Dog and I (2 page)

Then came Cindy, a half cocker spaniel with a tail so active it couldn't possibly be bobbed, at a cost of three dollars from a house on the edge of town. Cindy overlapped slightly with Bumps, the first of what we would come to call “borderline collies,” a soft little black and white puppy that came from across the street when we lived in Toronto and cost not a cent. Bumps was followed by Bandit, a ten-dollar mutt, part border collie, part Lab, from a village down along the Rideau River. And now, thanks to Jocelyn's inability to obey simple commands, there is Willow, part border collie, part puzzle from higher up the Ottawa River at Petawawa, cost one hundred dollars, but that included shots.

So let's add it all up. Five dogs—three of whom lived to sixteen—spanning forty-six years at a total initial investment of $113. That works out to $2.45 a year.

The price of a coffee and doughnut to get you through the morning.

Or the cost of a faithful companion to get you through life.

IT'S BEEN ABOUT TWENTY YEARS since I began writing a daily newspaper column for the
Ottawa Citizen
. I took on this new job with great seriousness and, at times, would work for hours interviewing and researching and thinking before sitting down to write the definitive piece on a politician or a compelling social problem.

Most days, such columns passed without comment. In a way, that is actually good news to those of us who work in the daily newspaper industry, as feedback usually tilts to the critical. Those who agree with you tend to nod; those who disagree write; those who
really
disagree write your boss.

The day I wrote my very first dog column, I wondered if I dare. People have dogs, and people talk about their dogs, but were dogs a suitable topic for a self-styled serious columnist? Was the subject too light? Too insignificant? Was I wasting valuable news space? I went ahead anyway—and was overwhelmed by the response.

And since then, every time I have wondered if I should write about the dog, I have been shocked the next day that I even cautioned for a moment.

Some of those columns, largely abridged, are included here, but more than half of the material is original, specifically written for this book that first began to take shape more than a year ago. There are columns and small essays on the joy of puppies, the trials of the teenage dog, the pleasures of the mature dog and, of course, the heartbreak of the dog lost. Four of those fine friends—Buddy, Cindy, Bumps, and Bandit— are no longer with us.

Or so the saying goes.

In fact, they are always with us.

There might be books about humans teaching dogs, but they have it somewhat backwards.

It's a Dog's Life

I once had a dog who purred.

I was eleven years old when I got Cindy. She was not my first dog, but became the first to span a significant amount of my own life—childhood, teen years, school years, marriage, right up to within months of first child.

The actual first dog, Buddy, was a small black and white mutt with fur as soft as rabbit. Sadly, he never had a chance to lose that puppy fur. I was at school when my mother let him out the back door to pee and he bolted on her. We lived on Reservoir Hill in the small Ontario town of Huntsville, on a street so steep cars couldn't get up it most winter days, and the frisky little puppy ran right out onto the road just as the garbage truck happened to be thundering down the hill and couldn't be stopped quickly by anything short of a row of maple trees. Buddy was killed instantly.

I never even got to say goodbye because my mother, a practical person who did indeed have a good heart, agreed with the garbagemen that they could best dispose of the body. The driver felt bad. My mother felt terrible. I, of course, was devastated and, for years after—in fact, for decades after—would have recurring dreams that little Buddy, his fur still soft as satin, had found his way back to the door where she had let him out and was scratching to get in.

A few months after Buddy's loss, not long after the first snow that year, a small advertisement appeared in the back pages of the
Huntsville Forester:

Puppies for Sale

Mixed breed, mother spaniel, $3

There was a telephone number included, and I talked my mother into at least calling to see if they were all gone. She did and they weren't. There were three puppies left, but they were “going fast.”

I do not think she believed that. Puppies, in those years, were not something you sold. They were simply available, handed out by kids carrying a wagonload of squealing puppies around the neighbourhood or “advertised” by a crude sign hanging at the end of a farm lane that said, simply, “Puppies,” or, though additional information wasn't really necessary, “Free Puppies.” My mother wasn't at all impressed by the cost and clearly thought that asking for money was bad form.

I have tried to understand how things could change so drastically. Looking back all those years, it seems that purebreds and papers and thousand-dollar dogs were something that must have come along later, like second cars and microwaves and plasma-screen televisions. I do remember one huge dog up the street. Bo Bo must have been mostly a German shepherd, but was as close to royal lines as the town got—belonging to a family in the logging business and, by extension, virtual monarchy in this little town that then depended on the timber trade.

Dogs were mutts, though no one ever used that name because all dogs were mutts. The dog next door, Buster, was a mutt. The dog across the street, a cranky little thing called Jiggs, was a mutt. The dog two doors down, Lady, was a mutt. Four doors down, Queenie, a mutt. None, of course, looked at all the same as another; but none, as well, looked at all the same as any other dog in town—unless, of course, they happened to come from the same litter. But even then you couldn't count on it.

Somehow, I talked my mother into letting me go out to this place. I had money from my
Toronto Daily Star
paper route, so I put together three bucks in change and jammed it into the pocket of my big sweater. My mother was a great knitter—a famous knitter, in fact, for the area—and brought in extra money by knitting big wool sweaters that she sold for the cost of the wool and about fifteen cents an hour for labour. She knit sweaters with white-tailed deer on the back; big, bulky sweaters with pheasants; sweaters with moose, bears, eagles, wolves; sweaters with hunters and hockey players. Mine, of course, was a hockey player.

The sweater was thick and warm and I put it on for the long walk out to the edge of town. It was a very long walk—we had no car at all, let alone a second car—and the journey, in lightly blowing snow, took me up Main Street, out along the railroad tracks and the choppy, steel-coloured bay that had yet to freeze over, and close enough to the edge of town that you could see and hear the lumber trucks thundering past on the new Highway 11 bypass.

There, across from a small planing mill, was a red brick bungalow. I knocked at the door and waited, fidgeting.

A woman came to the door. She was dark and severe and was wearing a purple housecoat and smoking a cigarette. The room inside was also purple, with smoke. The cigarette, which stayed in her painted mouth, looked as though it had been bleeding about the filter.

“Yes?” she said. No hello, no greeting.

I was used to meeting people at their front door. I had to collect every two weeks for my
Star
route.

“Is this the place with the puppies?” I asked.

She nodded, two thick parallel streams of smoke coming out her nostrils. “They cost three dollars,” she said, expecting that to be the end of the conversation.

“I have it,” I said, grabbing my sweater pocket and shaking the change.

She opened the door and stepped aside. “They're in the basement.”

I went in, took off my rubber boots—black, the kind we rolled down as low as we could so that the white insides hung over them like a cape and rendered the boots essentially useless for what they were made for—and trailed after her in thick grey woollen socks desperately in need of pulling up.

She led the way, opening a door off the kitchen and stepping gingerly down a couple of steps while she searched along the rough framing for the light switch. She found it and we both went down, I amazed at how clear and clean the air was, she coughing impatiently.

A blond spaniel was there, somewhat cowering, bobbed tail wagging. Her nipples were almost dragging on the cement floor as she waddled across from a basket and crouched in front of the woman with the cigarette.

In the basket were three small furballs.

“You can have your pick,” she said.

There may be no tougher decision in life. It is easier to decide on a job than a puppy, easier to pick out a new car than a new dog.

One was dark brown with black spots. One was black with brown spots. Both of these were male. The third was almost the spitting image of the mother. She had silky, curly blond hair and a small face that held the biggest, saddest brown eyes I had ever seen in my life.

She was also the only girl—something I hadn't figured on. Like most stupid humans, I had always thought of dogs as male and cats as female, even though an eleven-year-old is perfectly aware that one of each is necessary to produce more of each.

I picked them up one by one and turned them over, the little things biting at my hands with razor teeth, their little tails whipping. The males were cute, and aggressive, but the little female was …
beautiful
.

I was instantly in love. “I guess I'll take this one,” I said. There was no
guess
about it. The dog had already decided.

“They're weaned,” the woman said, “but maybe you should feed her some cream for a bit.”

I nodded, but I wasn't really listening. I was staring at this beautiful, tiny little creature that lay upside down in my cupped hands. I was holding her like a communion wafer (that winter I'd started serving in the Anglican church down by the river). It seemed oddly appropriate.

I fished out the change. She counted it, nodded, and put it into the pocket of her housecoat. She turned and began going up the stairs.

The other puppies were whining and squealing. I wondered if they knew their sister was leaving. Perhaps they were just hungry. The woman, however, paid them no attention at all.

She showed me—
us
—to the door, did not even reach out to pat the little puppy she would never see again, but suddenly showed her first genuine concern for the dogs. “Keep her warm,” she said. “It's getting cold out there.”

It was freezing now. Much colder than when I'd started out. The wind cut through the sweater as if it were nothing but holes—which, of course, it was, even if tightly packed. It was also beginning to darken. I'd barely have time to get her home before I'd have to head off to collect and deliver my papers. This was when most newspapers were still afternoon events, something people read at leisure in the evening rather than in panic in the morning.

The wind was now coming hard straight off the bay. It had turned into a day where it is somehow easier to walk backwards than forwards, so I did, switching every now and then to check my bearings.

I carried her for a while in the pocket of the sweater, the same pocket that had held the change. I have never forgotten the sensation of that moment all these years later, the strange feeling of walking along with a live dog in my pocket. A dog so small that no one passing by in the cars and trucks would ever even notice. A dog that was wiggling and twisting so much that I had to keep a mitt over the pocket to make sure she didn't suddenly pop out like a jack-in-the-box that has triggered its own lid.

After a while I moved her from the pocket to inside the big sweater and then inside the second sweater. I folded my arms over my stomach as if I had a bellyache, she spread herself long and tight along my body heat, and I hurried faster to get her home.

I still had her there when I came into the house. My glasses were steaming up so fast I knew they wouldn't clear for several minutes, so I just tossed them onto the kitchen table. My mother was at the stove. I folded up the two layers of sweater, pulled her out, set her down, and watched, in shock, as she first peed and then pooped on the kitchen floor.

Any who doubted my mother's heart earlier cannot doubt it now. She said not a word. She cleaned it up herself and then took the little dog in her hands and checked it over as if it were something she'd picked up at the A&P produce counter. She checked the legs, the ears, the stomach, the teeth.

“You know it's a girl?” she said.

“Yessss,” I said, as if she had just asked the most obvious question possible.

“We'll have to have her spayed,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn't quite sure about all this. I knew it meant no puppies, and that was fine by me. But I hadn't anticipated the whole extent of the problem.

“It costs a lot of money,” she said. “And we'll have to take her to Bracebridge to have it done.”