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Post by Briar on Sept 10, 2020 21:26:11 GMT -6
Things hadn't become any clearer for them, and now he could sense Loki and Joker starting to pay more attention too. There were new words and treats in play, so Aubrey definitely wanted something, but thus far nothing had really happened.
"Stay," Aubrey said a third time.
He waited a little longer this time. To be honest, he was probably waiting for something to correct. It was Lyra who broke first, with her eyes still on him, in a deliberate kind of way that made Aubrey suspect she was pushing to see what he would object to. "Lyra, stay," he said again.
Lyra came to a stop, tail slowly wagging.
"Easy," he said, and this time when he said it, he made a deliberate show of relaxing, in hopes of inspiring the pups to relax along with him. But regardless of whether they did, he gave them praise for staying in place like he'd asked, though this time in the form of pats instead of treats, just to change things up. Even Loki accepted this, a little grudgingly, and not with the same enthusiasm as the other two; but he seemed to understand that he had done what Aubrey wanted, at least, which was what mattered.
It was coming together slowly. Maybe. They would need more practice, to be sure, but Lyra was certainly trying her best to figure it out, and Aubrey thought she was on the right track. And the other two hadn't messed up a 'stay' yet, so to speak.
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Post by Jack on Sept 11, 2020 6:38:47 GMT -6
  What a pretty purple flower! |
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Post by Briar on Sept 11, 2020 19:08:46 GMT -6
So Aubrey went into it and tried again. He felt that they might get sick of staying still for too long, but he didn't want to alternate with other commands until he felt like they had a better grasp of this one. "Stay," he said to the pups.
Once again, he waited a longer span of time before he released them. This time Lyra wasn't the one who moved, but Joker, having spotted something nearby that caught his interest and taking a couple of steps toward it.
"Joker, stay," Aubrey said.
Joker turned his attention back to Aubrey, head cocked like he was trying to figure something out. He probably didn't know the point of the 'stay' command just yet. But Aubrey didn't want to leave him like that too long; he wanted to set the pups up for success. So when Joker had stayed still with the rest for a short span, Aubrey said, "Easy," relaxing himself deliberately, and then rewarded the lot of them.
They did this a few more times, and with enough repetition the pups seemed to come to a slow understanding that 'stay' meant to stay where they were. Whether they understood what 'easy' meant remained to be seen, but Aubrey knew that one would probably take more work, in some different contexts, before it stuck. For now he just wanted to get them used to hearing it as the release for a persistent command, and this seemed as good a place to start as any.
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Post by Briar on Sept 11, 2020 19:33:01 GMT -6
Once they had reached that point, Aubrey decided to give them something that might be a little more engaging, or a little more challenging, or both. This time, when he said, "Stay," he moved away from them for a few steps.
He didn't ask them to come to him, but immediately returned to them before he said, "Easy." He didn't want them to associate 'come' as the release word for 'stay' when they had been working on 'easy' this whole time thus far. The pups stayed that time, so he gave them their rewards, though he could see Lyra tense when he had first begun moving away.
He didn't wait long before trying again. "Stay," he said to the pups, then moved away a further distance this time. Joker twitched, but didn't quite move, and Aubrey simply repeated the command at him.
Then he went back to the pups. "Easy," he said. Lyra moved around him then, but he didn't react, because the command was over. Seeing this, the other two milled around him too, and he gave them another round of pats before starting the process over again.
They worked on 'stay' a few more times, and Aubrey managed to get some good distance away from them before coming back by the final attempt. After that, he went through some other commands they knew, just to give them a break from doing the same thing over and over. Besides which, staying in place was probably not a pup's favorite thing to do in the world.
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Post by Briar on Sept 11, 2020 19:38:43 GMT -6
It was good for getting them moving and engaged, and a couple of them were even good for working on the 'easy' command. 'Heel', 'sit' and 'lay down' were all commands they could be released from, and rather than praise or treats, this time Aubrey used 'easy' to release them from those commands as well.
This took a little figuring out when he first tried it, since thus far they had only heard the command in conjunction with 'stay', but after a few attempts and some trial and error, they seemed to get the idea. 'Easy', for lack of a better way to put it, began to serve as an indicator that the 'game' they were currently playing was over.
After their round of review, it was back to 'stay'. Aubrey repeated what they had done so far a couple of times, just as a refresher. The pups did well this time; maybe the time away from the command had let it percolate in their brains more thoroughly.
With that done, Aubrey began releasing them from it without going back to them. Sometimes he would say 'easy' and then go straight into 'come', and sometimes he would simply release them and let them do as they liked. This wasn't too difficult for the pups to pick up after everything else they had done, and soon Aubrey felt confident that they could manage a good 'stay'.
They really had learned a lot over the last few weeks, now that he thought about it.
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Post by Briar on Sept 11, 2020 19:45:03 GMT -6
He wondered if he was pushing them too hard. They didn't seem to show big signs of strain, and he made sure to reward them and give them some time to just wander and play on every outing, but the thought did bother him from time to time. Sure, they might have been bred, or created, or whatever it was, to work alongside humans, but they were still young, and he knew that pushing children too hard wasn't good for their development.
Well, they had done their run-down of tricks and training for the day, so he stopped there and simply walked along behind the pups as they explored. It didn't take them long to find something else to focus on, once they realized that Aubrey wasn't going to play or ask anything more of them.
As of late, maybe because they had spent so much time together, they were really starting to move together more... cohesively. Aubrey didn't really know how to describe it. He wouldn't necessarily have said they were a pack yet or anything, but they didn't go tearing off in three different directions nearly as much anymore. Which was a good thing for poor Aubrey, whose arms had really gotten more of a workout than he would ever have asked for those first few days.
The September iteration of the Mansion wasn't a bad place for the pups to explore. The grounds weren't, at least. Aubrey had never actually been inside the house, come to think of it.
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Post by Briar on Sept 11, 2020 20:03:35 GMT -6
There wasn'a particular reason for it... Or at least, Aubrey didn't think there was, though he remembered now that Aster never trusted the Mansion very much. Aubrey hadn't been here with Aster in years and years, and he didn't really remember much from when he did come here; it was all very indistinct, but there had been nothing particularly unpleasant.
He didn't remember if they had gone inside then either.
But he thought, the pups were cooped up inside the house enough as it was. Why take them inside another house? The point of these walks was so they could be out in the open, breathe some fresh air, and have themselves a good time. There were plenty of trees to sniff and pocketpets to chase and fallen fruit to... "Hey, don't eat that!"
He intervened just in time to stop Lyra from getting her jaws around a fallen apple which... didn't look to be in very good condition.
Well, he also didn't know if dogs could have apples in the first place. More things that he should probably be reading about. There was so much to research, and so much he didn't know, and the more time he spent with them, the more he felt those gaps in his knowledge. For every one thing he figured out, it seemed like there were three new things to learn. It was funny how he felt both more and less overwhelmed as time went by, when he thought it would only be less.
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Post by Jack on Sept 11, 2020 20:05:43 GMT -6
  Another... pretty flower? You must have found a patch! |
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:08:13 GMT -6
It hadn't really felt like this when he was looking after the other Hara in Aster's household, mostly because they had been his siblings rather than his children, and Aster had been on hand to be a final authority on things, as well as to share the burden. Besides which, the other Hara were of course more or less like himself, and he knew their needs about as well as he knew his own. At least, he never had to worry about whether a food that was good for him would cause serious problems if, say, Damien ate it, which was unfortunately not the case here. And being able to talk to them, or even just communicating through gestures, helped immensely.
Maybe he should have been more insistent with Aster that Aster teach him how to work with creatures... But no, he thought that it might not have helped after all. Aster trained mostly Sarane and other reptilian-looking creatures, and there might not have been a lot of transferable principles between a dragon that could flatten you with one foot, and a trio of pups.
Lyra backed off from the apple, though she whined at him to show him that she was disappointed, then wandered back to him to bother him for a treat. The other two pups saw this and refused to be left out, and pretty soon they were all crowding around him. Laughingly, Aubrey pushed them away. "If you want a snack, you guys should earn it," he said.
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:12:31 GMT -6
He didn't know if it was just good timing on Joker's part or if Joker actually recognized some of what Aubrey said, but Joker chose that moment to bark, as if he was saying, Then let us! Give us something to do!
Fortunately it didn't then break down into a cacophony of barking. Sometimes it did, but to Aubrey's great relief, none of his three pups were loud or vocal very often. His neighbors would probably be a lot angrier with him than they already were if his pups were loud on top of having been unruly at the start... Though most of the damage had been contained within Aubrey's own home and property, they had endeavored to dig their way into the next yard over at one point, among other such mischief.
But now it was mostly fine, and it was even fun to work with them like this.
"Okay, okay. Sit," he said. All three of them sat, almost at the same time, as if they had coordinated this between themselves somehow. They hadn't, of course, but they had been with each other long enough that... he didn't want to say they had become a bit similar, which wasn't true, but they were on more of the same wavelength than they had been when he first started working with them. It was always an interesting thing to see, and it often caught Aubrey off guard, even now, when he had thought he had mostly gotten used to them.
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:18:02 GMT -6
"Lay down," he said, and all of them laid down together too. He thought it might be fun to teach them more tricks sometime, like rolling over or giving him their paw to shake. But for now, he was just getting them to do what they knew so that they could earn the treats they seemed to want. "Stay," he said, and began backing away from them. They watched him from their laying down position, all of them waiting for a cue to release. Lyra looked eager as always, full of energy; Joker seemed to be calmer about it, more patient, as befitted his general air as the most easygoing of the three pups. And Loki watched Aubrey with a piercing gaze, not in anticipation but as if Loki was trying to figure something out. Sometimes Loki acted just a little before Aubrey even gave a signal, so maybe that really was the case.
"Okay, come!" he said. All three pups got up and ran toward him. Despite his slower start, Joker was faster than the other two, and reached Aubrey first. Lyra and Loki were neck and neck; Loki had had an earlier start, but Lyra had come out explosively, and lost to Joker only because Joker was, well, the fastest of the pups over short distances. Aubrey had never tested the three of them over a very long stretch, so he didn't know how they would stack up against each other in that context, but maybe he would one day.
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:21:37 GMT -6
He fed them their treats, and did a couple more rounds of obedience practice with them, before deciding that they were done for the day, and would go home. The pups were a bit disappointed that playtime was over, but they had settled into the routine by now, and knew that they would come back tomorrow, so they didn't fuss too much about it anymore.
And sure enough, the next day saw them right back at the Mansion, exploring here and there, and doing some recall on the tricks that Aubrey had taught them thus far.
These days, Aubrey sometimes played with the pups himself. They played mostly with one another, of course; one of the nice things about having three at once was that they could entertain each other and act as playmates, so none of them would be bored or lonely just because Aubrey happened to be busy with something else. And now that they weren't actively being destructive most of the time, Aubrey was also content to leave them to it.
But he bought more toys with them when he had the mental space to do so, and to help bond with them, if nothing else, he began playing with them sometimes too. On this occasion he took out a rope, which had become a fast favorite of the pups. He wondered if it had something to do with the fact that their teeth and jaws were developing, but then, didn't even adult dogs love to chew?
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:22:03 GMT -6
Either way, it got their attention at once. There was some jostling for who would latch onto it first though, which got a little too frisky for Aubrey's liking, so he tried to interject himself and break it up.
That turned out to be a mistake.
The pup who got him probably didn't mean to, of course - and it had happened so quickly that he didn't even see which one of them it was. But he felt the teeth break skin.
This wasn't the first time something like this had happened, actually. The fact of living with pups who maybe hadn't learned all their manners was that you would just get nipped every so often, inevitably, until they learned to know better. And for better or for worse, Aubrey hadn't had a chance to devote himself to that until now. But now was as good a time to start as any, and he had done a little reading on the how of it, since it was an issue he felt like he ought to address.
And so, in line with what he read, he let out an audible yelp.
The pups, startled, stopped what they were doing at once. Aubrey cradled the hand that had been bitten as though it hurt much more than it actually did, and continued to make noises of pain. "Ow," he said. "Ow, ow, ow… That really hurt!"
If he was being honest, he felt a bit embarrassed to be doing this, even if his only audience was the pups.
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:22:19 GMT -6
If it wasn't for the fact that he was doing this for the purpose of teaching them to be gentle, he wouldn't have done it at all. To play up his own hurts for sympathy went against almost every fiber of his being, but the pups needed to understand, especially since they were getting bigger and their teeth sharper, that they couldn't play this roughly with people. Otherwise they might hurt Aubrey for real later, or hurt somebody else, which would inevitably invite a whole host of new and unfortunate problems.
The pups were at once concerned. Apparently it was because this was something they recognized and could understand, and was how their parents and playmates would teach them limits naturally. They recognized that they had hurt him, and Joker and Lyra began to play up to him, lowering their bodies and licking at him. The book said to expect that too, as their way of apologizing.
Even Loki lowered himself, though he didn't really join in on the licking. It was just as well, since it was a bit ticklish even with two pups, and Aubrey understood that Loki was apologizing too.
After this went on for a little bit, Aubrey 'forgave' them and they resumed playing around.
The pups were noticeably gentler with him this time. Of course, it helped that they weren't really roughhousing in general, besides playing tug of war with the rope. And the rope, being what it was, was a perfectly fine thing for them to bite on.
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Post by Briar on Sept 12, 2020 20:22:31 GMT -6
Joker seemed a bit hesitant at first, and even Lyra took a little while to work up to her usual enthusiasm, but when there was no negative reaction from Aubrey, they all had their turn with the rope toy with the same energy as they usually did, by the end of it.
Loki, in particular, seemed to enjoy it. Or maybe 'enjoy' wasn't the right word, but it seemed to help him… vent, maybe. He did seem like he had more tension in him than the other two, even now, despite the fact that he was definitely also more at ease in Aubrey’s home than he used to be. He played harder and more aggressively at the tug game than the other two, and as Aubrey watched the pup, he remembered how aggressive Loki could be with his toys too.
He wasn't more aggressive with Aubrey himself, or with either of his playmates, so thus far Aubrey didn't think it was a cause for concern just yet… but at moments like this, he was reminded of the fact, and it did worry him sometimes.
It might have been Loki who had bit him, come to that. But to be honest, Aubrey was sort of glad he hadn’t seen which of them it was. He wouldn’t have wanted to know, and to become biased against that particular pup as a result. He didn’t mean to, but he also knew it could be hard to un-know something once you… well, once you knew it.
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