Mara returns to the Mountains

[shaberon]

I remember about the second eye, at which point I said I had a cat that was double-enucleated in about the same way, and since he basically did fine, I thought Mara the dog would come round.

Mine was just a loafing house cat and that was what he continued to do, nothing remarkable like this.

It is more common for cats since they get glaucoma rather easily.

If an animal is not in excruciating pain, then, yes, a second chance when they can't see or walk right or whatever their disability is, yes they probably can adapt and it is worth a try rather than putting them down. Vets are much better than people doctors! In some cases every day is a gift thanks to them.

[JackMcThorn]

My favourite stories are some of those that occur in the mountains. It is such a risky and unforgiving place even to those souls with experience. I have only lived near some hills a few times in my life but the allure of the mountains is quite strong. I am mostly drawn to the many stories, books, and movies, of savvy risk-takers and their adventures. Adventures that I might never engaged in even in my younger years had I lived near any truly impressive mountains. My forms of risk were quite a bit different [they involved motorcycles for about 29 years - otherwise I would consider myself a rather -low risk person] and I think to myself how truly lucky I was during all of that fun. Even these quick updates of the mountain life are still interesting and a pleasure to read. The draw of nature sure can be powerful; an aid to the mind and body. Cheers for you and Mara's good fortune and continued improvements in well-being to be able to explore such a thrilling location.

[Sadieblue]

Thank you Bill for sharing, what a beautiful place, and Mara did such a wonderful job in the mountains, I must say I held my breath a couple times, but she came through for you. She is such a beautiful dog.

[Islander12]

That is fantastic news Bill…Way to go Mara!

[Isserley]

Somehow, I expected such an outcome - that Mara fully adapts to the new situation... She is doing really well walking the path, well done! ..and another thing, this is a wonderful, Shire-like place you live in Bill. It is a pleasure to even look at that nature, let alone live there

[Heart to heart]

Bill
That story of Mara lifted my heart today. Thank you so much for sharing your walk into the mountains. I was with you all the way.
She is an example to us all!
May you have many more times together along the road less travelled
Wishing you both much joy❤️🙏❤️

[Ernie Nemeth]

So happy for you and Mara, Bill!

Incredible senses dogs have, to rely on smell and hearing to such a degree. Truly a marvel.

Congrats on her remarkable recovery.


That scenery is amazing. Made me yearn to see the mountains again.

[Tintin]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)



https://projectavalon.net/Mara_returns_to_the_Mountains.mp4

Wow, wow, triple wow with, with an added wow on top ❤️ I'm just 03:40 something through this beautiful film and I'm genuinely moved. I'm just a little lost for words really ❤️ Bless. bless dear Mara, her mountain dog spirit; simply the loveliest thing I've seen for weeks. Thanks so much for sharing it with us (< in the absence of a happy Tintin emoji, this'll have to do)

Never give up. The most life affirming moments shared here

[Denise/Dizi]

OMG such beautiful footage of the first outing in a very long time together (Of great distance)... It must have done both of your hearts good to know that this part of your past, can now still continue... I can only imagine how happy both of you were as you walked up the trail together... Her knowing that you would still see her as a valid walking companion, and you, knowing she still wanted to go... And could!

Here is to many more years of trail hiking... With special companions!

Much Love to you both!!!!

[Johnnycomelately]

Heartwarming story and vid, Bill. May you and Mara have many more good such outings.

And heart warming comments, everybody else who has posted above. Lots of love here, and I add my own.

[jc71]

Best bit was when Mara sat down in the stream at the top of the waterfall

JC

[Harmony]

This video was like a fabulous ending to a movie. There at the end Bill and Mara both looking up, their hard work and focused attention, with dedication and love, what a great achievement.

Like the best love stories, adventure movies and real life dramas, the ones where challenges and hardships were overcome, keeping your eye on the goodness and when all seems darkest, yet somehow all ends as it was meant to be. It's the journey that is what really matters. Just imagine how boring a movie depicting a couple that sit on a beach drinking cocktails for their whole lives would be, nothing learned and nothing gained for their long term forever journey.


Please give your dear friends our thanks and love Bill for helping make this dream so wonderfully shareable with a real birds eye view. I think we are all so happy and proud of Mara and Bill

[Jambo]

The video was wonderful, such beautiful scenery!
What amazed me most is you say Mara is 100% blind, yet she led the way for 80% of the video.
Truly heart warming and amazing.

Mara is a lesson to us all. No matter what happens to you in life... don't waste your time focused upon the loss... just steadly move onwards.
Just Brilliant

[Bill Ryan]

Dear Friends, thank you so much for all your very wonderful comments... I'd not expected such a response! It was just a happy and delightful small thing that I thought might raise the spirits of a few readers who, like me, are sometimes discouraged by events elsewhere in the world.

I can't reply to everyone! But here are just a few footnotes I can add for those who may be interested.

Yes, she's 100% blind. But she has a kind of proximity detector: if she's on a flat surface, like a rocky trail or a dirt road, and then her nose hits a bit of vegetation, she knows that's the boundary and then course-corrects to get back on the tramlines again.

You may have seen that occasionally I also gently touch her (e.g.) on the left shoulder with my trekking pole. That's a sign to her that she needs to steer to the right, away from the touch of the pole. So if there's a potential hazard, I can easily reach out and guide her a little that way.

Yes, there'll have been all kinds of smells and scents on the trail that humans have no idea about. Not just humans on foot (who go there rarely), but llamas, alpacas, foxes, the occasional puma (yes, really: I see their scat sometimes) and every now and then a local on horseback.

Miller asked about the Haunted Lakes., which I've written about elsewhere. That large lake at the end of the video isn't haunted (not at all!), but the Haunted Lakes aren't far away. To get there, one repeats the rocky trail to the top of the waterfall, but then rather than heading straight on (north) to the large lake, one turns left (west) for several miles, going up and over a remote high ridge. We'll not be going there alone anytime soon. .

Many commented on the truly magical (Shire-like: yes!) beauty of the surroundings. (And yes, it's often much like Scotland.) I do know I'm very blessed here, and many of you will know that I venture into the high mountains all the time. I'll post a few photos of other places below — all high-resolution, squeezed to fit the page here and which may take a while to load, and best viewed on a big screen.

Some of the vistas take my breath away, especially when the sun is clear and bright, bringing our all the pastel colors. (I claim no credit for them: I have a simple, cheap little pocket camera, and it's all about the light.)

All this used to be the huge open playground that Mara freely ran around in every week, but (I think!) despite this remarkable breakthrough success, we're still limited in where we can safely go. I chose the hike I showed in our video because apart from the rocky trail near the waterfall, there were no hazards at all, like low spiky branches (dangerous for her eyes and face), tricky rocks to scramble over, and so on.

The vegetation you can see in the video was almost all soft, billowing alpine grasses which she would kind of wade through or scramble over with no problems at all. That whole open high valley (shown at the end of the video) is like that, with a whole bunch of other lakes up there as well, so there are many places we can go next time.

The weather is pretty gray at the moment (this is El Niño's fault, as it's meant to be high summer), but Thursday looks promising, the day after tomorrow. If it seems sunny, we'll head up there again, but probably alone (i.e. not with my friends who have the drone) and see if we can go a little further.

Some photos of other places I visited a few weeks ago — with no dog. (But, who knows if we might just possibly be able to return there together sometime. )

Enjoy:

[Bill Ryan]

And here's even more. The long drone video in my first post stopped when we reached the open grassy valley and the large lake. But here's the continuation, where we carried on for another half mile or more. This was taken by my friend's little 10-year old daughter on her iPhone, so it's only a couple of feet above doggie-nose-level. (She's super-athletic, an international swimmer already, and she runs around in the mountains everywhere despite her age and tiny size)



This is a much smaller, shorter video, just 18 Mb and 48 seconds. The pyramid-shaped mountain in the distance is called Quitahuayco, the highest in the region at 15,000 ft. Mara and I have been up there many times before, and I hardly dare think we might be able to do it again. There'd actually be nothing hazardous to stop her except that of course it's quite a strenuous climb. (But where we managed to get to, we were half way there already.)

https://projectavalon.net/Mara_retur...ountains_2.mp4

[palehorse]

what a great view Bill, she seems to be doing pretty well.

[palehorse]

Posted by Jambo (here)
The video was wonderful, such beautiful scenery!
What amazed me most is you say Mara is 100% blind, yet she led the way for 80% of the video.
Truly heart warming and amazing.

Mara is a lesson to us all. No matter what happens to you in life... don't waste your time focused upon the loss... just steadly move onwards.
Just Brilliant

These are beautiful words Jambo. Thanks.

[Michel Leclerc]

Thanks Bill, thanks everyone.

Yes Onawah – “and even showing [Bill] the way” – that is also what I thought.

At my vet‘s, in the waiting room there are plenty of semi-professional magazines about dogs and about cats. About two years ago, I found an article which, Pyrangello, rated a dog’s smell at an even quite large multiple of the 200 times our smell that you mentioned. Also it mentioned that with a dog the order of importance of the senses is quite different from ours: instead of (1) touch (2) sight (3) hearing (4) smell (5) taste which would be ours theirs is really (1) touch (2) smell (3) hearing (4) sight and (5) taste. (And then obviously, but not be found in a “scientific" magazine, the sixth sense would be even more important than (1) for both dogs and humans.

That set me thinking. When we walk our dog in a city he/she never stops smelling at hundreds of spots - if we are so wise as to allow it. In natural surroundings it is a non-stop activity. And then I remembered what John Lilly wrote about dolphins. How they seem to consider our experimental set-ups to study their “intelligence” as game environments for them in which they “play us”, steering our behaviour and measuring how good they are at it. So – what if..

An adult speaker of English who also reads and writes English masters about 50,000 words. 50,000 concepts we may say, to make it simple. But these concepts are based on our language, spoken through our vocal chords and related to visual representations of it. What we call intelligence is completely dependent on language. We carry around an encyclopaedia of sound and visual representations with which we juggle – which is called thinking. What if – a dog carried around an encyclopaedia of 50,000 olfactory representations of reality items, sets, aspects, and thinks with it? Thinks with the smells like we think with specific sounds and images – relating them to each other in vast complexes of associations and... reasonings? What if a dog is really like a dolphin and plays games with us?

My dog Basile walking me is then, to him, a continuous refreshing of his library so to speak, updating his database, considering whether changes need to be made to his strategies and assumptions in dealing with the world, and me.

The dog coming to us for help does so on the sufficient ground (sufficient to him/her) that we can be counted on to share the same absolute priority and importance given to the 6th sense – and from this mutual recognition all the rest: the love given and taken, follows.

To get back to topic, when I watched your video, Bill (now I have understood that a drone can also be used to applaud and stimulate love instead of just curiosity) I was under the impression that Mara “just remembered” that road. She knew it and walked it and yes, lead the way. You gently prodded her from time to time with your walking stick.. well, looked at it from above (!), it looked like she was a guide dog for the blind and you were the blind human with an oddly coloured cane! The fact that I even had this association is a testimony to the intensity of your bond. Then there was the place where you had to help her up the small ledge. There was clearly a small request for a little help directed at you. But the impression I got was not one of “What do I do now?” but one of “Bill, I’m blind now, can you give me a hand?”

Maybe a little imagining things but I still think she is continuously reasoning on the basis of her encyclopaedia and so finds (almost) all answers. (Because I can see similar things with Basile – who is not (yet) blind.)

In one sentence: since I have come to consider that Basile is as intelligent as I am, I have noticed that he has started to treat me as more intelligent than I used to be.

One last thing. There is one thing I have learned from the video as I anticipate Basile’s approaching blindness – and you Bill, have certainly come to that conclusion as well. It might be wise to organise her walks on the basis of how well she knows them from experience, having walked them with you before. Or conversely, it might be a strategy not to to try and do entirely new tracks – unless of course no danger were involved – so that she herself would recognise them as “easy to the blind dog I happen to be now”.

After all, she can certainly “see” in Castaneda’s understanding of the word.

[Sérénité]

Oh Mara
What a beautiful thing to watch! Her little tail wagging as you guide her onto the right path is just priceless.
Our dogs truly are furry earth angels that come to bless our lives.
Thank-you for sharing such a beautiful and heartwarming journey 🤍

[Tyy1907]

God bless our companion animals ❤️