Dog Stories

Dog Stories

I grew up with dogs, and I’m afraid of them. Our good friends in New Hampshire have two black Labrador-Chow mixes, friendly, affectionate critters now going a bit gray in the muzzle and lame in the hips. But they are still dogs, and they regard it as their bounden duty to guard the house against intruders. So every time we are invited to dinner, they bark deafeningly as they run up to us, until they recognize our scents. I know, rationally, that they would never attack us, and as soon as they have established where we stand in their human-rating system (pretty high), we wind up with a couple of seventy-five-pound lap dogs when we sit on the couch.
Still, the initial barking charge always shrivels my heart, and I have to make a conscious effort to stand my ground, call them by their names, bend down to let them get a good sniff of my hand, and pat them vigorously as soon as their tails start wagging.
The fear goes back a long way. The first dog I remember clearly was a Dalmatian named Charlie. I was maybe eight, and my brother Mike was about two. Our father and mother doted on Charlie, and I shared their devotion to him, because he was wonderfully odd-looking, with his black-on-white spotted coat and his different-colored eyes, one brown and one blue. He was calm and gentle, responding to being patted by licking my face, something which delighted me because it was so sloppy and messy. And I was pretty sloppy and messy myself as a little boy, to the constant irritation of my mother.
But there came a Thanksgiving Day when the family was getting ready to go to my great-aunt and uncle’s house for the feast. A formal dress code for special occasions prevailed back then, even for children. Mother had just finished knotting the tie I wore with my white shirt, and fitting shiny-new little black shoes onto my brother’s feet. Charlie was in our bedroom, standing near my brother, taking a great interest, as usual, in what was going on. Mike wasn’t used to his new shoes, and he stumbled. He reached out and grabbed Charlie’s tail to keep from falling down. I heard a growl and turned to see that the Dalmatian had whipped around and clamped his jaws around the top of my brother’s head. Mike shrieked, Mother yelled and swatted the dog on the muzzle, Charlie released Mike, yelped, and ran out of the room. Mother burst into tears and clasped my terrified brother in her arms, pushing back his hair to see if he was bleeding. He wasn’t; the dog hadn’t bitten down. So after everyone had calmed down, we set off for Turkey Day in reasonably good order. But the image of my brother’s head halfway into the dog’s mouth is still etched in my mind. Charlie disappeared soon afterwards. I didn’t miss him, and I never asked what had happened to him.
Dad, though, really liked dogs, and a few years later he came home from his route as a salesman for a roofing-materials company with another one. Tiber was a boxer, and Dad had found him by the side of the road when he’d pulled over to take a piss (in the early 1950s, gas stations with rest-rooms were few and far between, even in Massachusetts). The dog had walked right up to him, wagging his stump of a tail and looking forlorn but friendly. He wore a collar, but no ID tag. Dad took him in over Mother’s initial objections. He placed a “Dog Found” notice in the local paper, but nobody replied, and eventually Mother fell in love with the handsome, friendly boxer. It was she who named him Tiber, after the Roman river. I have no idea why – perhaps because Mother wrote poetry which sometimes drew upon her ancient history courses in college.
At the time we rented a small house from a gentleman farmer who raised sheep on his estate. The sheep operation was more a hobby than a livelihood for him, but he had a thriving flock of Merinos that grazed in the large pasture across from our house. I was in school by then, and each morning Tiber would accompany me down the lane to the school-bus stop on the state road. He learned when to expect me back, and every afternoon I’d find him waiting for me at the bus stop, and we’d walk home together next to the pasture.
Tiber never had never paid the slightest bit of attention to the woolies, until one day, as if some buried urge had suddenly busted loose, he jumped over the pasture’s stone wall. He ran directly at the flock of sheep, barking, and split it in half purposefully. Then he split the halves into smaller and smaller groups, until he’d finally isolated a single half-grown lamb. With the same terrible urgency, he attacked it, clamping his jaws around its neck and savaging it. His growls and the lamb’s desperate bleats stirred me out of my horrified torpor. I jumped into the field and picked up a metal fence-stake that was lying on the ground. Screaming “Bad dog!” I started to wallop him with the stake. Most of my blows missed – the stake was heavy – but Tiber finally whined and backed away from the lamb. The poor creature was still kicking, and I remember blood spurting out of its throat and dripping from Tiber’s blunt muzzle. The uproar finally attracted the attention of the caretaker who actually ran the sheep farm, and he came running out of the sheep-cote with a double-barreled shotgun. He blew my dog away first, and used the other barrel to finish the dying lamb. Much later I realized that Tiber must have been abandoned by the roadside because of a similar reversion to savagery; Boston’s more remote suburbs were still largely rural then, and a lot of people kept sheep, chickens and other livestock.
My parents divorced, and Mother remarried. One of the first things she and my stepfather did was to buy a black Labrador bitch, a sweet dog Mother named Mekatina, after a town in Labrador. But Tina contracted heart-worm and died barely a year after she joined our family. My stepfather immediately replaced her with a male whom Mother called Mokami, this time after a Labrador mountain range. Mokie was another sweetheart, but like Tina, he died untimely. Hard-pad, a form of canine distemper, did him in. I loved both Labs, and they never offered violence to me, my brother, or anyone else. But when they both kicked the bucket much too soon, I shied away from the very idea of owning dogs.
My paternal grandmother’s succession of Welsh Corgis during those years didn’t do much to restore my confidence. Corgis are aggressive critters who look like foxes whose brushy tails have been docked, and they were originally bred to hunt rats and herd sheep. My grandmother treated hers like lap-dogs, overfed them, and never gave them enough exercise. Naturally they turned out costive, bad-tempered and snappish. They routinely bit everyone who came in contact with them, except my grandmother. I hated them, and they felt the same way about me.
The next dog in my life was a miniature poodle named Agnes. My first wife, Louise, was a soap opera actress who acquired the dog during my two years in the Army, while we were engaged but not yet married. Agnes was affectionate and smart, but she made it clear to me from the start that she was Louise’s pal, not mine. We coexisted clumsily, in the same way that Louise and I blundered through our brief time together, and when our marriage inevitably fell apart, of course Agnes went with Louise. She lived to an astounding age, for her breed, or so I gleaned later from her owner’s publicist (daytime TV parts dried up for Louise when she passed forty, as they do for most actresses, and she launched a successful second career as a mystery writer).
Despite my hardening determination not to get involved with any more dogs, I wound up acquiring one, or rather, she acquired me. At the end of the 1960s I worked at a repertory theater company in Michigan, located on the campus of a university. The actors were put up in trailers and during one bitter winter I came back from a performance and noticed a mangy old yellow cur who looked a bit like an Australian dingo, scavenging food-scraps from the trash-bin. She was emaciated and shivering, and when I tried to shoo her away she just sat down and looked at me with big, hopeful (if somewhat bleary) doggy eyes. Of course I took her in, shared my TV dinner with her, and bedded her down on my spare towel. She stank horribly, of course, and in the morning – I had no performances that day, luckily for both of us – I gave her a bath in the trailer’s tiny bathtub, and took her to a local vet. He examined her cursorily and told me the old lady was on her way out. She had barely any teeth left, cataracts had left her almost blind, and she had advanced hip dysplasia, incurable arthritis which meant that soon she’d be unable to walk at all. He said the kindest course would be to let him euthanize her.
Being in my hippie, sanctity-of-all-life mode at the time, I refused, and brought the dog home. The vet had inadvertently suggested the name I wound up calling her, and I spent a bit of money on Old Lady over the rest of the theater season, buying her deworming pills, canned dog food, and chew toys soft enough for her to gum. She rallied remarkably, regaining some energy and filling out a little, though it was still painful for her to walk around. But she was affectionate toward me, and she proved to be very good company for quite a while, for she defied the vet’s dismal prognosis and enjoyed two more decent years before dying in her sleep one sunny afternoon at my brother’s place on Cape Cod. She was my road-buddy on a number of long drives from the Midwest to the East Coast, lying on the passenger seat of my clunky old Pontiac station-wagon, which was almost as decrepit as she was.
On top of all her other ailments, there was something wrong with her throat, so she couldn’t really bark. Instead, she let out hoarse little groans when she was excited. The only thing that made her less than an ideal companion was her farting, which was explosive and so stinky it made my eyes water. Even in the dead of winter I had to drive with the windows open to keep the toxic fumes from building up inside the car. I thought that the astonishingly vile smell of her farts was a clear sign that something drastic was wrong with her innards, but Old Lady maintained a good appetite almost until the day she died. Perhaps her lethal nether blasts were only her way of expressing appreciation for her food, just as people in some traditional cultures thank their hosts at feasts by belching.
One reason I fell in love with Patsy, who married me more than four decades ago, was that when I first met her, she was walking along a beach with a coyote. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the first time I’d met Patsy; our families had neighboring summer houses in the resort community of Quissett on Cape Cod, and we shared the beach. So as a teenager I’d seen her many times playing in the water, but naturally I hadn’t paid much attention to her: she was just one of the scrappy little kids fooling around at the water’s edge. Some years had passed, however. My first marriage had vaporized, and I was spending a hippie summer as a part-time housepainter and fulltime stoner, living with my brother Mike and one of his friends in a tent encampment set up in a patch of woods owned by my grandparents. “Tent City” scandalized the proper Quissettsians, but it amused my grandfather, who didn’t give a damn about public opinion, being a retired Wall Street magnate who had actually made money during the Great Depression. He not only condoned Tent City (we paid him a nominal rent), but also allowed us to keep our beach privileges.
One day toward the end of June I was loafing on the sand with my fellow Tent Citizens, and my eyes were drawn to a slim, long-legged young woman in a denim mini-skirt. She had flaming red hair that hung to her waist, and she was strolling along the waterline with what looked like a small German shepherd. But its color was too light, it carried its brushy tail low, and it walked on the tips of its toes. It also had a wariness I didn’t associate with domestic dogs. It stuck close to the woman, constantly scanning around for potential threats, obviously spooked by being in a place that was completely alien to it. It stayed away from the water as if it had found something wrong with that, too (later I would learn that it had started to take a drink, spluttered at the salt taste, and given its owner a very dirty look).
I was instantly smitten, not just by the lovely stranger, but also by her unusual companion. And I felt transcendentally stupid when after I finally drummed up the nerve to approach her, it turned out we weren’t strangers at all, but Quissett neighbors bound together so closely by ties between our grandfathers that we might as well have been cousins.
Patsy explained that she had been working out in Jackson, Wyoming for a dude rancher named George Clover and was back East for a short vacation. Her companion – not exactly a pet, she said – was a coy-dog whose father was a blond-Labrador/wolf mix belonging to Mr. Clover, and whose mother was a coyote born in Jackson Hole’s elk refuge. The coyote bitch had huge litters with the part-wolf Lab, and Mr. Clover tried to give most of the pups away to the hippie chicks (like Patsy) who had begun coming to Jackson, working as cabin girls and part-time wranglers on dude ranches for low wages, but the chance to spend some time riding horseback in the glorious Teton country. Patsy says Mr. Clover may have run out of hippie chicks before he ran out of puppies, so it’s possible he drowned the extras.
Crispin (Patsy found her moniker in a friend’s baby-name book and liked the sound of it) was the last of her litter, and she’d spent more time with her wild coyote mother. She’d learned to scavenge for her food, and although Patsy provided plenty of dog food for her, she never got out of the habit. She was more coyote than domestic dog; the only giveaway was the fact that her ears flopped over a bit instead of standing straight up.
Crispin never bit me, but she barely tolerated my presence in Patsy’s life. When I went out to Wyoming toward the end of that summer to be with her again, Patsy was living in a tiny trailer on a ranch in Wyoming’s Gros Ventre range that belonged to a family named Taylor. The trailer had only one narrow bed, and every night Crispin would settle down next to Patsy and use all four of her paws to push me onto the floor.
The Taylors had a teenaged daughter who used to come out to the trailer to smoke dope with us, and her parents decided that Patsy and I were a Bad Influence, so they turfed us out. We went back to Patsy’s widowed mother’s house in Andover, Massachusetts, and I left Patsy there with Crispin while I returned to New York to try and revive my acting career and find an apartment for us. But Crispin couldn’t shed her scavenging habit, and eventually the neighbors got tired of seeing their garbage cans knocked over and all the trash strewn on the sidewalk. Without even lodging a complaint with Patsy or her mother, somebody added poison to his or her trash, and that was the end of Crispin. She wasn’t more than three months old when Patsy first took her in, and I still think that given time and patience, I might have overcome her wariness and made friends with her. But the cowardly poisoner nipped that hope in the bud. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but there are still times when I wish they existed. Crispin would be jumping around in the Elysian Fields hunting mice and voles (well, OK, her prey wouldn’t think that was much fun, but never mind), and the poisoner would have to die painfully, over and over and over again, without ever knowing what he or she had done wrong.
Crispin’s murder was the final blow that knocked all notions of owning dogs out of me. It hit Patsy even harder, needless to say. We spend most of our time in a small New York City apartment, and dogs need more exercise than just a daily stroll. Unless you have time to get to one of the dog-runs in the city parks, where your pooch can ramp around off-leash and socialize with other dogs, or unless you can afford to pay a dog-walker to do it for you, I think it’s a crime against canine nature to keep a dog in the city. Many people will disagree with me, I know, but then, as I’ve stated above, I’m afraid of dogs, and don’t want to do anything that might get them riled up.
Patsy isn’t scared of them, but she agrees with me that city dogs don’t get enough exercise. Still, we like having companions from another species to keep us from thinking homo sap is boss of the world. So we’re on our third set of Siamese cats, the breed Patsy grew up with. The first two pairs lived to ripe old ages; the current duo, Xoco and Quetzal, are three-year-old half-brothers we bought as kittens. They are rowdy, bossy, demanding, destructive, and highly vocal – in fact, just like dogs. Xoco even fetches, sort of; he’ll bring a tossed cat-toy back half way and then wait for his pet human to go pick it up and toss it again. But he and his brother aren’t dogs, thank the Jeezus. They don’t have to be taken outside to pee and poop at six in the morning during a January sleet storm.

(Note: I wrote this piece four years ago for Terry Ross’s Black Lamb. The two Lab/Chow mixes our New Hampshire friends owned died, and have been replaced by a very boistrous young Greyhound-Lab mix, who also scares me.)