Dog and I (6 page)

Directly through the ear is a short tunnel leading to open sky. That odd swooshing sound you hear—a bit like gusting wind—is the commands and orders and calls and, well, out-and-out begging from me going in one ear and out the other.

Here, just to the side, we will find the seven-month-old puppy's sensory centre. So far, it understands but one word: “walk.” It is a word that these sensory organs can pick up at fifty paces even if whispered, even if attached to another word, like “sidewalk,” even if intended as nothing more than an innocent discussion of the apparatus required to cook vegetables Chinese style. Alarms have been known to go off even if the word is spelled out: “w … a … l … k.” Science has no explanation.

Next door to the sensory centre we come to the small package of cells that control motor movement and go into action the moment the leash is attached to the collar. Once these cells swing into action, the front legs are instructed never to touch the ground, the throat is directed to issue only death rattles, and the nose is commanded to lead the desperate lunge for all the latest toilet gossip of the neighbourhood.

The puppy view of reality is contained in a single, twisted cell—very tiny, you'll see it hiding in that crevice over there—that believes all humans secretly desire to have forty-pound dogs jumping at their faces, are highly impressed by barking, and like nothing better than to see a dog giving its private parts a good and thorough licking.

Over there to the left is the taste centre of the puppy brain. That blackboard on the wall listing today's specials includes a morning round of used Kleenex, a teenager's sock that should have been washed a week ago, a Barbie doll head, the inside of a perfectly good slipper, cat food, three chicken bones from the garbage, a slice of processed cheese—still wrapped in plastic—that someone was dumb enough to leave on the table, a bowlful of Lite-Brite markers, several ankles, the mail, one library book, and a beer conveniently knocked over by a wagging tail.

One floor above taste, we come to the room that contains all the ambitions of a seven-month-old puppy brain. In ascending order, the room contains (i) a hope that the garage door is open to the garbage, (ii) that the big German shepherd by the bike path gets run over, (iii) that they get tired of booting me off the chesterfield and, above all, (iv) a growing hope that now that they've stopped putting me off the bed I'll get my own pillow.

There is, just off a bit to the right, a very tiny mass of cells that contains the puppy logic. It is, at seven months, fully developed. It believes that one solves the problem of a chain wrapping around a tree by continuing in precisely the same direction until it is wrapped four times and there is barely enough slack left to permit howling. It also believes, in this instance, that, like the two cats in this house, it, too, fits perfectly on any size lap.

Finally, we should spend some time puzzling over one of the great mysteries of the universe: the puppy view of sex. Two months ago, there was no view. Then one day a nice car ride turned into a guy in a white jacket with a needle, total darkness, and then waking up with stitches to lick. Since that moment, the legs of passing strangers have taken on a new and highly attractive appearance. Visitors are therefore once again advised to watch their step as they leave. For what they might land in—as well as what might land on them.

Care and Feeding, Then and Now

I have been in love with dogs ever since I stumbled on a litter of black puppies in a back shed at Aunt Minnie's many, many years ago. Aunt Minnie, actually Great Aunt Minnie, lived on a small farm deep in the Ottawa Valley. She had a well rather than running water and coal oil lamps rather than electricity, but she also had a place of fabulous wealth in the eyes of a young child: chickens and roosters in the yard, cows in the back fields, once in a while a pig, and cats and dogs everywhere—but not in the house. That is how it was then. Dogs lived outside; or, if they were lucky, in a shed.

Aunt Minnie had lived a long and healthy life and was around ninety when she died at her little farm. They held the funeral there, too, Aunt Minnie laid out in a casket in the sitting room, keeners moaning on chairs along the far wall, the women sitting in the dining room tinkling spoons against their tea cups, and the men gathered in the woodshed tinkling their tonsils with cheap whisky straight from the bottle.

A child not comfortable in either group, and most assuredly not comfortable with the casket and the keeners in the sitting room, fled naturally to the outside. Being the only kid at the funeral—taken simply because I was too small to be left with neighbours, as my older brother and sister had been—I had headed out into the barnyard to be, as a far superior writer once put it, “young and easy under the apple boughs / About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green.”

Aunt Minnie's farm had a half dozen sheds. Some held chickens, some held old machinery, some held hay, some manure, some milk cans and bottles, some nothing but flaking swallows' nests and active beehives. One, however, held the preserves she put down each summer—wild raspberry and blueberry jams, pickled cucumbers and beans and carrots and onions—and there, in the middle of the floor, was half a wooden crate filled with the most magical toys I have ever come across.

Six black puppies.

The mother, whose name I forget but not the look, was a mutt with black curling hair and floppy ears. She must have had a touch of spaniel, a bit of collie. She was gentle and friendly and lived her life out and about the barnyard, though had been allowed inside the shed attached to the house to care for her litter.

The puppies were still nursing. They must have been three or four weeks old, for they tumbled and jumped with their paws and needle-sharp teeth at a small boy's lap as he knelt and played with them for so long his mother had to leave the tea group and come and find him so he'd be cleaned up for the funeral and the long walk—Aunt Minnie's sons and sons-in-law and nephews carrying the casket—down to the little church on the shore of the Bonnechere River.

The puppies mesmerized me. I remember begging my mother to let me take one, but one of the men who overheard us said the puppies weren't yet weaned—whatever that meant—and we'd have to wait a couple of weeks before they could be taken from their mother. I asked if we could get one then and my mother answered as she usually did when the ultimate answer was bound to be no: “We'll see.”

We didn't see because we didn't get back to Aunt Minnie's that summer. It wasn't many summers after that, however, that another litter showed up closer to home and “We'll see” became, as it usually did after enough begging and whining and pleading and even crying, “Okay.”

“Okay, but you'll have to take care of it yourself.”

“Of course,” I answered, insulted that such a statement would even be necessary.

It was necessary, of course, and perhaps she should have had a written legal contract as well, because as all parents eventually discover, the raising of their children's pets usually falls, at some point, to them.

It is hard to believe how much the care of animals has changed since then—even for those of us who neglected our promises. The dogs of Aunt Minnie's litter never saw the inside of a house. The dogs of my first litter did, but only in back rooms or basements. Dogs were then trained by discipline—a rolled-up newspaper for punishment; a snout placed in, or almost in, an accident to make sure it didn't happen again, though it usually did; a choke chain to teach them to heel. I had a friend named Fred who trained his nippy puppy not to bite by picking the thing up in both his hands and sinking his own choppers into the puppy's neck until it yelped so loud it seemed Fred had bitten it in half.

Those dogs learned not to bite, learned to go outside to pee, learned not to wreck furniture or tear apart shoes—but they would never be taught that way today.

My first dog was kept in a basement, a dirt-floor basement with a bare bulb hanging down off the ceiling for light, much of the basement jammed thick with slabwood from the local mill that we burned in a furnace. My second dog was kept outside in a doghouse in summer and in a back room in winter. My third and fourth dogs had the run of the house and slept where they wished. My fifth prefers to be crated at night.

My first dog had a leash and collar from Stedman's five-and-dime store, both cheap. My fifth dog has a variety of leashes and a couple of stylish collars from a suburban box store for pets. A daughter's dog—in many ways my sixth, it seems—has a variety of clothes, including faux fur by “Fursacci” and little booties for when she heads outside in winter. Come Christmas, she has a complete Santa's outfit to wear for the occasion.

My first dog, Buddy, was fed scraps. My second dog, Cindy, a combination of scraps and this new “kibble” that was on the market. My third, Bumps, and fourth, Bandit, had kibble and, for special moments, canned dog food. My fifth, Willow, just came begging for a treat, which I fetched for her and for my daughter's little Boston terrier, Cricket.

Salmon Sushi Dog Treats. I plead insanity.

Fetch… Fetch… Fetch…

I know only his first name, Matt, but I need to find him. My lawyer wants to serve him.

The end of my life as I know it came a week ago when this young man named Matt did nothing more than pick up a stick and throw it. It didn't hit me, but there are times when I wish it had—like at 3:42 yesterday morning when, without warning, a bundle of thick white and brown fur came flying through the bedroom doorway and landed full force on my chest and stayed there. It being approximately the surface temperature of Venus (480°C) outside and there being no air conditioning, a fur blanket was about the last thing I was interested in. It was, however, somewhat less annoying than hearing, and feeling, the unmistakable plop of a tennis ball as it hit my shoulder and rolled, with uncanny accuracy, down toward my throwing hand.

Perhaps I should describe this tennis ball so that you can appreciate the full impact of what it felt like. It is the third tennis ball to be pulled from the new package from the dollar store in the past two days. It began life, as all the tennis balls have, clean and green and soft. Within a matter of minutes, however, it became, like all those before it, black and wet and slimy, great gobs of goo and sand and dirt and heaven knows what else hanging from it as it rides about in the mouth of this eight-month-old puppy named Willow.

The ball, incidentally, has just landed on my keyboard, so excuse me for a bit while I get the Windex and paper towels and then go outside for an hour or two of wrecking the rotator cuff.

I do not know what it is that Matt unleashed when he picked up that first stick and threw it. It's hardly as if the dog had never fetched anything before—though it must be admitted that she rarely brought anything back—but it was as if her age and his stick-throwing suddenly came together the way VLTs and hard liquor sometimes do for humans. Willow was hooked.

The big difference is that if someone else suddenly becomes transfixed with VLTs, it is not necessary for me to go along and push the flashing buttons that start the cherries spinning. Not so with fetching. If the dog gets hooked, the owner becomes an unwilling addict.

I have tried to figure out how this happened. We were at the lake. We were visiting friends on the other side of the island. The barbecue was on. The beer was ice cold. Matt, the nephew of our friends, seemed to be a nice, friendly, sensible young man right up until the moment he reached down, picked up a piece of broken branch, and hurled it off into the woods. The dog chased it down, brought it back, Matt threw it once again, and the rest is history.

Hooked. Addicted. Totally obsessed as I have never before seen a dog become. (There is another dog around our summer place this year, a daughter's Boston terrier, but its only obsession is passing wind that would fell a hemlock.)

The puppy is a mutt. No one, not even its mother's owner, can figure out its lineage. She has the one blue eye of an Australian sheepdog, but the crouching, heelnipping, and herding instincts of a border collie. This is fine with me. In the past, I have been more than happy to have one around to round up little swimmers who dare venture beyond the drop-off. None of the others, however, had to have something in the mouth. Always. Every waking moment.