Dog and I (11 page)

Today we went walking, as usual, down by the creek. It was snowing lightly, winter clearly getting its directions confused, but the spring melt from the previous day had the creek brown and swollen and as inviting to the one-year-old dog as a warm bath might be to an eighty-year-old human.

My mood fit the mood of the day, overcast and downcast. Word the previous night at hockey had been that one of the longtime players is battling cancer. A man only into his forties, a gifted athlete with a young family, hit hard by that one attacker so difficult to turn back. Word had also come that an old neighbour had passed on, a funny Scot who owned a Scottie and who had no children of his own, but, with his wonderful wife, took on the children from all sides of the street to the point where the children thought of them as “spare” grandparents.

One can only slip down so deep in one's thoughts when a dog is around. She raced about, trying to break branches off from trees, until I pulled my sorry hands out of my pockets and broke one off for her and threw it. And threw it again. And threw it again. And again and again and again.

We walked for more than an hour. She scared herself half to death by bolting over a bank and practically landing on a couple of mallards that exploded from the water. She almost got stuck in a gopher hole. She ran and ran and ran, and then ran some more, her fur soaked through with creek water, streaked with mud, never happier because, to her, there is no never. Only now.

I talk a lot to her, just as I have to all the other dogs. It's a strange, one-way conversation, quite different from any you might have with, say, a baby or a toddler who also does not understand whatever language you are using. I talk to the dog about what we're doing, what we're seeing, sometimes even what we're thinking. Or at least what one of us is thinking. She couldn't care less.

She cares only about the walk, the water, the sticks, the throwing, the smells, the sounds. She has been this way since she was a puppy and she will be this way right to her final walk down along this creek, a walk in which only one of us will return with a heavy heart. But that is a long, long, long way off. Perhaps by then we will both be in old age.

Right now she clears away the internal clouds with her running and her jumping and her foolishness—“Get your head out of that hole!”—and in her sheer, open delight at doing nothing but hanging out with you in a place both of you love. That is the essence of the middle-aged dog she will eventually become: a welcome companion, no matter what you might be doing or what might be on your mind. Perspective, delivered daily.

I would never suggest that dogs offer a superior perspective on life than children do, just a slightly different one. Both tell you that there are far more important things in life than what you might have on your mind. But there are differences. If you show up at your front door having been fired over lunch by the boss, the children will want to know how it affects them; the dog will want to know when you are going for the walk together.

Those walks—down by the creek one day, through the woods the next, around the block if it's raining hard— are, for many of us, a critical salvation in life. The dog is interested only in getting going. He or she lives absolutely in the moment—the most important thing in the world being the sound of the leash coming down, then the most important thing in the world the door, then the most important thing in the world trying to figure out what other dog came and peed on this tire or that snowbank. Simple, yes, but an astounding and absolutely welcome simplicity after a tough day as a human.

There is simply no
down
to dog. She has just come to me with a new stick and, when I try to take it from her, she hangs on so tightly that I am able to lift her entirely off the ground, swinging her around and around and around until stick snaps and dog goes flying, bouncing straight back for more of the same. I'm sure dog disciplinarians would frown on such activity, but this, surely, is more a case of the dog dealing with the human than the human with the dog. If I felt down moments earlier, now I am roaring with laughter, near tears at the absurdity of this new game she has invented on the spot.

I cannot say it as accurately or as well as James Thurber—“Dogs are
obsessed
with being happy”—so I won't even bother trying. I'll just enjoy. And be thankful for all those years of being welcomed at the front door by someone who knows what really and truly matters in life.

Tummy scratches.

What a dog does on its back and a man does leaning down.

Dog in Winter

It snowed during the night, huge flakes that fell so slowly it seemed they were drifting through water. By morning it was clear that—in this particular part of this vast country, anyway—we shall have that white, politically correct holiday time of year everyone craves.

The old dog, Bandit, noticed the second she was let out for the morning. Instead of heading to the end of her chain to do her usual duty, she stepped out into the deep fluff, suddenly reared back on her back legs like Silver at the end of a
Lone Ranger
episode, and lunged, literally lunged off the back deck as if she were diving into warm summer water rather than the form water takes in winter in these parts.

It is December and it is white. The world is as it should be. November, the one month most Canadians would vote off the calendar, is gone with its blowing leaves, wet winds, and early evenings so dark not even a flashlight cares to go out in them. Soon it will be January, the month that seems to take up too much of the Canadian calendar, but for now there is fresh snow on the ground, and everyone, even this old dog romping in the backyard, feels a bit like the children let out for recess in the nearby schoolyard, running and leaping and laughing as if the snow were something to swim in and eat at the same time, a great unexpected surprise that somehow fell out of the sky in the night.

The snow is above the ankle but below the knee, a far cry from the four storeys of snow that have already been dumped on the Maritimes, and it is, for the moment, still a joy to shovel. I head out with Bandit, she plowing her nose through the fallen cover as if, somehow, it helps. It doesn't, of course, but it still looks as if we are working together.

A neighbour down the street has a snow blower. In December I stand on the drive, scraper in hand, praying he will not offer to help out; by February I will stand by the window, coffee in hand, praying he will beat me to it and do the obvious neighbourly thing.

I number among the millions for whom the snow shovel is the only household tool we have ever mastered. That clean walk, that squared-off drive is the only time in our pathetic lives when we can point to anything we have completed without hitting our thumbs, stripping a screw, or bumping our heads. It is also—though it hardly equals a new cedar deck or a refinished basement—the only visible, albeit temporary, evidence of accomplishment we are ever able to present to the rest of the world.

There was once a time when Canadians were hypersensitive about their dominant season. In the late nineteenth century, British prime minister William Gladstone dismissed us as the land of “perpetual ice and snow,” and the Irish newspaper,
The Nation,
ridiculed the place so many Irish were headed for as nothing less than “a kind of Siberia.”

At one point, long before political correctness worried about the inadvertent mention of “Christmas,” the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom, ordered that the word “cold” be avoided in all government brochures and publications and be replaced with the far more acceptable word “buoyant.” If I were to say to the neighbour, “Buoyant out today, eh?” I would get a look like the dog gives me when I tell her it's time to head back inside.

There was another point when Canadians actually tried to pretend we had no white stuff to speak of here during the “winter” months. When railway magnate William Van Horne used to head off to Europe in search of new investors for his railways and new immigrants to ride them west, he would fake a chill no matter what city he might be in, moaning for all to hear, “How I pine for Winnipeg to thaw me!” I understand he was in Florence the day he said this.

Mercifully, Canadians eventually came to celebrate winter, even trying to sell it to the rest of the world as something that was, indeed, buoyant to the spirit.

Few of us care for so much of it, and almost all of us will be begging, come late February, for it to finally stop snowing, but at the moment it is most welcome. For reasons that no one can understand—any more than we can figure out why the snow the plow deposits at the end of the drive is 2,426 times as dense as the fluff The Dog and I are supposed to be shovelling—that first snowfall seems to warm us up as much as it, most assuredly, brightens the evening enough that a flashlight isn't necessary.

Bandit understands this best. The snow seems to have taken a half-century of dog years off her, and she runs as if she would love to be, if it were only possible, both under the snow and on top of it at the same time. What she smells in that fresh snow is unknown; it is, however, delightful to see that nose poking, for once, in a place where I would happily poke my own.

The driveway done, the old dog and I head out for a walk down past the houses and under a roadway to a park where an open creek still churns and defies icing solid, at least for a few more weeks. The scene is sweeter than any of the politically correct holiday-time-of-year cards that have been filling up the mailbox each morning. Deep snow covers the deer trails, falls off into the creek, and flows like slush floes down past the beaver chews and, eventually, into the Ottawa River.

Around one turn the dog suddenly starts, frightened by five mallards that burst from the creek and, in a fury of duck talk and slapping wings, head out over the cornfields on a bearing that will take them south. Perhaps they stayed around just long enough to see winter's exquisite arrival. Perhaps they have already seen enough.

Grizzled and on the Lam

It is always disconcerting to discover that the voice at the other end of the telephone line belongs to the police. And all the more so to learn that they are calling about one of yours.

“We have your dog here at the station.”

For a long moment I am speechless, and the Ontario Provincial Police constable mistakes the silence for denial. He recites the numbers of a licence, but they mean nothing. I have never heard those numbers before. Nor, of course, have I ever looked at them.

“It's registered in your name, sir.”

I'm sure it is—but still I am speechless.

“Female. Black and brown with a little white, fairly small—is that yours, sir?”

It certainly sounds like her, but how? Bumps is nearly fourteen years old and has not only never before crossed the law, but these days can barely cross the lawn. It would seem more reasonable if the police were calling about one of the kids being caught in a bank holdup, or if our aging Ford Pinto station wagon had turned itself in as a menace to public safety. But we are speaking here of the totally harmless, a mongrel that came from up a street we lived on in Toronto it seems now so very, very long ago.