Marty came to visit. He is a granddog. We have two granddogs, plus an in-law dog. They coexist with our pair of Lab-sized mutts on occasion.

Marty trundles between the house and the barn, trailing a woven 20-foot-long orange “lead,” a leash without a loop that gun dog trainers use to limit their pups’ range.

Marty is near to the ground, just a smidgen higher than those pot-bellied pigs whose races delighted us at last month’s Jefferson County Fair. His pedigree crosses Jack Russell terrier with dachshund, yielding a light brown “wiener dog” on steroids.

Marty has two trundle speeds. One is a zippety-quick indoors fast-step, claws castaneting across the ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor. The outdoor run features a fair imitation of an Olympic swimmer’s straight-out lunge into the pool. With each leap, Marty’s forepaws and hind legs get parallel to the ground, giving him a scissors sprint that covers an amazing amount of open ground – until he hits the hip-high (on humans) goldenrod and grasses in our fields. Then, he disappears, his whereabouts betrayed by the against-the-breeze waving of the grass tops and his incessant grunts and wheezes: “Where’s the bunny? C’mon, gimme a bunny. I wanna chomp a bunny!” That orange lead gets tangled, not stopping him but slowing him enough for me to retrieve him. He never does chomp any bunnies.

This is Marty’s second visit within a month. For the moment, he seems to be cured of the urge to chomp cats.

That wasn’t easy. His first arrival coincided with the arrival of six kittens of about two months in age, an intended supplement to our supply of barn and field cats. The chickens’ leftover feed attracts mice, moles, voles and rats, plus feed-raiding sparrows and occasional starlings. The cats keep the numbers of these varmints at reasonable levels.

Our two larger mutts are supposed to keep weasels, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, possums and the occasional fisher cat from dining on our chickens. They do so well that the dogs occasionally dine on the varmints.

Their second job is keeping deer away from blueberry bushes and keeping deer and rabbits at a distance from our gardens.

In that regard, there seems to be a labor slowdown.

Ralph is now eight years old. Buddy is seven. As younger dogs, they zipped and barked around our six-acre home patch, chasing away deer, rabbits and the occasional gaggle of geese that decide our pond might make a poop-plopping home for them.

This year, the geese arrive. The dogs, lying on their sides soaking up the summer sun, raise their heads. They look at the geese. They look at each other.

“Bark!” they say, never rising to their feet. “Bark, bark. I say again: Bark!”

The geese, 100 yards away, pay no attention to the dogs. The dogs look at each other again.

“We done our jobs, huh?” they convey, in glances.

“Yup!” they decide, giving their heads two self-satisfied plops back into the “dead dog” position that we humans can only wish we could use to fall asleep so effortlessly.

Marty’s visit injected some spice. At first, Marty was claw-scraping eager to pull me and the lead within striking distance of those newly arrived kittens. This disturbed our resident dogs as well as me, because Ralph and Buddy appear to be transgendered mommy-figures, licking the kittens and allowing them to clamber over the dogs in their “king of the hill” games.

It took work to convince Marty that the kittens, like our chickens, are not chompable by resident dogs or visitors.

Marty learned. Of course, he cannot resist a sprint and lunge that sends a cat leaping wildly for a tree, if that cat is already running past him. But if the cat is strolling or just lying about, Marty now does the nose-bump that signifies neighborliness.

He yaps, of course. Terriers do that innately, especially if tied to a lead while the resident dogs meander unfettered. But by now, the lead is more of a decoration than a limiting device. It still comes in handy when something new sends Marty into his scissors-splayed run. I only need to catch up to the lead and place a foot on it, rather than try to catch the dog himself. But because he knows it can be done, Marty now usually stops at a vocal suggestion.

My, he does bark at deer, rabbits … varmints. That yapping reminds our resident dogs of their duties. Thanks to Marty’s visit, they now bolt upwards, their larger forms and deep, menacing barks pushing the varmint barrier back beyond the crops and chickens.

Marty will be back in New Jersey by the time you read this, his caretakers having returned from a vacation trip. But his visits are a ray of sunshine, as are the arrivals of our human grandchildren.

Happily, granddogs and in-law dogs have one shining quality in common with grandchildren, nieces/nephews.

We enjoy their visits, and delight in their buoyancies.

Then we can give them back, and relax.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.