I’m not sure when the tree first got his attention; it was probably in mid-June, when the apples first began to fall. He came running up to me and dropped a green apple at my feet. This was nothing new for our dogs; we have been playing catch with apples for years, but this is Huey’s first summer, and this was his first apple. Huey can be a pretty impatient little dog. When I didn’t pick the apple up and throw it quickly enough, he ran over to it, picked it up, and when he was sure I was watching, dropped it again, and gave me the demanding little noise that he makes, a cross between a whine and a grunt. Finally I threw it for him and we played catch for awhile, until something else got his attention.Huey is not quite nine months old as this is written, and everything is new to him. It is always fun to watch animals, and especially young ones, as they experience new things and try to make sense of it all. What are they thinking? Do dogs know the difference between an apple and a tennis ball? Do they care? Does it matter? While the shape, size and color seem similar to us, dogs don’t see colors, and to them it is probably just something that we can throw and they can chase. On the other hand, they might think that tennis balls grow on trees.
Huey has become very attached to that crabapple tree. One day he was standing there when another apple fell and bounced around on the ground. He was on it in a second, and took off running around the yard with his new toy. Suddenly, the relationship between dog and tree had changed; the tree had thrown him a ball. Now he began sitting under the tree, staring up into its branches. He could see the tennis balls hanging there, but he couldn’t reach them. Every so often he would bark at the tree, demanding that it throw him a ball. Sometimes it did, usually it didn’t. It took awhile for Huey to realize that not every tree is a tennis ball tree, so he would sit under an oak tree, or a maple tree, and bark at it, demanding that it throw him a ball. The results were not very good.
This has been a great year for apples; the crabapple tree that Huey is so fond of is one of five apple trees scattered around the yard, and all of them are loaded with fruit. As the apples grew, the weight of them caused the branches to bend downward, and soon Huey found that he could just walk over and pick one off the tree of his choice. Plus, as time went on the apples became tastier, so now he had another choice, play with it or eat it. Edible tennis balls, what a great idea.
Now gravity began to work against him. Every time he removed a ball from the tree, the weight on the branch became a little less, and the branches rose slowly toward their normal position. Soon Huey had to stand on his back feet in order to pick an apple from the tree. Then the time came when he couldn’t reach an apple from the ground. Not one to be deterred by a challenge, he simply locates the ball of his choice and jumps in the air to retrieve it, consistently picking apples that are six feet off the ground.
Soon the lower branches will have been picked clean, but that shouldn’t be a problem. The apples on the upper branches are ripening quickly, and before long the trees will begin throwing them down for Huey to play with or eat. But in the fall, after all the fruit has been picked or has fallen, we may have a confused and disappointed puppy, staring up into the branches, wondering why the tennis ball tree doesn’t want to play with him any more.
