much busier street on the other side, had been falling down, and I didn’t want to chance either of the dogs heading that way.
But today I saw that that whole strip of fencing has been replaced, so he got his first chance to run off leash and he did such a good job! We practiced some recalls and he jogged right up to me and let me grab him for some congratulatory scritches despite all the intriguing sniffs he’d been sniffing.
Of course now he needs a thorough brushing because he picked up all manner of burrs and seeds.