June’s World: Yellow Lab is a true Marley, but I haven’t given up hope

Sometimes, I have this glorious dream:
I am sitting in a blind at a high-dollar duck club with June, our family’s yellow Labrador retriever, at my side.
June whimpers as she spots a flock of mallards in the distance and shivers with excitement as the ducks draw closer.
At the last minute, the mallards flare, but a lone, long shot is fired. One of the greenheads glides into the marsh and starts to swim off.
“We’ll never get that one,” one of the hunters says.
But June bounds out of the blind and starts swimming toward the spot where the mallard went down. The duck tries to swim away, but June doesn’t give up.
She finally grabs the bird and begins the long swim back amid applause from the hunters.
Then I crash back to reality. And another scene — a true story — comes to mind.
My 27-year-old daughter Jenny was walking June across the dam of our subdivision lake when they came across a flock of Canada geese feeding on a hillside.
June broke loose and rushed the birds, her leash trailing behind her. She chased the geese into the water and even after they flew off, continued her pursuit.
She dived in and swam toward the middle of the lake, where the geese had landed. Finally, she was a yellow speck in the distance.
After the geese were flushed again, she gave up and swam back to shore as Jenny yelled at her.
Jenny had to wade into cold water up to her waist to untangle June’s leash. The two then collapsed on dry land. They trudged home, wet, exhausted and humiliated on what Jenny still calls “the walk of shame.”
Welcome to the wild, wacky, rollercoaster ride that is June’s World.
To put it kindly, she is a free spirit — something we were convinced of from the moment Jenny brought her home.
Jenny was afraid to put her little puppy in front of our adult chocolate Lab, Zoey, for fear that Zoey would maul her.
But June promptly went up to her, batted her nose with her tiny paw and began biting at her ear.
Since then, June has done plenty to justify the middle name we had given her, Marley (after the misbehaving yellow Lab of book and movie fame).
•One morning, I was awakened by the sound of thump, thump, thump. Pause. Thump, thump, thump. Half-awake, I asked my wife, Jana, what it was. She replied by saying, “Look.”
Opening one eye, I saw June jumping in the air three times, chasing her tail. Then she paused and did three more 360s in the other direction.
•We often call her Kramer (of TV’s “Seinfeld”) because of the way she skids into a room.
•When she isn’t chasing her tail, she greets each day by doing a tuck-and-roll summersault. Really.
•The foot of our bed, near where June sleeps, looks like it was attacked by beavers.
•When she is retrieving sticks in the lake, June often is more interested in hopping on Zoey’s back than grabbing the stick.
•When she was a puppy, June wet in the house so often that I suggested we rename her “Puddles.”
And on and on it went.
It got so bad that Jana seriously considered booting June out, and I had to plead with her to give June a little more time. The dog must have sensed that.
Almost overnight, she learned that she was supposed to be going to the bathroom outside and started waiting patiently by the door when she had to go. And she stopped gnawing on things, contenting herself to play with Zoey instead.
As for the hunting training, she’s making progress there, too. June, soon to turn 2, now goes straight to the training dummy or the stick, bringing it right back to me. Source .kansascity.com/