The Dog With the Old Soul (4 page)

Dena Kouremetis

When my husband, George, and I look back,
we shake our heads in disbelief. We didn’t find one another on a dating site or throw flirtations to one another across a crowded bar. The brother of my maid of honor, George was a groomsman in my 1982 wedding to someone else.

See, it’s a Greek thing. During the ensuing twenty years, I’d spot George at Greek weddings, festivals, funerals, picnics and dances I would attend with my husband. And each time I’d see him, I would ask his sister about him, taking curious note of the fact that he’d stayed single. My knowledge of George extended to his being a gregarious, good-looking family friend that danced well. After my marriage broke up two decades later, however, I was to discover that George was still there, unattached. And when he found out I was about to become single myself, he wasted no time saying he had no intention of missing
his chance to finally get to know me. Well, it’s just about the most flattering thing a middle-aged woman can have happen to her, isn’t it?

So is
this
what they meant by “happily ever after?” Well, almost.

You see, my new love made it clear early on that he had pet allergies and that, although he liked dogs, he would probably never own one.
Pet dander
was a new term to me.

“What happens when you’re around a dog?” I asked.

A pained look came over George’s face. “My sinuses get stuffed up and I get headaches. Then I get sinus infections and it’s awful.”

Hmm, really?
I’d had small dogs throughout my life. They’d warmed my lap, watched TV with me, melted me with their doleful eyes and filled up spaces in my heart humans simply couldn’t. It was tough to face the idea of never owning one again. “Can’t you get shots?” I asked.

George looked at me as if I had reduced his affliction to inoculating livestock, and it was there the subject ended.

As things got more serious between us, I rationalized the idea of having the freedom to travel and socialize without worrying about a pet. I could accidentally drop food on the floor or leave a door open without having to worry about a little being scurrying to snatch up the morsel or run out of the house. The freedom began to grow on me. A little.

The day finally came when my daughter walked me down the aisle to George and life began anew. At dinner with some friends not long after we moved into our new home, we learned they
were getting a Shima puppy flown down from the Northwest—a shih tzu–Maltese crossbreed, a dog that had become popular over the past few years for its personality, its no-shed fur and, of course, its cuteness factor. Rena and her daughters would excitedly show us photos of their mail-order dog. There was jubilation the day Maxie’s doggy crate, containing a floppy-eared, mop-tailed pup, was handed to its new owners at the Sacramento airport. In the end, Maxie would be everything this little family had wanted in a dog and more. He was adorable, easy to train, smart and absolutely charming. Even people who hated most dogs loved this little guy.

Rena could tell I was smitten with her new four-legged charge. I’d make any excuse to “stop by” for a visit and I loved it when she or her girls would knock on our door with Maxie in tow. And even though I’d watch George begin to sniffle afterward, it was apparent that he became putty in Maxie’s paws. Soon a conspiracy began to hatch. Rena began forwarding me by email photos of new Shima puppies she received from the Spokane, Washington, breeder of her own pup.

The short-limbed, big-eyed blobs of fur in the photos were, of course, totally disarming. The pure white ones looked like tiny snowy owls, and the brown ones like diminutive shaggy dogs you could cuddle to death, like the character in Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men,
if you weren’t careful. With each set of photos I forwarded to George, he’d make a remark that I was trying to wear him down. I was. By the time I forwarded the third batch of litter photos to George, it was all over.

“Did you see the black-and-white one?” he calls to me as we occupy our respective home offices in our new house.

“Oh, yeah. He’s my favorite,” I admit.

A few minutes go by. I hear nothing but the click of George’s mouse. Then a feeble voice echoes down the hall to me. “I think we have to go see this little guy.”

If I could do a happy dance atop my Aeron chair without killing myself, I would have risked looking like an idiot.

Before he could change his mind, I was busy emailing the breeder, asking questions about the black-furred, roly-poly handful with the white paws and white belly. She told us about his parents, how he was the first puppy that wanted to be held, how large he might grow (no more than eight to ten pounds) and when he would turn eight weeks old—just old enough for him to leave his mama. The next day, knowing our heightened interest level, the breeder snapped more photos of him and sent them hurling through cyberspace. There was one of him standing on her deck, one with him shakily perched atop a rock and another one that was a close-up of his little black-and-white face. We were head over heels in love with our small furry Internet date.

Our minds began racing. Recently we had won the grand prize from a raffle George had entered—a free cruise for two to Alaska. The ship was to leave from and return to Seattle, only one hundred miles from where the breeder lived. So instead of flying, we schemed to take a few extra days and drive up so we could swing by and collect our tiny live cargo.

There was much to do to prepare for a new arrival in our house. As we wandered the aisles of the local big-box pet store
before the trip, it was as if we were a couple shopping for baby things. We collected books, talked to on-site trainers and bought tiny puppy toys, not knowing what our new puppy might like. At home, we scoured the Internet for information on bringing a puppy home and found that things had indeed changed since I had owned my last dog. Using crates had become the preferred method of house training, since they emulated the security of the place puppies were born. I had even seen
Dog Whisperer
on TV, a series showing people how to train their puppies without resorting to scaring them by using rolled-up newspapers. It was all about understanding how dogs think and not attributing human characteristics to them. I looked forward to using all the newer techniques with this little guy.

The drive to Seattle was fun and the cruise was glorious. But when we got off the cruise ship and reclaimed our car, it was all about the puppy, which we had already named Cosmo, for his cosmopolitan-looking tuxedo markings. After several hours of scenic driving, we stood at the front door of the breeder’s house like two parents-to-be at an orphanage, waiting to see the child we had received only pictures of. The breeder and her husband were gracious, friendly people with several litters for sale—two Shima litters and a passel of Yorkshire terriers, all of whom looked like tiny
Monopoly
tokens, fully proportioned from head to toe. And then we spotted him. Cosmo looked up at us, wagging his entire body, just before his older brother jumped him from behind. There was no doubt that of the entire gang romping before us, this was the little man of our Internet dreams.

We were ushered into the backyard to watch the toddlers romp in order to see more of his personality. His mom was out there, too, still correcting her pups by occasionally “scruffing” a neck or two. And what personality… Cosmo jumped with his siblings, squatted to take a tiny leak and then, ignoring his playmates, began crawling on top of George as he sat on the grass at puppy level. If this had been a real estate deal, George would have signed all the paperwork and handed over the check before knowing anything more about the property. It was love at first cuddle.

Cosmo is now a two-year-old, incredibly cute member of our household. He greets us every morning as if we had been gone for months and makes our entire day complete before it has even started. It’s Cosmic bliss as our little friend licks our feet, nuzzles our necks and heaves big sighs of contentment.

So what happened to the allergies George claimed he had? Yes, he has them. But he makes this doggy relationship work, just as he makes ours work—with love, patience, compromise, understanding and the occasional antihistamine. I like to think of our lives with Cosmo as a three-way love affair of sorts—the happy ending to a warm, fuzzy fairy tale, just as special as the one about how George magically changed his role in my life from groomsman to bridegroom in thirty short years.

Kathryn Canan

I peered out the bathhouse window
from behind the faded yellow-polka-dotted curtains. It wasn’t safe yet; they were still out there. Perhaps if I peeked out the door and made a bit of noise, I’d be able to scare them off. I opened the door a few inches; it scraped on the uneven concrete floor, and the hinges squealed. Slowly I closed it again and then opened it, drawing out the unearthly sounds. I tried banging the door and shouting, to no avail.

Mama Moose was totally wrapped up in showing her baby where the best-tasting flowers and shrubs were growing. I wasn’t going to take a chance that she would trust me walking past them to get back up the hill to our cabin. Few animals are more dangerous than a moose defending her calf—I had as much respect for her as I would for a grizzly. I’d seen enough reports in Montana newspapers about people who hadn’t learned that lesson.

Since I had no real choice, I decided to relax and enjoy the sight, although it was clear Mama wasn’t going to win any beauty contests. Bull moose (or male moose) are majestic, but cows (or female moose) can easily be mistaken for awkward, malnourished horses with strange ears and knobby knees. The calf had not yet outgrown its reddish-brown coat; he or she had just been born that spring and would stay with its mother for at least a year.

Our house is what decorating magazines call “rustic.” Normally it’s not a problem having no bathroom in the cabin. It started life as a small log cabin on an old dude ranch in the 1920s. Previous owners had added a kitchen and a porch and had brought in running water from a nearby creek. My parents, who bought the cabin in 1961, when I was still in diapers, had added electricity but had balked at digging a septic tank. The common bathhouse for the old dude ranch was fifty yards down the hill. A bathroom so far away has its advantages, though. The stars are incredible on a clear night at three in the morning.

Moose, thank goodness, are not nocturnal, so we’re usually safe on those midnight treks. We tend to see them in the morning and evening, stopping at what used to be a salt lick behind our cabin, on the way to or from the creek. Recently the Forest Service informed us that “baiting” animals with salt blocks is illegal, even though there had been one on a stump outside the back window for at least eighty years. No matter…the stump is saturated with salt by now and the moose come, anyway. Trouble is, they seem to have gone nuts this year and invaded Camp Senia.

I can hardly blame them. It probably feels like the only safe haven for miles around. Mother Nature went on a rampage a couple of years ago, with gusts of wind up over one hundred miles per hour, which felled lodgepole pines all over the forest. Perhaps it was nature’s way of clearing out the pine bark beetles killing her trees. As if the windstorm didn’t do enough damage, along came a drought and a bolt of lightning the next summer to finish the cleanup. Fire.

I had an excellent view of the first cloud of smoke from that fire, since I was four miles up the side of the canyon, enjoying the pristine blue sky reflected in Timberline Lake. I don’t know where the moose went when that fire hit, but I got myself down the mountain faster than I ever thought possible, grabbed my car keys and drove the twelve miles out of the canyon with the firestorm just behind me and moving fast. I passed firefighters heading up and hoped sincerely that no one would be hurt defending our cabin.

Our cabin neighbors had forced my mother into their car at the first sign of fire. After we reunited in town, we spent a sleepless night and the next day huddled in anxious mourning. Finally, my mother got the call from our friendly forest ranger. Owing to the luck of the wind (and relentless nagging by said forest ranger to create defensible space), twenty of the twenty-five cabins in Camp Senia were spared, and we lost only our woodpile.

To fight this huge forest fire, firefighters worked for the next three months, until the October snows put out the last of the fire. By the time the fire was stopped, it had covered a huge distance,
eight miles east down the canyon and three miles to the west from its origin; both sides of the canyon were devastated up to the timberline.

Camp Senia, then, was left as a little island of green surrounded by a seemingly lifeless, charred skeleton. When we returned the following summer, we could see gleaming granite boulders previously hidden by dense undergrowth sitting starkly on the mountainside. Piles of chips, where the rocks had peeled from the intense heat, lay underneath them.

Not everything was black; the first summer after the fire already tiny ribbons of green were beginning to grow along the small streams running down the canyon sides to the main creek near the cabin. It seemed that these little trails were all pointing toward our miraculously saved haven.

So the moose came.

They came to the meadows dotted with blue penstemon flowers, which were already obliterating the sites of the burned cabins. They nibbled tender fir trees and the young shoots of shrubs whose roots had survived the fire. A venerable bull moose reclaimed his kingdom on the islands formed where the creek slows down and widens out, while members of his harem basked in the sun behind our cabin, on a patch of kinnikinnick, a plant that is an evergreen ground cover.

The moose and other animals give back to nature as much as they consume; along with the ash from the fire, they fertilize the new growth. Each summer since the fire, the forest has been blanketed with wildflowers—a varied palette of paint-brush, mountain bluebells, bright yellow balsamroot, orange
and yellow monkey flowers, and the blooming promise of berries that ripen sooner in sunnier meadows. The flowers give shelter to new seedlings of lodgepole pine, a species whose cones open only in response to the intense heat of a fire.

At last I watched Mama Moose lead her calf down past the lodge, where guests of the dude ranch used to enjoy Western barbecues. The moose were heading for their own banquet of tender plants growing in the creek, washed down by fresh snow-melt. It was now safe for me to leave the bathroom and head back up the hill to the cabin. Closing the door quietly behind me, I waved toward the moose and sent them a wordless thank-you. A thank-you for reminding me of the natural wonders that have resulted from what had seemed to me, as a cabin owner, like utter devastation.