For example, she learned, pretty darn quickly, that when the black, inedible thing on the end table made a loud noise, and we tore its head off and spoke at it and put its head back on, very shortly after that another big dog would arrive at the door of our den, and then it was party time.
She also learned that we would leave our den, walk a short distance, and wait for the door to another, smaller den, to open. Sometimes, when the door opened, that den had other big dogs in it and then it was party time. Sometimes the den had another dog in it. When that happened, depending on the dog already in the den, the door would either close and we would wait for it to open again, or we would step into the den, knowing the other dog would never do anything as reckless and unwarranted as challenge Molly.
After we entered the small den, the next time the door opened, the outside would have completely changed. Then we would take her to a place where she could pee and poo and we wouldn't yell at her.
Molly also learned that every once in a while we would climb into a den on wheels, sit in it for anywhere from one to five hours, and emerge in a very different place.
All of this must have seemed magical indeed.
None of it compares of course to Molly's special power, which was, I think, to sense, locate and retrieve any missing tennis ball in a 400 kilometre radius.
We first discovered this power when Molly was very young. Maybe nine weeks old. I had her out for a walk, at night, and, as we passed some bushes planted along the side of one of the buildings across the way from where we lived, she pulled so intently against the lead, I let her have her head. She plunged under the nearest bush and came back out almost immediately with a tennis ball in her mouth. There it is in the photo below.
Again, we underestimated this capacity the first time we encountered it. But after a while it was impossible to ignore. Bruce took Molly to visit one day at his office. He put her down, took off her leash, and - zip - she was gone. Minutes later, she was back, with a tennis ball. One of Bruce's co-workers had lost it under her desk about three years before.
Another time, we had driven about four hours to visit friends at their cottage south of Algonquin Park. We'd been there two years before with Molly. We opened the car door, Molly flew out, ran down the steps to the cottage, disappeared inside and emerged, seconds later, with a tennis ball. It had been under the couch.
Along with the power to jump four times her own height and run at sub-sonic speeds, Molly was "The Fetcher" - the special operations terrier who could - so long as their evil schemes involved tennis balls - foil even the most desperate global criminals.
All of this, of course, is just our silly anthropomorphism of our little dog. Molly had her own notions of what her powers were, revealed in her secret name: "Molly, the Clever Little Dog Who Always Gets Away," about which you can read here.
