My Life in Dog Years Read online

  We met strangely enough. It was duck season and I was going hunting. I woke up at three and sneaked from the basement, where I stayed when my parents were drunk— which was all the time—up into the kitchen. Quietly I made two fried egg sandwiches at the stove. I wrapped them in cellophane (this was well before sandwich bags), folded them into a paper sack and put them in my pack along with a Thermos of hot coffee. Then I got my shotgun from the basement. I dumped a box of shells into the pockets of the old canvas coat I’d found in a trunk in the back of the coal room. I put on the knee-high rubber boots I’d bought at army surplus.

  I walked from the apartment building four blocks to the railroad, crossed the tracks near the roundhouse yard, crossed the Eighth Street bridge and then dropped down to the riverbank and started walking along the water.

  The river quickly left settled country and headed into woods, and in the dark—there was just the faintest touch of gray on the horizon—it was hard going. The brush pulled at my clothes and after a mile and a half the swamps became more prevalent so that I was wading in muck. I went to pull myself up the bank and walk where the ground was harder.

  It had been raining, mixed with snow, and the mud on the bank was as slick as grease. I fell once in the darkness, got to my feet and scrabbled up the bank again, shotgun in one hand and grabbing at roots and shrubs with the other. I had just gained the top, brought my head up over the edge, when a part of the darkness detached itself, leaned close to my face and went:

  “Woof.”

  It was that distinct—not “arf,” nor “ruff,” nor a growl, but the very defined sound of “woof.”

  I was so startled that I froze, mouth half open. Then I let go of the shrub and fell back down the mud incline. On the way down the thought hit me—bear. Something big and black, that sound—it had to be a bear. Then the word gun. I had a gun. I landed on my back and aimed up the bank, pulled the hammer back and put my finger on the trigger before I realized the gun wasn’t loaded yet. I never loaded it while walking in the dark. I clawed at my pockets for shells, found one, broke open the gun and inserted a shell, slammed it shut and was going to aim again when something about the shape stopped me. (It was well it did—I had accidentally jammed the barrel of the shotgun full of mud when I fell. Had I pulled the trigger the shell would have blown up in my face.)

  There was just enough of the dawn to show a silhouette. Whatever it was remained at the top of the bank It was sitting there looking down at me and was the wrong shape and size for a bear. It was a big dog, a black dog. But it was a dog and it wasn’t attacking.

  I lowered the gun and wiped the mud out of my eyes, stood and scraped mud off my clothes. I was furious, but not at the dog. There were other hunters who worked the river during duck season and some of them had dogs. I assumed that one of them was nearby and had let his animal run loose, scaring about ten years off my life.

  “Who owns you?” I asked the shape. It didn’t move or make any further sounds and I climbed the bank again and it moved back a few feet, then sat again.

  “Hello!” I called into the woods around me. “I have your dog here!”

  There was nobody

  “So you’re a stray?” There were many stray dogs in town and some of them ran to the woods. It was bad when they did because they often formed packs and did terrible damage. In packs they were worse than wolves because they did not fear men the way wolves did and they tore livestock and some people to pieces.

  But strays were shy and usually starved. This dog stayed near me and in the gathering light I could see that he was a Labrador and that he was well fed. His coat was thick and he had fat on his back and sides.

  “Well,” I said. “What do I do with you?”

  This time his tail thumped twice and he pointedly looked at the gun, then back at my face, then down the side of the river to the water.

  “You want to hunt?”

  There, he knew that word. His tail hammered his sides and he stood, wiggling, and moved off along the river ahead of me.

  I had never hunted with a dog before and did not know for certain what was expected of me. But I started to follow, thinking we might jump up a mallard or teal. Then I remembered my fall and the mud and that the gun was still loaded. I unloaded it and checked the bore and found the end packed with mud. It took me a minute to clean it out and reload it and before I’d finished he’d come back and sat four feet away, watching me quietly.

  It was light enough now for me to see that he had a collar and a tag so he wasn’t a stray. It must be some town dog, I thought, that had followed me. I held out my hand. “Come here …”

  But he remained at a distance and when it was obvious that I was ready to go he set off again. It was light enough now to shoot— light enough to see the front bead of the shotgun and a duck against the sky—so I kept the gun ready and we had not gone fifty yards when two mallards exploded out of some thick grass near the bank about twenty yards away and started up and across the river.

  It was a classic shot. Mallards flying straight up to gain altitude before making off, backlit against a cold, cloudy October sky. I raised the gun, cocked it, aimed just above the right-hand duck to lead his flight and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a crash and the recoil slammed me back. I was small and the gun was big and I usually had a bruise after firing it more than once. But my aim was good and the right-hand duck seemed to break in the air, crumpled and fell into the water. I had shot ducks over the river before and the way to get them was to wait until the current brought the body to shore. Sometimes it took most of the morning, waiting for the slow-moving water to bring them in.

  This time was different. With the smell of powder still in the air, almost before the duck finished falling, the dog was off the bank in a great leap, hit the water swimming, his shoulders pumping as he churned the surface and made a straight line to the dead duck. He took it in his mouth gently, turned and swam back, climbed the bank and put the duck by my right foot, then moved off a couple of feet and sat, looking at me.

  I made sure the duck was dead, then picked it up and tied it to my belt with a string I carried for the purpose. The dog sat and watched me the whole time, waiting. It was fully light now and I moved to him, petted him—he let me but in a reserved way—and pulled his tag to the side so I could read it.

  My name is Ike.

  That’s all it said. No address, no owner’s name, just one short sentence.

  “Well, Ike”— at this his tau wagged—“I’d like to thank you for bringing me the duck…”

  And that was how it started, how I came to know Ike.

  Duck season soon consumed me and I spent every morning walking and hunting the river. On school days I would go out and come back just in time to get to classes and on the weekends I stayed out.

  And every morning Ike was there. I’d come across the bridge, start down the river, and he’d be there, waiting. After a few mornings he’d let me pet him—I think he did it for me more than him—and by the end of the first week I was looking forward to seeing him. By the middle of the second week I felt as if we’d been hunting with each other forever.

  And he knew hunting. Clearly somebody had trained him well. He moved quietly, sat in the blind with me without moving, watched the barrel of the gun to see which duck I was going to shoot at, and when I shot he would leap into the water. On those occasions when I missed—I think more often than not—he would watch the duck fly away, turn to me and give me a look of such uncompromising pity and scorn that I would feel compelled to apologize and make excuses.

  “The wind moved the barrel,” or “A drop of water hit my eye when I shot.”

  Of course, he did not believe me but would turn back, sitting there waiting for the next shot so I could absolve myself.

  When the hunting was done he’d walk back with me to town, trotting alongside, until we arrived at the bridge. There he would stop and sit down and nothing I did would make him come farther. I tried waiting him out
to see where he would go but when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to leave he merely lay down and went to sleep, or turned and started back into the woods, looking back to see if we were going hunting again.

  Once I left him, crossed the bridge and then hid in back of a building and watched. He stayed until I was out of sight and then turned and trotted north away from the bridge along the river. There were no houses in that direction, at least on the far side of the river, and I watched him until he disappeared into the woods. I was no wiser than I had been.

  The rest of his life was a mystery and would remain so for thirty years. But when we were together we became fast friends, at least on my part.

  I would cook an extra egg sandwich for Ike and when the flights weren’t coming we would “talk.” That is to say, I would talk, tell him all my troubles, and he would sit, his enormous head sometimes resting on my knee, his huge brown eyes looking up at me while I petted him and rattled on.

  On the weekends when I stayed out, I would construct a lean-to and make a fire, and he would curl up on the edge of my blanket. Many mornings I would awaken to find him under the frost-covered blanket with me, sound asleep, my arm thrown over him, his breath rumbling against my side.

  It seemed like there’d always been an Ike in my life and then one morning he wasn’t there and I never saw him again. I tried to find him. I would wait for him in the mornings by the bridge, but he never showed again. I thought he might have gotten hit by a car, or his owners moved away. I mourned him and missed him. But I did not learn what happened to him for thirty years.

  I grew and went into the crazy parts of life, army and those other mistakes a young man could make. I grew older and got back into dogs, this time sled dogs, and ran the Iditarod race across Alaska. After my first run I came back to Minnesota with slides of the race to show to all the people who had supported me. A sporting goods store had been one of my sponsors and I gave a public slide show of the race one evening.

  There was an older man sitting in a wheelchair and I saw that when I told a story of how Cookie, my lead dog, had saved my life his eyes teared up and he nodded quietly.

  When the event was over he wheeled up to me and shook my hands.

  “I had a dog like your Cookie—a dog that saved my life.”

  “Oh—did you run sleds?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not like that. I lived up in Twin Forks when I was young and was drafted to serve in the Korean War. I had a Labrador that I raised and hunted with, and left him when I went away. I was gone just under a year; I got wounded and lost the use of my legs. When I came back from the hospital he was waiting there and he spent the rest of his life by my side. I would have gone crazy without him. I’d sit for hours and talk to him and he would listen quietly … it was, so sad. He loved to hunt and I never hunted again.” He faded off and his eyes were moist again. “I still miss him …”

  I looked at him, then out the window of the sporting goods store. It was spring and the snow was melting outside but I was seeing fall and a boy and a Lab sitting in a duck blind. Twin Forks, he’d said—and the Korean War. The time was right, and the place, and the dog.

  “Your dog,” I said. “Was he named Ike?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Why, yes—but how… did you know him?”

  There was a soft spring rain starting and the window misted with it. That was why Ike had not come back. He had another job.

  “Yes,” I said, turning to him. “He was my friend….”

  For a time in my life I became a street kid. It would be nice to put it another way but what with the drinking at home and the difficulties it caused with my parents I couldn’t live in the house.

  I made a place for myself in the basement by the furnace and hunted and fished in the woods around the small town. But I had other needs as well—clothes, food, school supplies—and they required money.

  I was not afraid of work and spent most of my summers working on farms for two, three and finally five dollars a day. This gave me enough for school clothes, though never for enough clothes or the right kind; I was never cool or in. But during the school year I couldn’t leave town to work the farms. I looked for odd jobs but most of them were taken by the boys who stayed in town through the summer. All the conventional jobs like working in the markets or at the drugstore were gone and all I could find was setting pins in the small bowling alley over the Four Clover Bar.

  It had just six alleys and they were busy all the time—there were leagues each night from seven to eleven—but the pay for truly brutal work was only seven cents a line. There weren’t many boys willing to do the work but with so few alleys, it was still very hard to earn much money. A dollar a night was not uncommon and three was outstanding.

  To make up the difference I started selling newspapers in the bars at night. This kept me up and out late, and I often came home at midnight. But it added to my income so that I could stay above water.

  Unfortunately it also put me in the streets at a time when there was what might be called a rough element. There weren’t gangs then, not exactly, but there were groups of boys who more or less hung out together and got into trouble. They were the forerunners of the gangs we have now, but with some singular differences. They did not have firearms— but many carried switchblade knives.

  These groups were predatory, and they hunted the streets at night.

  I became their favorite target in this dark world. Had the town been larger I might have hidden from them, or found different routes. But there was only a small uptown section and it was impossible for me to avoid them. They would catch me walking a dark street and surround me and with threats and blows steal what money I had earned that night.

  I tried fighting back but there were usually several of them. I couldn’t win. Because I was from “the wrong side of the tracks” I didn’t think I could go to the authorities. It all seemed hopeless.

  And then I met Dirk.

  The bowling alley was on a second floor and had a window in back of the pit area. When all the lanes were going, the heat from the pin lights made the temperature close to a hundred degrees. Outside the window a ladder led to the roof. One fall evening, instead of leaving work through the front door, I made my way out the window and up the ladder onto the roof. I hoped to find a new way home to escape the boys who waited for me. That night one of the league bowlers had bowled a perfect game—300—and in celebration had bought the pit boys hamburgers and Cokes. I had put the burger and Coke in a bag to take back to my basement. The bag had grease stains and smelled of toasted buns, and my mouth watered as I moved from the roof of the bowling alley to the flat roof over the hardware store, then down a fire escape that led to a dark alcove off an alley.

  There was a black space beneath the stairs and as I reached the bottom and my foot hit the ground I heard a low growl. It was not loud, more a rumble that seemed to come from the earth and so full of menace that it stopped me cold, my foot frozen in midair.

  I raised my foot and the growl stopped.

  I lowered my foot and the growl came again. My foot went up and it stopped.

  I stood there, trying to peer through the steps of the fire escape. For a time I couldn’t see more than a dark shape crouched back in the gloom. There was a head and a back, and as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could see that it had scraggly, scruffy hair and two eyes that glowed yellow.

  We were at an impasse. I didn’t want to climb up the ladder again but if I stepped to the ground it seemed likely I would be bitten. I hung there for a full minute before I thought of the hamburger. I could use it as a decoy and get away.

  The problem was the hamburger smelled so good and I was so hungry.

  I decided to give the beast under the stairs half a burger. I opened the sack, unwrapped the tinfoil and threw half the sandwich under the steps, then jumped down and ran for the end of the alley. I was just getting my stride, legs and arms pumping, pulling air with a heaving chest, when I rounded the corner and ran s
mack into the latest group of boys who were terrorizing me.

  There were four of them, led by a thug—he and two of the others would ultimately land in prison—named, absurdly, “Happy” Santun.

  Happy was built like an upright freezer and had just about half the intelligence but this time it was easy. I’d run right into him.

  “Well—lookit here. He came to us this time….”

  Over the months I had developed a policy of flee or die—run as fast as I could to avoid the pain, and to hang on to my hard-earned money. Sometimes it worked, but most often they caught me.

  This time, they already had me. I could have handed over the money, taken a few hits and been done with it, but something in me snapped and I hit Happy in the face with every ounce of strength in my puny body.

  He brushed off the blow easily and I went down in a welter of blows and kicks from all four of them. I curled into a ball to protect what I could. I’d done this before, many times, and knew that they would stop sometime—although I suspected that because I’d hit Happy it might take longer than usual for them to get bored hitting me.

  Instead there was some commotion that I didn’t understand and the kicks stopped coming. There was a snarling growl that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, followed by the sound of ripping cloth, screams, and then the fading slap of footsteps running away.

  For another minute I remained curled up, then opened my eyes to find that I was alone.

  But when I rolled over I saw the dog.

  It was the one that had been beneath the stairs. Brindled, patches of hair gone, one ear folded over and the other standing straight and notched from fighting. He didn’t seem to be any particular breed. Just big and rangy, right on the edge of ugly, though I would come to think of him as beautiful. He was Airedale crossed with hound crossed with alligator.