Tree...................... What Tree?

My big boy Brutus has now gone two days with hardly being leashed at all. He's starting to get the hang of it, although, I think we have a few more days to go. I don't even turn the tone collar on anymore, and most of this afternoon he didn't even have it on at all.

There is one thing he hasn't quite figured out yet, or he just has his own way of doing, which cracks me up every time. If he's in the front yard, and he wants to be in the back yard, he'll knock on the front door, come through the house, wait at the patio door until I open it and go out that way. That's the same door that leads out onto the deck where Don had built a lovely gate to keep Brutus "on" the deck, and that's where our story leads to today.

I had left the gate open because Brutus had come through the house, and we had gone out in the back yard, through the gate. This evening, Brutus went through the same routine of coming through the house, but when I opened the patio door, there was a chipmunk on the deck, and Brutus was off and running. He normally does this, but the gate is closed and he kind of comes to a skidding halt, but this time the gate was open, and he kept on skidding right down the stairs. The chipmunk was FREAKED!! By now, I think that they have all figured out that he can only go so far, so they're safe if they make it to the other side of the stairs. Anyway, once he realized that he was still heading down the stairs, although slightly out of control, and the chipmunk was still ahead of him, he decided that this whole scenario maybe wasn't such a bad idea, and when he landed at the bottom, he kept chasing. We have another smaller set of stairs that go up a bank on the other side of the lawn, and the chipmunk headed up those stairs, and so did Brutus. Then the chipmunk headed up the tree, and so did Brutus's face!! At first I was afraid that he had knocked himself out, but he was up on his feet in a few seconds smelling all over the place for that chipmunk, and the little stinker was about ten feet up in the tree looking down at him like "oh my God, I can't believe you just ran into the tree!". I could almost hear him laughing. It was like watching Tom and Jerry in real life!

Poor Brutus. His nose is missing some of it's black color, and he has a pretty good gash on his cheek, but thankfully those are his only visible injuries. His pride on the other hand, I'm not so sure about.