I am a dog man and have been since I was 4 or 5 when a big hound wandered into our yard and my mother fed him a pot of stew. I watched him gulp it up, this marvelous, vivid creature, not me or of mine own array of the familiar alive, but somehow kin. When she told me, days later, that he had been hit and killed by a car, I felt his absence as if struck by a rock.
They have been with me ever since. As a boy and young man, their gravitational field would draw me to them in friends’ homes, at college parties, in parks. They responded to affection. They returned kindness. They looked at me as if I existed.
I’ve kept four — Montana, Pete, Luna and the Wolf, and at Lamancha have tended to more than I can count.
I like horses but have never had the intense, physically-touching, years’ long reality of them. For me, a cat has always seemed a kind of sparky creature, quick to shape-shift its emotions in ways I could never anticipate. I cannot read them, but I can read dogs. They have opened in me a kind of intuitive cryptographer — their conversational tails and crouches, their head turns, their sudden stillnesses, the tenor of their barking , mewling, howls and yips, their hesitations, their full out bursts of speed, their rolling, sidewindy approaches to the unfamiliar — the language of dog has become my second tongue. However, I am an amateur in contrast to some whose apprehension of doggy-selves is positively witchy. My friend, Elaine, a trainer, has solved more dog mysteries than Holmes, and Nancy, a master of both horses and dogs, can direct them to perform before audiences swirling with scents and distractions; they love her for bestowing upon them a purpose.
We keep them close because we love them, and they love us in return. The more I spend time with them, the more I understand this is not a contract, this ‘agreement’ is not transactional. It is a harmony; if we are lucky, a long, complex song, a duet, and over the course of time, a bloody great opera. We sing each to the other. Who does not chit-chat with them? Or consult their expressions for clues to the problems that enmesh us, and that we bring to them? Who does not feel a kind of ascension when — our hands upon them, scratching, smoothing, patting — they turn to us with eyes filled with such pleasure? Who does not take delight in their swooping, quick-cut running? In their light-filled eyes? In their utterly complete aliveness?
Dog lovers are invariably sloppy but not necessarily sentimental and rarely absent of sense. Most of the time we also know when one will not work for us (sometimes, sadly, for anyone at all). Fundamentally, our love is for the species, and its apex reserved for the few who come into our homes.
Still, all that said, who among our tribe has not felt his or her heart reach out to a stranger-dog, never met till now, whose immediate impression feels like a hand on the back saying, “Ohh, …. maybe we can do one more”, as Brownie did for me this week at Lamancha. Brownie, a stray, perhaps a Malinois, whose very presence is a promise to stay by your side, whose integrity is loyalty, whose loyalty is love.
