I almost ran over a dog this morning on the way to work. The old boy came tearing out of nowhere and shot right across my path, and if my reflexes hadn’t still had a little of their younger-day quickness about them, that would’ve been the end of him. I’m awful glad I missed him.
It got me thinking about dogs. Of all the creatures on this earth, none has planted itself closer to the human heart. Now, I know the cat people are already hollering at their screens — and fair enough, cats have their charms. But a cat operates on its own terms. It doesn’t so much live with you as tolerate your presence in its house. A dog, though — with very few exceptions — is yours, body and soul, from the moment you meet.
The first dog I can remember was a Collie-German Shepherd mix I named Bullet. He was a faithful companion to me in the way only a childhood dog can be, though he had little patience for the neighbor kids who regularly helped themselves to my toys and pitched them under their house. When he caught them in our yard, he’d nip at their heels all the way to the property line — not an inch further — then turn around and trot back like a sheriff who’d just enforced the law. One afternoon he grabbed the seat of my pants and hauled me back from the road when I’d wandered too close to traffic. I spent many a happy hour on the back steps throwing sticks and balls for him to retrieve. Somebody poisoned old Bullet, and he died a hard death. He didn’t deserve that. No animal does.
We didn’t get another dog until we’d moved away from that neighborhood and those particular neighbors. The next one was a Cocker Spaniel and bird dog mix with long white curly hair. We called him Whitey — and yes, I realize that doesn’t reflect great imagination on our part, but we were young. Whitey loved our whole family with an enthusiasm that was almost embarrassing to witness. He’d run through leaf piles with us in the fall, wallowing around like he fully understood the concept of fun. The trouble was, he couldn’t stand to see my Dad drive away. Every time the car backed out, Whitey went after it. Dad hit him a couple of times, but it never discouraged him. Then one day Dad came back almost immediately after leaving, and there was Whitey in the back floorboard — bloody, whimpering, and broken. We carried him out next to the dog house. He licked my hand once, whimpered softly, and was gone. We buried him in the woods just past the old cemetery near our house.
After that, Dad got into hunting and came home with three Beagles — Lady, King, and Husky. These were working dogs, plain and simple, and affection wasn’t really in their job description. They stayed penned unless Dad took them up past the cemetery to run rabbits, at which point nothing on earth could stop them. One afternoon they got after a particularly fast buck rabbit. Lady and Husky eventually gave out and sat down next to Dad, but King ran that rabbit for three solid hours — finally pushing it back past us for a shot. Dad missed. King walked over, looked up at him with what I can only describe as profound disappointment, and collapsed in a heap. We thought he was dead. It took a full bucket of water, applied both externally and internally, to bring him around. King never showed much interest in rabbit-chasing after that, and Dad had grown tired of standing around in the woods listening to dogs bark. He sold all three, and I won’t pretend I was heartbroken.
In high school we got a couple of pups from a litter my Uncle Pinky had raised. I named mine Lobo, after the TV dog. By then I was a junior, interested in everything except my dog — but Lobo was a faithful sort who kept close to home. He was part Husky, with a warrior’s disposition toward any dog that crossed into his territory. Dad kept a bucket of water by the back steps for the regular pile of claws and teeth that erupted in our backyard. Lobo absorbed wounds that would have finished a lesser animal, healed up, added the scars to his collection, and kept right on living. He was still going strong after I’d left for college and gotten married. My new wife was amazed that I could pour hydrogen peroxide into wounds that looked nearly gangrenous and have him wagging his tail the next day.
He finally met his match at about ten years old — a young, strong dog with some Pit Bull in him. Lobo won the fight, ran the dog out of his yard, and then couldn’t recover. Age had finally caught up with him. He’d used up every one of his nine lives.
My wife and I moved to Athens for school and decided we needed a dog. We got a Border Collie named Lady and rented a little brick house in the country whose owner didn’t allow dogs inside, so we set her up in the well house. We also had fish, and a gerbil who escaped his cage, chewed his way out of the house, and took up permanent residence in the well house alongside Lady. Since the little monster had bitten me, I made no serious effort to retrieve him.
Lady ended up with a litter of puppies, as nature will arrange when you’re nineteen and don’t know what you’re doing. I believe we kept a couple of them for a while, though honestly the details have gone soft with time. When we moved again we gave Lady away, which I still feel a little bad about.
Somehow we ended up with a Black and Tan Dachshund named Fritzie — purchased from a woman who, in retrospect, was probably moving to Florida specifically to get away from him. That dog could have a bath on Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon produce an odor that would clear a room. My wife and I quietly conspired and donated him to my parents, explaining that he was an “inside dog.” My Dad lasted about a week before he bricked off the back patio and made it Fritzie’s permanent residence. Every decent morning you could find Dad out there with a hose and soap, scrubbing that dog down like he was hosing out a livestock trailer. It never took. Dad eventually gave Fritzie to some elderly folks who adored him completely. I’ve always suspected their sense of smell had retired before Fritzie arrived.
Then came the Weimaraners — Misty and Abend — silver, slobbering, and enormous, originally belonging to my wife’s brother. They migrated to my parents’ house, as most of our animals eventually did, and I feel genuine retrospective guilt about that. Dad built them a pen with a chicken wire fence. They jumped over it. He made the fence taller. They jumped over that too. He tried discipline. They were either too dumb or too determined to care. He finally gave them to a man who lived way out in the country, who later reported with some delight that those two dogs ran deer to the ground. Of course they did. That’s what they’d been looking for all along.
The best pet my wife and I had during all those years was, I’ll admit, a cat. His name was Hector — a big black fellow with white feet, given to us as a wedding present. He moved through life at his own unhurried pace, an ambler who never rushed unless genuinely startled. On road trips to visit my folks he usually slept, but one memorable occasion I glanced in the rearview mirror and found him performing his business in the back window. The car behind us nearly drove off the road, the driver laughing so hard.
Another time, a tire went nearly flat and we pulled into a station to get it changed. My wife was holding Hector patiently when the mechanic disconnected two air hoses with a sound like a small explosion. Hector left four claw marks in her shoulders and vanished into a stand of pine trees. It took us two hours to coax him down.
He loved the outdoors — would stand motionless for long stretches in spring, just breathing in pine trees, then roll around in the needles like he owned the forest. He never had a flea in his life that I noticed. He was crossing a street in Toccoa one afternoon and didn’t make it in time past one of the drivers who used that road like a racetrack. When I found him, I knew I couldn’t bury him in the town where he’d been killed. I drove him as far out into Rabun County as a dirt road would take me and buried him in a grove of Mountain Laurel, the kind of place he would have spent all day sniffing around in if he’d had the chance.
Every now and again, his spirit ambles by and says thank ya’.
Children bring pets the way spring brings rain, and when ours arrived — a daughter in 1972, then two sons in 1975 and 1980 — the animals followed. There was a Siamese cat from the lower regions of the earth who ran from bed to bed and left chaos everywhere he went. There was a beautiful dark cat my daughter named Menudo, after the Latin singing group, who was so quiet you forgot he existed — until he started fainting. I was on the verge of a vet visit when I thought to check his collar. He’d been growing so fast it had nearly choked him. We fixed it immediately, but Menudo was never quite sharp after that. He’d be walking along and just walk into the wall for no particular reason. I have checked collars on every fast-growing animal I’ve owned since. We also had a cat come home one morning with his long, beautiful tail completely gone — just gone — acting perfectly normal about the whole thing. The vet sewed him up and said he’d likely be fine, and as best I can remember, he was.
We got a little brown Dachshund named Frisbee for the kids, which was a sweet idea that didn’t quite work out. She was an escape artist and a committed barker, and our neighbors on that side of the house had limited patience for both qualities. After a near-miss with a car on the busy street out front, we found her a home with a grandmother who loved her completely, and the feeling was mutual. That one had a happy ending.
The dog we had longest during the kids’ growing-up years found me, rather than the other way around. I was hauling trash to the local dump when a small white mound at the edge of the heap began to move in my direction. It was a dog — filthy, matted, impossible to identify as any particular breed. I couldn’t leave her there. “What is that?” my wife asked when I came through the door. “I think it’s a dog,” I said.
After what seemed like hours of bathing, she turned out to be a miniature Poodle. Once she was clean she pranced around the house like a decorated veteran at a parade. We named her Scruffy, which turned out to be permanently accurate — she was a dirt magnet of almost supernatural ability. You could wash her in the evening and by the next afternoon she looked like she’d been rolling through a feedlot. She never wandered, though. She stuck to the back porch like it was her post, leaving only for the bathroom or a brief tour of the backyard.
She hated the UPS truck and the mail carrier with a white-hot passion I never fully understood, though I always suspected one of the mailmen sprayed her out of spite early on. She’d work herself into such a frenzy over those trucks that in her later years I genuinely worried for her heart. She would have eaten them from the ankles up if she’d gotten the chance. For everyone else in the world — gentle as a lamb.
We had Scruffy for about ten years. By the end she was stiff with arthritis and could barely move. When the time came, I watched her eyes as she went, and it was one of the saddest moments I have known. My oldest son and I buried her in the far corner of the backyard, as far from the delivery routes as we could get her.
A couple of years ago, my wife Paula decided she wanted Dachshunds again. We went to look — and came home with three. There was a boy and two girls, and at the first feeding it became clear the boy had decided he was apex predator of the household. My daughter Kirsten, bless her, took him off our hands without too much persuading. He was named Puck, and by all accounts he’s a fine dog who found exactly the right home.
The two girls we kept. Fiona, and a little piebald runt — brown and white — who we named Hoosier. The woman selling her had initially told us we couldn’t afford her because her coloring was so rare in Dachshunds. But when it came to the paperwork, it turned out she couldn’t confirm who the father was. We got her at a discount. “Who’s Your Daddy” became Hoosier for short, which suits her perfectly.
We learned about crate training this time around. We got a bell, and taught Hoosier to ring it when she needs to go out — and I promise you, it works. She has her own chair between the two computers, her tummy rubs, her special treats, her regular baths. She knows she’s loved.
I suppose that’s the arc of the whole story, really. From Bullet running loose in a neighborhood that would poison him, to a little dog with her own chair and a bell she rings when she wants out — that’s sixty-some years of learning how to do right by an animal that trusts you completely.
Some people say wisdom doesn’t come with age.
Some of it does.
Writing for Sanity's Sake 