Lambsquarters (11 page)

Zoë was born right in the middle of the back kitchen early in our first spring, before the renovations, when the floorboards were broken and the wind howled through. Her mother was a city mongrel, probably a mix of hound and shepherd, though Thomas’s grandmother said she was “a bit big for a Heinz.”

I’d never had a dog before, though I’d longed and begged for one, even brought puppies home when I was a child, trying to break down my parents’ resolve. Zoë’s
mother, Jessie, just a stray pup, was injured at the side of a city road. A vet wrapped her broken leg to her body until it healed, and found her a home with us before we came here. She began a three-legged race (the fractured leg never touched the ground at speed) that lasted for fourteen years.

Zoë’s father was a Grey County local, a daily visitor who had a reputation for being the best groundhogger in the township. His title was undisputed by any of the neighbours. A crucial task, dispatching groundhogs is a prized skill because groundhog holes are killers. A cow can break a leg if it drops in a hole. A farmer can fall from his tractor and die if a wheel goes in. When they aren’t in their burrows, groundhogs spend most of the daylight hours eating vegetation that has been planted for other uses. Pasture, hay and gardens are all at risk from the woodchuck,
Marmota monax
. So Zoë’s sire was legendary. His owner, who lives across the way, was born in this house years ago in one of the upstairs rooms, so it seemed appropriate for the dog to colonize the farm with his pups. Pure white, he had upstanding perky ears and a curly tail, which made a rather odd mix in the offspring. Some had floppy hound ears, others had ears that stuck right up, but Zoë’s were that fetching combination that begin by sitting up straight, but turn over at the edges, limp-eared, as if the starch ran out at the laundry.

As a newborn she was almost totally black, but over
the months her markings changed. The dark hair remained over her head and back, but formed a wide symmetrical band around her face, detailed with tan. Her legs and belly turned beige and she grew a white ruff. The older she got, the more her white father surfaced in her fur, eventually making her Snowy Zoë and Snowface.

She was the runt of six pups, the last born, and she retained a bit of the underdog in her demeanour. Her effective bark did little to ward off strangers, for as soon as anyone approached her she’d turn turtle and submit. Zoë shadowed her mother sideways through fences, trailed behind her over the hills, and lost all their games of bite-throat, throwing herself down on her back, her mother’s teeth pointed at her neck. Never could she get enough attention.

At thirty-five pounds, she made a rather cumbersome lapdog, but she was determined to live on the couch, snuggle up and settle into quiet adoration. She turned into a rag doll then. We would gently clutch the tendon in the crook of her front leg to make the relaxed paw rise and fall in a wave. She would be on her back, her chin high in pleasure, her eyes half closed.

Zoë loved to sing. When she was on her back, on my lap, I’d rub her chest and hit a note, and she’d start in on an uninhibited aria. Tremulous, melodic, Zoë’s operatic numbers far surpassed the baying of hounds at moons. My guess is she’d have loved the costumes of formal performance as well. But Zoë was a farm dog.

She inherited her father’s skill at groundhogging. Her mother was a natural killer as well, but Zoë was a pro, an Artemis, eagle-eyed and fast. Her aim was perfect and her method, which was to attack and shake, broke the groundhog’s neck in an instant. Sweet singer, she turned vicious when a woodchuck showed its yellow teeth.

Groundhog bodies would lie in state for a few days, depending on the heat, before Zoë would drag them home for a final ripening on the lawn. When they were really rank, she would alternately chew away on them and roll in them, spreading the scent of rotting flesh all along her coat before begging for an evening lap-sit. She got to sleep outside in the summers.

It seemed incongruous to breed Zoë, a perpetual pup, so we took her into Murphy’s Mill to be spayed after her first groundhogging season. It was autumn, the vermin were gone to ground for the winter, and she’d begun to smell more like a dog than a charnel house. She would be able to convalesce inside.

Because Zoë had a hidden infection, something went wrong during the anaesthetic. She lost vital signs, went into cardiac arrest, turned flat. The vet jumped all over her, administered life-saving drugs, did CPR, bagged her, got her breathing again. Whatever was wrong was beyond his scope and equipment. Guelph, he said. We had to rush her to the animal hospital at the agricultural college. It was the only way to save her.

Thomas drove the pickup. Zoë lay unconscious on my lap in the passenger seat, her reflexes too shallow now for even a wave. I cradled her in one arm and held up the IV bottle with my other. An hour’s drive down the highway, ambulance speed, taking our dying dog to the best veterinary care in the country. Thomas, used to tending emergencies along the same route on code 4 trips to the hospital, was reduced to relative and driver.

We left her at the college in the care of the vets. They called us in the middle of the night and I heard Thomas try, through the fog of sleep, to make sense of what they were saying, try to translate dog-owner talk into medical language so he could really understand. “You mean she has peritonitis?” he asked and pressed for details. It was touch and go. She was infected, was in grave condition. They had removed what damaged tissue they could, cleaned up the rest, put her on drugs and were waiting for improvement. She was stable.

Such a sad face she had when we arrived to take her home. Hound eyes turned down, great pools of liquid beseechment. We’d abandoned her, she was broken and rent, but we were back. She rode home on my lap, gazing up at me with longing, with promise, with submissive adoration. A quiet dog for the moment, the hunter asleep inside.

It wasn’t long before her spark returned and she got back outside, firing herself through the fences on tilt. She ran the ski routes all winter chasing rabbits and
foxes, flushing birds out of the bush. And after running the trails she’d come inside, chew the ice from her paws and loll on her back, waving, singing, dreaming and running on the spot.

We had a rabbit in the house by then. Thlayli, an angora with a furry head. I’d won him in a handspinning competition. His hair was long, blueish-grey and fine, and he’d sit on my lap to be combed and plucked. When he wasn’t in his cage in the front hall, he had the run of the house, and Zoë tolerated him the way she did everything else.

In the summer, Thlayli lived outside. I made a wooden house for him, which I put inside a moveable wire-mesh enclosure. Every few days I moved it to a new place on the lawn so he could graze. Of course he’d inevitably get out of his enclosure by burrowing under it, or by hopping around during the move. He was tame and always returned to his hutch. His first summer passed without incident, Zoë nosing him when he escaped.

During his second spring, Thlayli was shifted once again to his outside home. But his first free hop along the grass was his last. Zoë must have seen a moving blur, and she pounced. She grabbed, shook and broke his neck. Just like that. A pile of dead angora lay limp on the lawn.

It was clear that Zoë knew what she’d done. Contrition is evident in a dog. The eyes, both avoiding
connection and begging forgiveness. The tail dragging, the ears off their semi-perk. Zoë never killed the wrong thing again. The chickens were safe; the cats untouched. For the rest of her life she killed groundhogs until they all but disappeared from the farm, but nothing else.

She’d been a digger through the years. There was a spot by the house, under the lilacs, that she’d hollowed out on the hottest days each summer, trying to find a cool den. We gave up trying to stop her. If caught in the act she just showed her belly and exposed her neck. Old age crept up too soon, seven years at a time, and Zoë finally sang her last song. Thomas dug down into the spot under the lilacs she was always trying to reach, deep enough so she’d be cool forever. As I mourned, he laid her to rest just a few feet away from where she was born. She’s there by the house, but her footprints still sprint through the barn each summer, and her memory lives in the generations of groundhogs whose ancestors moved to safer terrain.

DARK DAYS

THE BARN WAS TRANSFORMED
by the renovation Zoë had witnessed. The floor was smooth and flat but for the paw- and footprints; the walls were straight. We installed heated water bowls in the chicken coop, and on both sides of the stable floor to provide access to the greatest number of pens. The main beam was replaced, the mud-sills renewed.

Almost nothing was built in, just the centre posts and troughs. The space was immense, wide open and clean. Tobacco tins, sunk in the floor when the cement was being poured, left post holes when dry for arranging our pens. We drew up plans at the kitchen table, Thomas and I, with cement-king Arthur’s help. Formations for feeding, for lambing, for mothering up. Sick pens and ram pens and pens for fattening late lambs. Pens for yearlings and new stock and creep-feeding—where lambs can squeeze through a small
opening for feed, their greedy but frustrated mothers left behind. All possible arrangements with portable housing. The stable stanchions and mangers now mutable gates and hurdles, feeders and pens.

THE WINTER WE SPENT
before the renovation was worse than the state of the barn. The ram had got out the previous summer, had bred some of the ewes before the prime time. This increased my workload because I had to feed the imminent ewes differently from those more recently bred. It all might have worked if I’d stayed to conduct the proceedings. But I got sick. Really sick. Hospital sick. Out of town sick. A terrible infection. And there was nothing I could do but lie in bed, fight for my health and fuss for my family, my farm, my still-nursing daughter, my unborn lambs.

I was filled with drugs, and I thinned and weakened and despaired more each day. My milk almost went, but I would not force a weaning on my daughter. It was for her to choose when to stop.

The hospital was in the city, two hours away. Thomas, so busy at work, on call so much, so many needing him, did everything. He brought me the baby, looked after the barn, tended his patients and worried like crazy, his knowledge a curse. And one full-moonlit night, one of the ewes wandered out into the light and gave birth in front of the barn. Triplets. Dropped in the snow during a frostbitten
night, left to freeze in their sacs with no one to help.

It went on all winter, day after day, recovery and relapse, trips down the road to the hospital. Once, Thomas was on call—the emerg full of carnage and crises—and had to see me himself. I needed more care, but the ambulance was taken by a patient of his, and there was no room for me. So I waited until the neighbouring town sent theirs, which was more primitive than ours and without trained staff. The attendants did not know my illness, couldn’t have helped if they did. They asked me directions to the city, to the health centre, to an all-night gas station along the way. Panic set in and added to my pain. How did Thomas manage to care for others—his duty clear and unflinching—while I was so ill?