One foot in front of the other

For the last two days Copper has been less motivated to track scent than a slug running towards salt. Not only is it disappointing, but in contrast to his enthusiastic training runs from the days before, it’s even harder to take.

After running a one day old trail and a few blind runaways, we called it a morning and came back to Bud’s house to get ready to go into Tyler (about 20 minutes away) to visit his aunt and uncle. On the drive over I tried to pull the old “cry without anyone noticing” trick and thought I’d succeeded until I looked over at Bud’s confused face as he reached out to touch a wet spot on my cheek. He asked what was wrong which of course made it impossible for me to answer because then I really started to cry. How to answer that one? I’m scared to death this won’t work? I have a scent-tracking dog who lay down in the sand to nap in the middle of training yesterday? Everyone who hears what I’m trying to do either laughs, gets quiet or politely says, “Oh…that’s interesting”? I’m a girl? It’s hard to balance reality with your dreams sometimes? Or maybe today I just needed to flip over, show my belly and hear that one way or another, it would work out.