Howl (28 page)

Pyr Pressure

[Franz Lidz]

I
F YOU’RE CONTEMPLATING
having children, you might consider staying over at my house for a weekend rethink. Car, curfew, and clothes negotiations; the constant keening of self-pitying rock ballads; showers running endlessly with or without people inside…. An Australian friend with his own teenagers tells me that if only he had known how much he’d enjoy his dog in his declining years, he “might have given parenthood a swerve.” I wouldn’t go that far (at least not publicly), but I know what he means. Over the last decade, I’ve owned six Great Pyrenees. Actually, the Pyrs were not so much owned as adopted into my family: in the morning, we all have breakfast together; at night, they encircle the parental bed. Every adoptee has been a comedian with a wildly different act and sense of humor.

The first two, Cadmus and Europa, came along when I was in the first flush of confident, urban ignorance after my wife, Maggie, and I acquired six wooded acres in rural (or at least rural-ish) Pennsylvania. Like others in similar circumstances of un-preparedness, optimism, and bedazzlement (newlyweds in a home-furnishing outlet, movie stars with their first big paycheck buying a reckless number of vacation homes), we quickly filled up our new barnyard with a Noah’s Ark of ill-chosen beasts. The two puppies took their place alongside llamas, miniature goats, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, turkeys, turtles, cats, and a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig from hell.

If not for their senses of humor, none of my Great Pyrenees would have had any sense whatsoever. These big-hearted dogs of the mountains walk up to and joke around with all kinds of farm animals—even miniature goats—because they are too trusting. Miniature goats, however, tend not to trust Great Pyrenees, and, when approached, try to butt their brains in.

Repeated brain-butting may explain the obtuse Cadmus. Over the years, there has been considerable discussion in my home about whether Cadmus was as dumb as he seemed or dumber. He was a big fellow with a big appetite for food and an even bigger one for attention. The portly clown combined the physical grace of Oliver Hardy and the simpleton destructiveness of Bullwinkle. He was so prodigiously dim that he must have thought his name was “Off the bed!”

Cadmus flunked obedience school. Twice. Then again, he was always more showman than academic. He loved to entertain plumbers and mechanics and babies, especially baby chickens. To the horror of our hens, he would pounce on their chicks and bat them between his paws like badminton birdies. If they stopped chirping, he tried to revive them by slurping their feathers. My oldest daughter, Gogo, used to call the drool-drenched remains Cadmus left in his wake “Chick-sicles.”

Among the other loves of this not-quite-Great Pyrenees were seat cushions, oven mitts, barbecue tongs, chaise longues, bags of charcoal, boxes of matches, cartons of cigarettes, and cans of lighter fluid, all of which, at one time or another, he liberated from a neighbor’s patio and dragged a quarter of a mile to our barn. There was something faintly comical about the way he piled his booty in a great towering heap, hollowed out a trench in the middle, and fell asleep.

At Thanksgiving, Cadmus was at his most amusing. He would station himself between the stove and the dinner table and bay at whatever holiday fare—stuffing, giblets, Bromo Seltzer—hovered overhead. On his final Thanksgiving, Cadmus howled and slavered as the turkey was handed around the groaning board. After the first pass, Maggie set the bird on a table behind her. When it was time for seconds, she reached back and found only an empty plate. Somebody observed that the baying had stopped; the rest of us searched the house for the obvious suspect. We found Cadmus in the barn, stretched out in mid-heap, a dopey smile pasted on his face and the turkey carcass—picked clean—tucked under his chin. When he died a few months later of bone cancer, I told Maggie, “I never thought I could love anything so stupid.”

By comparison, his sister Europa was a veritable Caninestein. Even when she slobbered, she had a certain air about her, a look of exalted weariness one associates with good breeding and scorn for the foibles of the lower orders. Raising her nose haughtily, she’d dodge and dart through underbrush with light-footed elegance. Europa would only lower her snout to search for a scent, and even then she’d maintain a kind of cool dignity: sniff, sniff, sniff, snuffle, snuffle, schnozzle, schnozzle, all nose and no nonsense.

Europa survived on her Chaplinesque wits. Because she weighed only about 80 pounds, she made an easy target for the larger brother who loomed over her, but her quick thinking, agile body, and surprising ingenuity helped her more than hold her own. She’d romp gleefully with Cadmus until she wore him out, then literally run circles around him. As Cadmus panted, Europa would look at him the way a child on a merry-go-round looks at the gaily colored center pole.

Europa was so poised and stately that, on a lark, we once entered her in a town dog show. There—amid a Babel of yips, yaps, and the occasional yowl from barkless Basenjis—a judge evaluated the twenty or so entrants pretty much as if they were guys auditioning for the Chippendales. The judge, whose face could have won Best-in-Show at Westminster, pinched, prodded, and poked. He ran his hand down each dog’s back, felt its shoulders, patted its rump trying to tell by feel instead of X-ray just how close its skeletal makeup came to Pyrenees perfection.

The judge clasped Europa’s head between his hands and peered into her eyes. With a faint hand signal, he commanded my daughter Daisy to walk Europa, halt, pose. As Daisy matched Europa stride for stride, the judge stepped back and viewed the pooch front, back, and profile, like a fastidious art critic sizing up a newly found masterpiece. Europa reacted as if she were a piece of outsider art. She stopped abruptly in the center of the ring, eyed the judge with regal disdain and, like an ancient sovereign, attended to her bodily functions. As the judge stared in revulsion, I realized Great Pyrenees have their own jokes that do not seem a bit funny to non–Great Pyrenees.

The idea that Great Pyrenees compete at Westminster as “working dogs” strikes me as ridiculous. Cadmus’s nephew, the sweet and antic Huck, solved the problem of work: he didn’t work. Then again, he was a true aristocrat: work had been bred out of him. His lone aspiration was to be a rug in our bedroom closet, a 150-pound rug.

Huck was the quintessential beta male. Europa was the boss bitch. Though alleged to be a guard dog, the only thing Huck ever guarded was his dog bowl. Then again, Europa could have it whenever she bared her teeth at him. Vacuum cleaners terrified Huck: a burglar wielding a Dust-Buster would have had the run of our house.

Huck was never goofier than when doing impressions of humans. Like Pee-wee Herman, he could pick up and reflect back facial expressions as they flashed across his consciousness: grins, smirks, paroxysmal eye twitchings. Happily, Huck had been neutered, so he was never in danger of getting arrested in the balcony of a porn theater.

He also barked in his sleep. No amount of time in a kennel or lunatic asylum could prepare you for the
warrph
that rumbled forth basso profundo. To silence it, you had to squirt him with a bedside water gun. When my youngest daughter, Daisy, was ten, she invited a girlfriend to the house for a sleepover. In the middle of the night, Huck
warrphed
his way to a drenching. The next morning we learned that Daisy had been shaken awake by her terrified schoolmate. “I think there’s a burglar in the house,” she told Daisy. “I heard your mom scream, ‘Stop or I’m going to shoot you!’”

Alas, Cadmus, Europa, and Huck are all long gone. These days, the Pyr pressure in my home is exerted by Ella and her younger half-brothers, Errol and Tyrone. There’s a lot of Keaton in Ella, both Diane and Buster. Diane, in that the steady glitter in her eyes radiates mischief; Buster, because she’s acrobatic—her parlor trick is to leap against a sliding glass door and, after stretching her forelegs to the top, slowly, squeakingly descend for maximum annoyance value—and has a serene capacity for absorbing frustration and turning a blind eye to fear and failure. Ella dedicated the first two years of her life to pulling off a single practical joke: grabbing rolls of toilet paper off bathroom dispensers and unraveling them along our property line like crime-scene tape. When she finally got it right, she burped in delight.

Which brings us to Errol and Tyrone, the wet-nosed equivalents of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. A fussy worrywart whose fur coat is as immaculately white as the Cream of Wheat he adores, Errol minces about like a lanky, gonky teenager, on the tips of his toes. A walking mudslide, Tyrone shambles to his own grubby rhythms, trailing a long string of drool that invariably entangles Errol.

As much as Tyrone grates on Errol, and Errol on Tyrone, they need each other; it’s the pairing that makes them funny. As with Tom and Jerry, their slapstick is based on a marvelous tension, a mutual incompatibility. Indeed, it seems to conform to what Mark O’Donnell, the noted anima-physicist, has termed the Laws of Cartoon Motion. According to the Second Law, any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. To demonstrate this principle, Tyrone and Errol require a frolicking squirrel. In hot pursuit, they are so absolute in their momentum that only a tulip poplar will impede their forward motion absolutely. O’Donnell says Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination the Stooge’s Surcease.

In his book
How to Speak Dog,
Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, parses the subtleties of tail-wagging. Coren claims that when a dog holds its tail almost horizontal, pointing away from its body but not stiff, it’s saying: “Something interesting may be happening here.” That’s what Ella does when watching Tyrone and Errol perform one of their anarchic routines. A dog that holds its tail up and slightly curved over the back is saying: “I’m top dog.” That’s how Europa behaved around Cadmus and Huck until the very end.

James Thurber said death, to dogs, is the “final unavoidable compulsion, the last ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail. They like to face death alone, sharing it with no one.” Europa ran off one New Year’s Eve, without fanfare or good-bye. Huck left with her, returned without her. We posted signs all over town, everywhere from grocery stores to dry cleaners. We tacked one in the post office next to a wanted poster for Osama bin Laden, who never showed up, either.

I finally found Europa four days later in back of a neighbor’s house. She was lying on her side and breathing in weak, raspy gulps. She didn’t move until I called her name—a little like the way Argus perked up when Odysseus returned to Ithaca after twenty years.

I drove her to the vet, who hooked her to an IV bag and revived her with steroids, cortisone, Kibbles. Daisy sat in Europa’s cage and ministered to her all morning and afternoon.

When we got home, Europa lay down and fell asleep. She heaved terribly. The cancer had spread to her lungs. We gently woke her and got her upright and walked her outside, where she collapsed. She died instantly.

On her final walk, Europa waved her tail in broad sweeps, a tragicomic flourish worthy of the Little Tramp. Coren calls that particular waggle the “closest to the popular conception of happiness.”

It might be wishful thinking, but wagging happily is how I like to remember her.

Tool: Retractable Dog Leash $10.95–$39.95

[Jeff Steinbrink]

Flexi-Alternatives:

• Rope

• Chain

• Obedience School

Seems simple enough. You hold on to the business end of the Flexi Classic, clip the other to your dog’s collar, and the two of you are good to go, you at your speed, Ajax at his. What puts the flex in the Flexi Classic is its retractable leash, or “lead,” a cable that plays out from the handle as Ajax trots away and rewinds (without any help from you) when he comes back. Your walk together becomes a series of partings and remeetings, and if Ajax knows his John Donne he’s likely to shoot you a look that says,

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

That’s the concept, anyway: you at the center of your dog’s world, he, your little Magellan, and the Flexi Classic, a spring-loaded reminder of the tie that binds.

In practice, though, this scheme, this very Order of Things, is likely to fall apart. It’s clear that the Flexi Classic was designed with the well-behaved dog in mind, the mannerly, picturesque, well-adjusted dog who regards you as he might a god and who trots gladly at your side, drifting briefly away to sport with a butterfly, pee on a hydrant, or scratch where it itches. The Flexi Classic’s whipcord winds out easily as he does, winds back noiselessly as he returns, rests as naturally in your grip as a scepter might. You are a champion, my friend.

Maybe all dogs in Germany, where the Flexi Classic is made, are this way: docile, businesslike, orderly. In other parts of the world the Flexi Classic may have a hard time coping with, let’s say, less conventional dogs. A lazy dog, for instance, will give the Classic fits. Mine is a lazy dog. As we walk I’ll feel his inertia building as he begins ever so gradually taking line with him, from behind. If I slow, so does he. The Flexi Classic is no match for him. He’s no more likely to speed up and allow it to reclaim lead than he is to flutter his saddle-bag ears and leave the ground. If I don’t resort to yanking and tugging (accomplished by holding down the brake button on the Flexi Classic’s handle) I’ll soon be at the end of my tether and Ajax will be lying down, his head between his paws.

Or take a belligerent dog, an ornery dog, especially a big ornery dog. The largest Flexi product, the Flexi All Belt 3, claims to restrain dogs who weigh up to 150 pounds. Except for my little brother, I’ve never had anything to do with an animal of that size, but I have walked my neighbor’s 75-pound Collie mix, a sociopath named Mikey. For Mikey the Flexi All Belt 3 is a dream come true, a way to bring down two victims in one fluid motion. He’ll begin a walk as innocently as a choirboy, prancing along as if with a clear conscience. But at the sight of a neighborhood cat, rat, ferret, hamster, or guinea pig he’ll bolt, every ounce of his 75 pounds developing momentum like a round shot from a chamber. By the time he arrives at the full sixteen-foot limit of the All Belt he will be traveling in excess of 120 mph and approaching his prey with the effective mass of a small planet. Your options are to allow the Flexi to be torn from your hand or to hang on (some models come with a Comfort Soft Grip) and kiss your rotator cuff good-bye.

From the dog’s point of view these retractable leashes must reinforce the conviction that their people are fools—lovable fools, but fools. The Flexi line, after all, allows us to be flown like kites. The Mikeys of the world take off running and try to hurl us into space, while the Ajaxes allow us gently to float away as they hold their ground. For the Flexi to function as its (human?) developers intended, it may be necessary to secure a particularly agreeable dog, a cooperative and philosophic dog. A German dog.

[
Nothing on a Doberman moves in the wind.—Dan Liebert
]