My Life in Dog Years (2 page)

We had a servant named Rom, a young Filipino man, who took care of me when he could. But he had a family of his own, and I was left alone much of the time. Or left alone with Snowball.

The Philippines had been ravaged by the war and much of the islands was still in ruins. The people had been devastated, buildings bombed and blown to pieces, whole tracts of land pitted and scarred by battle. It was impossible to walk anywhere without stepping on empty cartridge cases or seeing
some part of an exploded shell or mine. There were burned-out tanks and trucks everywhere, old Japanese fighter planes sitting on the ground, buildings blown in half and all too often a shallow grave or bulldozed trench with bodies in it.

This became my playground and Snowball became my guide.

We grew up together.

Snowball became an extension of me. I “went native,” as they said then. I wore army shorts that were miles too big for me, an old army belt holding them up, no shirt, no cap. I sunburned constantly so I had a Band-Aid over my nose to keep it from peeling all the time, and I evolved into being Filipino.

Snowball grew tall in that first year, with a thin hound look, one ear flopped down, the other standing straight up, and her tail tightly curved over her back. I took to standing on one leg, my other foot cocked into the knee,
one hand holding Snowball’s back by the short fur. In many ways I think I became more dog than human.

I would see things—blown-apart buildings, old tanks, Jeeps upside down, rusting guns everywhere—but Snowball would
know
things. She would see the obvious outside way a thing looked, but then she would move to it and smell it and perhaps lick it and dig at it and look under it, and I took to doing the same things.

I would try to look inside what we were doing, follow Snowball’s lead, and in doing this I found more and saw more than I ever could have alone.

We went everywhere, including many places where we were not supposed to be.

We found a cave in the jungle full of Japanese bodies—skeletons—and boxes of Japanese money and swords, and rats almost as big as Snowball.

We moved through places in Manila where people were so poor and hungry that a whole family lived under a single overturned Jeep and had only a handful of rice a day for six mouths. Still they offered us food—even a tiny bit for Snowball—and I took to “stealing” food from home and taking it to them and we would sit and talk their language, and eat rice and sardines with our fingers, and I would hear of their lives, Snowball next to me as we squatted in the dirt, and how the war had been for them.

We watched cockfights, where men put two roosters in a dusty ring and let them go at each other. Pesos flew around the pit while the men bet money on which rooster would win.

We moved outside of town, where the farmers wore conical hats and walked through rice paddies with huge water buffalo pulling wooden plows through the mud. Once, here, Snowball saved my life.

We were walking along a trail where the grass came down next to the dirt in tight clumps. I had gotten ahead of Snowball when she stopped to examine a pile of buffalo droppings. As always, I was barefoot, and I was shuffling along. Two steps ahead I saw a pretty colored ribbon lying along the trail. Another step closer and I saw it had moved. It wasn’t a ribbon but a snake, one that—I was to learn later—was deadly. Some involuntary signal made me start to jump but I was too close. I was almost on the snake by that time. It was about to strike when a flash of black fur passed my leg and Snowball grabbed the snake just in back of the head and with a quick flick broke its neck.

It was all over in half a second.

I stood, shaking slightly, while Snowball made sure it was dead, threw it off to the side of the trail and continued on, stopping to look back, one ear up and the other down,
her black face questioning, wanting to know why I wasn’t coming. At last I regained some control and followed her.

We were in the Philippines two and a half years and I can’t think of a day I spent without Snowball next to me. In many ways she became a kind of parent, watching out for me. When I slept she would crawl up beneath the mosquito netting at the foot of the bed and sleep with one part of her touching my foot or leg. The top of her head, her back, a paw—always she slept touching me, and when it came time to go back to the States I would not agree to go unless and until Mother made arrangements for Snowball to come with us. I made such a fuss that Mother and Father actually went through all the reams of paper it took to bring a dog from the Philippines to the United States.

But she did not come. Not two weeks before we were due to leave, a military truck
swerved and hit her while she was walking next to me. She was killed instantly.

I remember standing, not believing she was dead, thinking how nothing would ever be right again, not ever, and how I would always, always miss her, and that is all true. Now, forty-nine years later while I write this, I can see her laughing tongue hanging out while she turns to beckon me on, see the white spot on her side, her tail curled tightly over her back as she turns and jauntily heads up the path ahead of me, and I miss her as much as if she’d just died yesterday.

Snowball.

Much of my childhood I was alone. Family troubles—my parents were drunks—combined with a devastating shyness and a complete lack of social skills to ensure a life of solitude. This isolation was not natural, of course, especially for a child, and most of the time I was excruciatingly lonely I sought
friends whenever I could, but was rarely successful.

When I was very young these times of aloneness were spent making model airplanes, reading comic books or just daydreaming. But when I was twelve, living in a small town named Twin Forks in northern Minnesota, an uncle gave me a Remington .22 rifle he’d bought at a hardware store for ten dollars. I ran to the woods.

It is not somehow “politically correct” to hunt, and that is a shame for young boys. For me it was not only the opening into a world of wonder, it was salvation. I lived and breathed to hunt, to fish.

Two rivers ran out of town, one to the north and one to the east, and any day, hour or few minutes I could spare I would run these rivers. The first year I hunted mostly rabbits and ruffed grouse—feeding myself in the process. I scuffled along in old boots with
a box of .22 long rifle cartridges in my pocket and the single-shot rifle in my hand. On my back was an old army surplus light pack I’d bought with money from setting pins at the local bowling alley. In the pack I had matches, usually a loaf of bread, salt and an old aluminum pot for boiling water.

There was great beauty in running the rivers, especially in the fall when the leaves were turning. The maples were red gold and filtered the sunlight so that you could almost taste the richness of the light, and before long I added a surplus army blanket, rolled up over the pack, and I would spend the nights out as well. During school—where I did badly—I would hunt in the evenings. But on Friday I was gone, and I would frequently spend the entire weekend alone in the woods.

The problem was that I was alone. I had not learned then to love solitude—as I do
now—and the feeling of loneliness was visceral, palpable. I would see something beautiful—the sun through the leaves, a deer moving through the dappled light, the explosion of a grouse flying up through the leaves—and I would turn to point it out to somebody, turn to say, “Look …” and there would be no one there.

The second fall after I’d started living in and off the woods I decided to hunt ducks. Miles to the north were the great swamps and breeding grounds of literally millions of ducks and geese, and when the migratory flights started south the sky would seem to darken with them. The .22 rifle was not suited for ducks—was indeed illegal for them—so I saved my money setting pins and bought an old single-shot Browning twelve-gauge shotgun from a kid named Sonny. The gun had a long barrel and a full choke, and with number four shot seemed to reach out forever. I never became really good with it, but could
hit now and then when the ducks were flying at the right angle. Duck hunting soon became my life.

I did not have decoys but I made some blinds six miles out of town where there were cattail swamps. I would walk out there in the dark, leaving the house at three in the morning, nestle into the blinds and wait for the morning flights to come in from the north. Usually I would get one or two ducks—once a goose—but some I wounded or didn’t kill cleanly and they would get into the swamp grass and weeds in the water and I couldn’t find them.

It was about then that I met Ike.

Ike was a great barrel-chested black Labrador that became one of the best friends I’ve ever had and was in all ways an equal; not a pet, not something to master, but an equal.

I had had other dogs. Snowball in the Philippines, then a cocker spaniel somebody gave me named Trina. They were sweet and
dear and gave love the way only dogs can, with total acceptance, but Ike was the first dog I’d ever known not as a pet but as a separate entity, a partner.

We met strangely enough. It was duck season and I was going hunting. I woke up at three and sneaked from the basement, where I stayed when my parents were drunk— which was all the time—up into the kitchen. Quietly I made two fried egg sandwiches at the stove. I wrapped them in cellophane (this was well before sandwich bags), folded them into a paper sack and put them in my pack along with a Thermos of hot coffee. Then I got my shotgun from the basement. I dumped a box of shells into the pockets of the old canvas coat I’d found in a trunk in the back of the coal room. I put on the knee-high rubber boots I’d bought at army surplus.

I walked from the apartment building four blocks to the railroad, crossed the tracks near the roundhouse yard, crossed the Eighth
Street bridge and then dropped down to the riverbank and started walking along the water.

The river quickly left settled country and headed into woods, and in the dark—there was just the faintest touch of gray on the horizon—it was hard going. The brush pulled at my clothes and after a mile and a half the swamps became more prevalent so that I was wading in muck. I went to pull myself up the bank and walk where the ground was harder.

It had been raining, mixed with snow, and the mud on the bank was as slick as grease. I fell once in the darkness, got to my feet and scrabbled up the bank again, shotgun in one hand and grabbing at roots and shrubs with the other. I had just gained the top, brought my head up over the edge, when a part of the darkness detached itself, leaned close to my face and went:

“Woof.”

It was that distinct—not “arf,” nor “ruff,”
nor a growl, but the very defined sound of “woof.”

I was so startled that I froze, mouth half open. Then I let go of the shrub and fell back down the mud incline. On the way down the thought hit me—bear. Something big and black, that sound—it had to be a bear. Then the word
gun.
I had a gun. I landed on my back and aimed up the bank, pulled the hammer back and put my finger on the trigger before I realized the gun wasn’t loaded yet. I never loaded it while walking in the dark. I clawed at my pockets for shells, found one, broke open the gun and inserted a shell, slammed it shut and was going to aim again when something about the shape stopped me. (It was well it did—I had accidentally jammed the barrel of the shotgun full of mud when I fell. Had I pulled the trigger the shell would have blown up in my face.)

There was just enough of the dawn to show a silhouette. Whatever it was remained
at the top of the bank It was sitting there looking down at me and was the wrong shape and size for a bear. It was a big dog, a black dog. But it was a dog and it wasn’t attacking.

I lowered the gun and wiped the mud out of my eyes, stood and scraped mud off my clothes. I was furious, but not at the dog. There were other hunters who worked the river during duck season and some of them had dogs. I assumed that one of them was nearby and had let his animal run loose, scaring about ten years off my life.

“Who owns you?” I asked the shape. It didn’t move or make any further sounds and I climbed the bank again and it moved back a few feet, then sat again.

“Hello!” I called into the woods around me. “I have your dog here!”

There was nobody

“So you’re a stray?” There were many stray dogs in town and some of them ran to the
woods. It was bad when they did because they often formed packs and did terrible damage. In packs they were worse than wolves because they did not fear men the way wolves did and they tore livestock and some people to pieces.

But strays were shy and usually starved. This dog stayed near me and in the gathering light I could see that he was a Labrador and that he was well fed. His coat was thick and he had fat on his back and sides.

“Well,” I said. “What do I do with you?”

This time his tail thumped twice and he pointedly looked at the gun, then back at my face, then down the side of the river to the water.

“You want to hunt?”

There, he knew that word. His tail hammered his sides and he stood, wiggling, and moved off along the river ahead of me.