Dogging Us
Is it time to get another dog? That’s the question being raised in our household again. In part, it’s due to this week’s anniversary of the October afternoon a few years ago when we had to say good-bye to our beloved Ben.
In the heart-breaking compression of dog-time that anyone who lives with a loved dog comes to know, Ben moved much too quickly from his earnest puppyhood and exuberant adolescence, from his singular nose-to-the-ground focus and an athleticism in running that seemed to extend beyond purpose, beyond the drive of what in the blood makes a pointer most fully himself, to the deaf, arthritically-crippled old-timer barely able to make it up stairs or scrabble across a tiled floor. From massive chest and powerful haunches to sunken spine and hip joints that, when I massaged him there, felt like bone on bone.
For much of the time since, I’ve believed (and largely still do) that he’s irreplaceable. But then that is not the point. A loved dog leaves behind an empty space, and usually it’s only another good dog that can fill it.
Truth is, my husband and I miss having a dog in our life. But other things – work, travel, family health problems, and now, possibly, a move – have persuaded us this is not the time to open our doors (and arms) to another canine member of the family. It’s an easier choice to make, perhaps, when we’re back in Chicago, but life on a Maine island often seems to call out for a dog – likely a water-loving one as the typography would suggest.
Not that dogs aren’t adept in making most places home.
Indeed, as hunters at our sides, vigilant guardians before our fires, dogs have been with us a long time. According to Maine science writer Hannah Holmes, dogs and every other canid that walk this region of North America are descendants of some weasel-like critters that dwelled in trees more than 60 million years ago. After the dinos died off and left behind an indisputably big niche, these early canid ancestors climbed down from the trees looking to add something meatier to their diets. Their evolving brains and teeth obliged, and about 10 millions years later, those bigger-brained carnivores divided into two groups, the “cattish” and the “doggish.” Later, the doggish branch of the family split further and “umpteen more pre-dog species evolved toward dogness.” The model that finally succeeded was likely a fox species in what, during another long episode of glacial mischief-making and reshaping of the planet’s continents, was the equivalent then of the North American southwest. From it, our current wolves, foxes, jackals, coyotes, and wild and domesticated dogs directly descend. But whatever the long lineage or however extended the time line, it’s certain, claims Holmes, that “Man and Dog did walk into North America near the end of the last ice age, and things would never be the same.”
Since, the survival of dogs has been ensured, and the reason is pretty simple. Chalk it up to domestication. As cave paintings depict, canines achieved a favored status early on. They demonstrated that their behavior could be tamed and trained. Our hominid messages to them were clear: Old hunter, stay alert, protect me from danger. Pack animal, bend to my alpha dog will. Later, when we humans decided to stay put and move indoors, we needed ample proof our dogs-as-household pets would succumb. Eagerly and wisely, if longevity’s the goal, they obliged. With the help of human tinkerers who selected out our dogs’ best traits and with desire standing in for blind nature ensured what got passed on to future generations, dogs evolved into a willing powerlessness, into an outright eagerness to get along with us if defined by slobber and slather and coffeetable-clearing tail wagging. They’ve come to rely on us, and most of the time, accept the rules we impose. And so we invite dogs into our houses. They bound across the welcome mat and swap carcass for kibble, the assumption being they’ve left their wildness at the door.
And yet there were so many times over the years, especially summers on the island, when I discovered Ben gulping down the last bits of something small and dead or rolling in fresh possum roadkill or running toward me, mouth open, its pink ridges and white teeth clumped with some wild animal’s shit. At night, I watched him stop and stare into the black woods, his fur lifting along his spine, his entire body twitching with the nerve-ending quiver of a chase and I knew he still lived in two worlds. Even if such episodes were brief, and for a long time in his later years came only by way of a leg-twitching, mouth-chuffing dream in which he still ran with his ancestral pack, Ben returned for a time to wildness.
As for us, the masters beneath whose roofs our dog chuff and twitch, we think we know our pets. After all, we are (or should be) the alpha dog. Through training and exercising control, we assume responsibility for our four-legged pals, expecting, and not without some justification, that our dogs in gratitude or through long habit or dependence, may reflect back on us the emotion we’re so often counseled dogs do not posses. When they take off after a deer in unfamiliar terrain or on a pond’s thin spring ice, we fear what can happen to them. But aren’t we frightened, too, a little, by their pursuit of what we cannot know?
Our dogs bolt and we stand helpless in the face of an instinctive and ancestral urge pulling them away from us, our beloved pets who sleep in our beds or nap on our furniture. We trust they’ll heed our call and return to hearth and kibble, to tidbits fed from the table. We rely on their relinquishing the chase, the carcass, to their giving themselves over to a hose’s cold spray, a brisk scrubbing down with soapy brush. They’ve been bred to obey, trained to return. And for this bond, we’re rewarded. Our lives are enriched.
One afternoon in the last weeks of Ben’s life, I happened to be reading some old Down East essays by Caskie Stinnet. In one, he claims that, given her skill sets, if Margaret his boxer were human, she’d be put in charge of Customer Service. And Ben, I wondered? No doubt he’d have an adjoining office. Inspector General a title that seemed appropriate. Once, nothing much got past him. Few folks managed to enter our house without his physical inspection – a full frontal assault a more apt description. Even in later years, when flak-jacket protection was no longer necessary, Ben’s approach to whoever crossed our threshold was so democratic and equally inflected, a friend once declared him the canine equivalent of the WalMart greeter.
Earlier that afternoon, on a gloriously warm October day and bound to be one of the season’s lasts, I’d hauled outside one of Ben’s fleecy beds so he could get some sun and fresh air in all the comfort a retiree from a long and illustrious career (without benefit of a gold watch) so richly deserved. Promptly, he’d fallen into the deep sleep of the old and deaf when provided abundant security and ease.
While he slept, an unexpected flash of color caught my eye, a russet-orange not so different from Ben’s, like a flame not long before it dies out. A vixen who’d been around for the whole summer had emerged from the adjacent woods and without the merest trace of alarm or hurry in spite of Ben’s presence, having no doubt already recognized the lack of peril in a gimpy-legged geezer, trotted slowly across the lawn and disappeared over the bluff’s edge.
Only later did Ben stir, open his eyes, lift his head, his nose working the air. Too late, he learned of the vixen’s presence. Nevertheless, he hauled himself up, teetered, then wobbled his way to where she’d emerged from the woods. And there, with highly evolved nose to the ground, through smell alone, he traveled distances, crossed time lines.
Not so many years before, a younger Ben would’ve worked the fox’s scent with unflagging ardor. He’d have charged up and down the bluff’s face, crashed in and out of the trees, parsed the grasses with his lowered nose, whatever it took, what his species had been born to do but seemed so uniquely his. Eventually, maybe long after it had grown dark, he’d have bounded back to me, alive in all his otherness, a quivering embodiment of joy at having visited the world of his distant kin. To have run again with the pack. And in spite of my vexation and fear, I’d have understood. He had to return to his ancestral home.
But that afternoon, my old dog, companion of no words, turned back. He wasn’t running but was, as he’d always been in a short life, racing. Toward the question: Is it time?
