Brownie the Hound Dog: Farm Stories

♪ Foggy Oak Farm ♪♪ Foggy Oak Farm ♪♪Come on down to♪♪ Foggy Oak Farm ♪- Hi friends. Welcome to Foggy Oak Fairy Tales. Each week, we'll bring you a new story. Some weeks, we'll share a story based on what's been happening on our real-life Foggy Oak Farm, where we have all sorts of animals and adventures. Other weeks, we'll use our imaginations and create new adventures together. I'm so glad you're here. This week, we have a story about Foggy Oak's first dog, a brown and black-hound dog mix named Brownie, who came to us after she was found running along the side of the road by relatives in Ohio.

Brownie thought she should be everyone's friend, or mother if it was a baby animal, and could be counted on to sneak into your lap if you weren't watching. Above all, Brownie was a runner. Let's see if we can catch up with her in this week's story. True to her nature, Brownie was found running, emaciated along one of the long flat roads of northwest Ohio by my cousin, who was driving home. She pulled over and coaxed the very hungry dog into her car, noting the way the dog's bones showed starkly through her short, light brown coat.

When my cousin pulled into the horseshoe-shaped driveway of their farm, the dog had already attempted to crawl into her lap to cuddle several times. Brownie, as she almost immediately became known, was an inveterate lap bandit. If you were sitting down and Brownie was somewhere nearby, she was going to slowly methodically and inexorably make her way onto your lap. To be clear, Brownie was not lap dog sized. We think she was a black mouth cur mix, which is a kind of hound dog. That meant she was about the size of a Labrador retriever, had a mostly brown coat with a long dark brown fading to black muzzle typical of a hound dog, dark brown ears, and some light splashes of white fur on her chest and belly.

As a dog about the size of a Labrador retriever, Brownie was never the right size for being a lap dog, but she was fully convinced that was where she was meant to be. So what did everyone know about Brownie at the beginning? We knew that she appeared to have been abandoned by the side of the road after raising a litter of puppies. That she had been ranging lost for some time, and that, in spite of whatever she had been through, she had the sweetest temperament imaginable. My cousin and her family looked for an owner missing a hound dog just to be safe.

It was, of course, possible that Brownie had run off, not that she had been abandoned, but no sign of her former owners was ever discovered. She quickly fit in well with the rest of the dogs on my cousin's Ohio farm, but they wanted a permanent home for her. That fall that they found Brownie was the same year that we bought and began settling into foggy oak farm, and at our wedding, which we held at our new home, my aunt mentioned they thought Brownie would fit in nicely here. By that winter, we were feeling ready to add a dog, and we're thinking more about that sweet brown dog, my Ohio relatives, had identified as a perfect match for us.

In January, over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, we met my aunt, uncle, and cousins at my parents' house in Westerville, Ohio, to pick up Brownie and bring her home with us to Virginia. Now, Brownie, she likes to run. My aunt cautioned as they handed us the leash. Sweetest dog in the world, but you have to keep an eye on her. If she has a chance to bolt, she will. We laughed. We'd had dogs like that, we thought, who liked to go for a brief joy run around the property, and then would completely home when they were out their energy.

We weren't particularly worried about Brownie's tendency to bolt. On the way back to Virginia, Brownie happily crawled into my lap, getting heavier and heavier as the car ride went on, but behaving very nicely as we left Ohio and returned to Virginia and foggy oak farm. Brownie seemed to make herself at home quickly. Her preference was to crawl up into bed with us, and if she could wedge herself between us. If that wasn't permitted, she would settle for sleeping at the foot of the bed, be grudgingly.

We soon learned that Brownie loved to go for runs with us, so we'd take her across the street to a gravel road that ran along a series of lovely old farms. Brownie's favorite was a farm at the top of a tall hill that had Donkeys. I don't think I was aware just how much most Donkeys hate dogs until they came charging at us across the pasture, screaming and braiding in anger. I knew in a distant way that Donkeys are used to protect flocks of sheep, goats, and chickens, and those kinds of livestock from predators, especially coyotes and foxes and wolves, but I had never seen that drive to kill enemies in action, and those Donkeys wanted to stomp Brownie.

Brownie, who was oblivious to the murderous intent of the charging Donkeys, was just wagging her tail happily. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. We yelled at the Donkeys as we dragged Brownie away. From then on, we crossed to the opposite side of the street, and tried not to make eye contact with the Donkeys when we passed by with Brownie. But it wasn't always enough to prevent angry, braiding, and a rapid approach from the offended Donkeys. Brownie always thought that was great, since she lived in perpetual hope of becoming friends with them.

She was sweet, but perhaps not very smart. At that time, we didn't have much fencing on the farm. We had just a couple of pastors by the barn, Benston, and the fencing wasn't entirely secure in one of them. It was fine for animals, like sheep who don't have a strong desire to explore and escape, but it was not fine for an exploration oriented lady like Brownie. We closed off the patchy pasture, and the pasture adjacent to the barn became Brownie's romping grounds. At this point, we had a cat and a handful of chickens and guinea's, so Brownie made friends with all of them, and had her daily romps in the barn pasture to wear it out some of that hound dog energy.

I don't know if it was awareness of the Donkeys, her own desire to run, or a naturally miscevious nature, but we quickly discovered that Brownie could not be trusted with an open door. You'd step outside briefly to toss the trash into the big garbage bin, and Brownie would have snuck up on you like a shadow and bolted across the lawn down the hill and towards those darn donkeys. I learned that chasing her was absolutely no good. She would pause, look back over her shoulder at you with a huge grin, and then when you started forward with a yellow brownie, she would be off like a missile delighted with having tricked you and gotten you to chase her.

Because we are up on such a tall hill ourselves, and it takes a long time to walk safely down it, unless of course you're brownie, dashing at breakneck speed through the woods. We learned it was fastest and most effective to grab a leash and some treats and get in the car to drive down to the bottom and wait for her to emerge. Sometimes she'd come to you. Sometimes she'd utterly disappear. Once, when she had zipped past my husband at the back door, we found her panting by the side of an extremely fast road, unsure how to get back across to us.

In April of the year we brought her home, we had a gigantic snowstorm. We got over two feet of snow all at once. In southwestern Virginia, that is not a trivial amount. Our infrastructure is simply not equipped for it. We were utterly snowed in, and we hadn't yet sorted out any way to clear our long, huge, hilled driveway in the event of major snow. So we were functionally trapped. We decided there was no way brownie would try to run away in that. And she did love the snow, especially jumping at snowballs we tossed to her, so we let her out with us.

She developed a method of hopping above the snow, landing back in the snow up to her back and repeating the hops. It was very funny, and we were enjoying some snow time with her when we saw her donkey sensor go off. She had a particular way of cocking her head and lifting her ears while breathing in. You could tell she was gearing up to run away and try again to make friends. Brownie don't even think about it. I muttered lunging for her collar, but before I could wrap my hand around her collar, she was gone like smoke.

My husband reached for her two as she shot past him, leaping and crashing through the deep snow. When she got to the crest of the hill, leading down into the woods, she did her signature look back at us with a merry expression on her face. Brownie, we both yelled, slogging forward as fast as we could through this snow. She gave us one more smiling glance and then was gone, down the driveway and out of sight. There was no chance of getting a car to her this time. We can only hope that the deep snow would also prevent traffic from being too bad.

We knew right where she was headed. I ran inside for the leash, handing it off to my husband to then treached off to retrieve her. Half an hour later, they both returned. He had followed her down the hill across the snow-covered main road to that gravel running path where he came upon her justice. She was creeping closer to the fence line to try and find the doggy's. Brownie looked pleased with herself and very happily worn out. My husband David was exhausted from the hike to find and return her in the deep snow.

Brownie didn't go outside the fence without a leash after that. In the spring, we learned that Brownie considered herself not only a friend to all other animals but a mother to baby ones. When we brought home our first chicks, Brownie was there, whining and worry at the peeping and trying to mother the little babies as we situated them in their pen. When we added baby goats, Brownie did the same, sticking by them like glue and following them around the barnyard. One night, when we had the baby goats, it got very cold and we brought them inside to be safe.

We attempted to fit them with baby diapers since at that point I was pregnant with my first daughter and we had some in preparation for her. The goats ran all over the house up and down the stairs on the furniture and Brownie was there with them the entire time, making sure they stayed safe. If we thought she liked to mother baby animals, it was nothing to how she was with our daughters. She worried over them constantly. If our oldest daughter would cry, Brownie would dash over to her and begin looking reproachfully at us for allowing her a moment of discomfort from a wet diaper.

If she couldn't be calmed when we were changing her or feeding her, Brownie would begin whining at us and worry. She knew she could do a better job than us. But of course we were the ones with hands, so she only had her voice and her eyes to offer in judgment of what she deemed our subpar parenting. Once my daughter caught a very bad flu and had a high fever for days. The doctors told us everything we should do, but a lot of that was staying with her while she slept and giving her fever reduces periodically to try and break the fever.

Brownie was beside herself with worry. She placed herself right next to our daughter and would not be moved, convinced that her presence alone was going to provide the cure. Perhaps she was right, our daughter soon recovered and Brownie seemed very pleased with herself. Now for every sweet nurturing moment, Brownie had her share of silly ones. In addition to her pension for running away, Brownie delighted in pulling trash out of trash cans. If you left the kitchen trash can unattended in the pantry, Brownie would slink silently into the kitchen and pull every piece of trash out, spreading it in a truly impressive array all across the kitchen.

We thought we learned our lesson and began closing the pantry door consistently, but every so often one of us would forget and waltz back into the kitchen unaware only to be greeted by an absolute mound of garbage. Brownie always got very embarrassed if she saw you happen upon her trash mountain. She put her tail between her legs, tuck her head and look up at you more and fully. I would never how could you accuse me. Her eyes said, "Listeners, I tell you, she could and she did." The next thing we added to the farm, a trash can with a lid.

When we finally added fencing around the house so that Brownie could go outside, we'd often leave the screen door. When we finally added fencing around the house, so Brownie could go outside, we'd often leave the screen door open to the back porch so Brownie could come and go as she pleased. However, some days it was buggy and we'd shut it. One day, David's family was visiting the farm and we were all on the back porch and joined the nice weather. His brother had slid the screen door closed behind him as he came out, but Brownie, eager to reunite herself with everyone outside, had dashed forward from the living room without noticing the closed screen.

As we saw her charging towards the screen, I called out Brownie the screen up, but I'm not sure why I thought that would help. Brownie ran headfirst in the screen door with a"womp" and bounced backwards, looking entirely perplexed. You may not be surprised to hear that this was not the last time Brownie utterly missed the screen door being closed. And after a few months of mishaps, we accepted the inevitable and removed the poor abused screen door entirely. With Brownie's habit of crashing into it, there was no point.

With the new fencing, Brownie had plenty of space to run all day as much as she pleased. And the summer after we added Brownie, we also added a 10 week old great Pyrenees puppy we named Shepherd or Shep for short. While Shep, who was a great protector and ran off bears, definitely deserves his own story. I will share that one of the first things he learned from Brownie was how to run away. Even with many acres, the fence, deart and woods to run in, Brownie still looked for opportunities to go find those plastic donkeys.

One day my brother was visiting and had let them into the barn pasture. He opened the stall door to leave himself and didn't realize that Brownie shadow dog that she was would slip right past him. Suddenly, she was bolting off across the pasture with a great peer puppy close at her heels. We rounded them up, but we could never trust Shep near gates or stall doors after that either. He had learned from Brownie what it was to run. I've had many a sweet and adventurous dog in my life on two farms, but I've never had one quite like Brownie, who was convinced that every animal should be her friend and was willing to run as long as far and as many times as it took to accomplish those friendships.

She was a lap and vating, deeply loving and slightly strained canine, and we could never have asked for more. The end. Remember, your part of the story, too. What did you think of this story? What did you imagine when you were listening? We'd love to hear your part of the story. If you and your grown-up want, you can share your thoughts or a picture you drew with our Foggy Oak podcast family. You might find it easiest to share with us on Facebook at Foggy Oak Farm. But we have lots of options on our website, Foggy OakFairyTales.com.

You can also check out pictures from the farm and learn more about us. Thanks for being part of the story, and I hope you'll join us next week. [Music]

Brownie the Hound Dog: Always Running 🐕 | Farm Stories for Kids

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