Remembering the Dude

I'm trying not to let this blog go to an all-ferrets-all-the-time mode, but I wanted to write a few words about the Dude.

When we first brought him and his pals home, two of them, the Dude (then known as the ferret formerly known as Snowball) and Gus, were wearing little collars with bells on them. We thought they looked ridiculous. We took Gus's off with no problem -- it was tight on his neck, but not too bad. But the Dude's was on really tight... and when I peeled it off, it came attached to skin and hair. We took him to the vet immediately, and had to keep him in isolation until the raw wound on his neck had healed.

It's not surprising that this nameless little tough guy immediately won my heart. He was the first ferret of the bunch we had to treat as an individual, not as part of a big, unruly group. We refused to call him Snowball (he was tan, for Christ's sake) but we didn't have a suitable name for him. But we had to call him something as he wandered into places we didn't want him to go -- so I called him "dude," until we realized that his laid-back personality and his earth-tone coloring matched Jeff Lebowski's.

He had a genius for trouble. His propensity for getting under our fold-out couch and coiling up in the springs (causing us nail-biting worry) led us to take the feet off the couch so it rested on the ground, and safety-pin its cover on. It took a lot to make that couch impervious to the Dude. He was a master safecracker.

He was also the ruler of the roost for a while. Once we put him back in gen-pop, he and Gus (accustomed to being the sole dominant ferret in his absence) had some legendary knock-down drag-out fights for dominance. Usually they involved Dude dragging Gus by his head or neck to behind the TV. A few years later, the fights started happening again; this time the heartier Gus did the dragging.

He had his own theme song, to the tune of a Budweiser commercial, I think:

(Here comes the Dude)
Here comes the Dude oh yes he's A-Number-1!
(Here comes the Dude)
Here comes the Dude oh yes he's nothin' but fun!

and so on, filling in rhymes as I went.

Over the last few months, I felt like I was seeing less and less of the Dude, even though I was spending more time with him than the other ferrets. We were giving him different medicines twice a day, some of which he liked, and some he hated. And by the end, he was so droopy that the only time I'd see the old Dude spark was when he was fighting off a syringe full of yuck.

But even then, I could just sit on the couch with him on my lap, petting him softly, singing little songs to him. I wish I could do it now.

Rob