My Life in Dog Years Read online

  Alley dog. Big, tough, mean alley dog. As I watched he spit cloth—it looked like blue jeans—out of his mouth.

  “You bit Happy, and sent them running?” I asked.

  He growled, and I wasn’t sure if it was with menace, but he didn’t bare his teeth and didn’t seem to want to attack me. Indeed, he had saved me.

  “Why?” I asked. “What did I do to deserve … oh, the hamburger.”

  I swear, he pointedly looked at the bag with the second half of hamburger in it.

  “You want more?”

  He kept staring at the bag and I thought, Well he sure as heck deserves it. I opened the sack and gave him the rest of it, which disappeared down his throat as if a hole had opened into the universe.

  He looked at the bag.

  “That’s it,” I said, brushing my hands together. “The whole thing.”

  A low growl.

  “You can rip my head off—there still isn’t any more hamburger.” I removed the Coke and handed him the bag, which he took, held on the ground with one foot and deftly ripped open with his teeth.

  “See? Nothing.” I was up by this time and I started to walk away. “Thanks for the help….”

  He followed me. Not close, perhaps eight feet back, but matching my speed. It was now nearly midnight and I was tired and sore from setting pins and from the kicks that had landed on my back and sides.

  “I don’t have anything to eat at home but crackers and peanut butter and jelly,” I told him. I kept some food in the basement of the apartment building, where I slept near the furnace.

  He kept following and, truth be known, I didn’t mind. I was still half scared of him but the memory of him spitting out bits of Happy’s pants and the sound of the boys running off made me smile. When I arrived at the apartment house I held the main door open and he walked right in. I opened the basement door and he followed me down the steps into the furnace room.

  I turned the light on and could see that my earlier judgment had been correct. He was scarred from fighting, skinny and flat sided and with patches of hair gone. His nails were worn down from scratching concrete.

  “Dirk,” I said. “I’ll call you Dirk.” I had been trying to read a detective novel and there was a tough guy in it named Dirk. “You look like somebody named Dirk.”

  And so we sat that first night. I had two boxes of Ritz crackers I’d hustled somewhere, a jar of peanut butter and another one of grape jelly, and a knife from the kitchen upstairs. I would smear a cracker, hand it to him—he took each one with great care and gentleness—and then eat one myself. We did this, back and forth, until both boxes were empty and my stomach was bulging; then I fell asleep on the old outdoor lounge I used for furniture.

  The next day was a school day. I woke up and found Dirk under the basement stairs, watching me. When I opened the door he trotted up the steps and outside—growling at me as he went past—and I started off to school.

  He followed me at a distance, then stopped across the street when I went into the front of the school building. I thought I’d probably never see him again.

  But he was waiting when I came out that afternoon, sitting across the street by a mailbox. I walked up to him.

  “Hi, Dirk.” I thought of petting him but when I reached a hand out he growled. “All right—no touching.”

  I turned and made my way toward the bowling alley. It was Friday and sometimes on Friday afternoon there were people who wanted to bowl early and I could pick up a dollar or two setting pins.

  Dirk followed about four feet back—closer than before—and as I made my way along Second Street and came around the corner by Ecker’s Drugstore I ran into Happy. He had only two of his cohorts with him and I don’t think they had intended to do me harm, but I surprised them and Happy took a swing at me.

  Dirk took him right in the middle. I mean bit him in the center of his stomach, hard, before Happy’s fist could get to me. Happy screamed and doubled over and Dirk went around and ripped into his rear and kept tearing at it even as Happy and his two companions fled down the street.

  It was absolutely great. Maybe one of the great moments in my life.

  I had a bodyguard.

  It was as close to having a live nuclear weapon as you can get. I cannot say we became friends. I touched him only once, when he wasn’t looking—I petted him on the head and received a growl and a lifted lip for it. But we became constant companions. Dirk moved into the basement with me, and I gave him a hamburger every day and hustled up dog food for him and many nights we sat down there eating Ritz crackers and he watched me working on stick model airplanes.

  He followed me to school, waited for me, followed me to the bowling alley, waited for me. He was with me everywhere I went, always back three or four feet, always with a soft growl, and to my great satisfaction every time he saw Happy—every time—Dirk would try to remove some part of his body with as much violence as possible.

  He caused Happy and his mob to change their habits. They not only stopped hunting me but went out of their way to avoid me, or more specifically, Dirk. In fact after that winter and spring they never bothered me again, even after Dirk was gone.

  Dirk came to a wonderful end. I always thought of him as a street dog—surely nobody owned him—and in the summer when I was hired to work on a farm four miles east of town I took him with me. We walked all the way out to the farm, Dirk four feet in back of me, and he would trot along beside the tractor when I plowed, now and then chasing the hundreds of seagulls that came for the worms the plow turned up.

  The farmer, whose name was Olaf, was a bachelor and did not have a dog. I looked over once to see Dirk sitting next to Olaf while we ate some sandwiches and when Olaf reached out to pet him Dirk actually— this was the first time I’d seen it—wagged his tail.

  He’d found a home.

  I worked the whole summer there and when it came time to leave, Dirk remained sitting in the yard as I walked down the driveway. The next summer I had bought an old Dodge for twenty-five dollars and I drove out to Olaf’s to say hello and saw Dirk out in a field with perhaps two hundred sheep. He wasn’t herding them, or chasing them, but was just standing there, watching the flock.

  “You have him with the sheep?” I asked Olaf.

  He nodded. “Last year I lost forty-three to coyotes,” he said. “This year not a one. He likes to guard things, doesn’t he?”

  I thought of Dirk chasing Happy down the street, and later spitting out bits of his pants, and I smiled. “Yeah, he sure does.”

  They are all there in my memory, a host of them from farms I worked on when I was a boy. They all seemed to be some kind of collie cross with longish hair and bright eyes and all seemed to be named Rex or King or Spot or Lad or Jim.

  They worked the farms. It is tempting to call them family dogs or family pets because they were that as well—something the small children could roll around with, something to love and be loved, something to greet in the morning. But they were more.

  I cannot count the number of times I have been sitting in a truck waiting for a combine hopper to fill, a boy thirteen, fourteen years old on a hot August afternoon with an old collie dog sitting in the seat beside me.

  You could talk to them and they would listen. I’d tell them of my dreams, my problems, girls—endless talk of girls—as I sat there in the hot sun chewing on a straw, ruffling a dog’s ears and watching the combine rumble around the golden field.

  They became in some way more than another person could be, perfect companions, and it bothered me that I didn’t know all of how they lived, only saw them at odd times during the day. One morning when we were rained out and couldn’t work the fields I decided to follow the farm dog around through his day.

  His name was Rex and he was a large collie type, slightly overweight, with a white ruff and thick gold hair matted here and there with burrs—all the colors smudged liberally with fresh, green cow manure he’d rolled in just that morning in back of the barn. (They love the smell
of fresh manure on their backs and the sides of their necks.)

  This particular farm had nine milk cows, three pigs, a pen of calves, a couple of palomino ponies for two daughters who would someday be old enough to ride them, a coop full of chickens and perhaps five hundred acres under cultivation.

  I walked out in the morning after a quick cup of coffee and made my way to the barn with the farmer, a stooped man named Warren, to begin milking. There was already a light mist that would be rain, and as soon as we were out of the yard carrying buckets to the barn Rex was off like a shot into the haze in the direction of the pasture.

  He did not need to be told but ran to where the cows were, went around them several times to form them up and with a couple of gentle nips got them heading for the barn. I have read somewhere that the reason dogs work stock is that the wolf in them is still strong and the herding instinct is a perversion of the hunting drive that moves wolves.

  It sounds like a tidy theory, but having watched Rex and dogs like him work animals, I don’t think it can be right. Every move they make is concerned with care for the animal they are herding, not with hunting, not with killing them. I have seen wolves course and kill and there is nothing similar about their actions.

  Rex ran ahead of the cows, then behind, keeping them in a group and watching out for anything that could bother them.

  When they reached the barn he stopped driving them and waited patiently for each cow—and they most decidedly did not hurry—to step into the barn and work her way to her stall before he would signal the next one in. All of this done without a word from Warrer.

  There was business in it, of course—it was work, and important—but there was affection as well. Rex obviously liked the cows and when Warren told me that Rex slept with them in the winter, curling up next to a cow in the barn to stay warm and cozy, I could see why when Rex looked at them it was with more than business in his eyes.

  When the cows were all in their stalls and being milked, Rex went to the head of the barn and sat by the door, waiting. I was not certain what he was waiting for until Warren poured some milk into an old pail lid and put it down and the cats materialized from the loft and other parts of the barn and began to drink. I’d had no idea there were so many cats. They seemed to come from everywhere. Rex watched them eat and when one kitten kept getting pushed away from the crowded pan Rex used his nose to make a slot for the kitten and pushed it into place with another nudge.

  He watched them until they had devoured the milk—a matter of moments—and then turned and left the barn, trotting out into the rain.

  I followed him. He went to the pigpen and stood looking at the pigs for a moment. Then the calf pen, where he stopped. I know it sounds far-fetched, but he seemed to study each calf individually, or perhaps he was counting them. From there he went to the chicken coop.

  Here he paused and turned. He had seen me following him at a distance and he looked at me and wagged his tail and started for me. But I turned as if to walk back into the barn, and he returned to the chicken yard. I stopped behind a corner and watched him go around the wired-in yard several times as he studied the fence, looking for holes. When he was satisfied, he trotted to the corral that held the two ponies and when they were clearly all right he came back into the barn.

  The whole route had taken ten minutes. He sat for a moment near the empty milk pan, then stood and walked up and down the barn several times, looking at each cow from the rear. That finished, he turned and went in front of them, walking back and forth in the narrow slot in front of the manger and studying each cow as she chewed on her hay.

  It never really ended. I thought that with his rounds done, he would relax. Instead he started over: the pigpen, the calf pen, and this time he spent more time on the chicken yard, carefully smelling along the base of the wire at one side. At one point in particular he nosed the dirt, snuffling the mud slightly When he returned to the barn I went to that spot and saw the fresh tracks of a skunk that must have tried to get into the pen during the night. (The next night Rex would catch the skunk trying to get to the chickens again and kill it in a battle that left the mauled body of the skunk by the granary and the entire barnyard so thick in stink it was hard to walk through it.)

  Once more in the barn Rex sat for a moment. He was sitting there when I came in to help finish the chores. In a moment he moved to the wooden manger in front of the cows. This time he climbed the crude ladder to the hayloft, until his head was just up in the loft. He stood there for a moment, then went down the ladder, and up and down the line of cows one more time, front and rear, then outside to check the other stock…

  He didn’t stop his circling route until we were done with milking. Then he escorted the cows out of the barn—not pushing them but simply walking along with them—and took them back out to the pasture.

  “He doesn’t just leave them in back of the barn?” I asked Warren.

  “Who—oh, the dog?” His wife had told me the dog’s name was Rex. I never heard Warren say his name. Just “the dog,” but spoken in soft terms, with deep affection and care. Even when he called Rex, he simply said, “Come here, dog,” always soft and gentle. “Oh no—he’ll take them out to where the grass is good so they can graze. There’s no grass in back of the barn.”

  “He knows that—to take them to grass?”

  Warren looked at me. “Sure—why not?”

  “But how could he know that? Did you teach him?”

  Warren shook his head. “Not me—the cows. He watches the cows. They taught him.”

  I knew then, and I know now, people who would not be able to learn that. I was skeptical that a dog could learn such things—I was very young and had not yet known dogs like Josh and Cookie—but by the end of the day I would not have been surprised to hear that Rex had learned to read.

  With milking done we went back to the house for a “quick bite” after breakfast of raw-fried potatoes, a bit of venison, rhubarb sauce and fresh rolls. Rex did not come in the house—he never came in—but Warren’s wife, Emily, took him a plate of meat and potato scraps as he waited on the porch. I watched him through the kitchen window. He didn’t relax. From where he sat on the porch he kept watching the farmyard, the stock pens, the cows out in the pasture. I thought of pictures I’d seen of lions in Africa surveying the veld—his ruff made a wonderful mane—and he maintained control until the girls awakened and came out to play.

  They were young—three and five—and when it rained they stayed mostly on the open porch, with forays into the yard for toys they’d left out. The minute they went outside they came under Rex’s control. On the porch he sat near them, watching them play, sometimes reaching over with a paw to move a toy and laugh and wag his tail. When one of the girls left the porch he would move with her, staying always on the “outside” to contain her, and as soon as she’d picked up the toy she’d gone after, he would gently guide her back to the play area.

  All day, or nearly all day, he stayed with the children. When the girls went in for lunch Rex took the time to patrol the yard again, and I noted that when one of the girls went near the pigpen—she was never closer than fifteen yards—Rex stopped her and used his shoulder to physically move her back to the house.

  At intervals throughout the day he would take moments—never more than one or two minutes—to make a quick run of the yard and the stock to make sure it was all doing well, but the rest of the time he watched the children. He didn’t just sit with them, or doze by them, or stand near them. He literally watched them. He played with them as well, but he was truly working the whole time and his eyes rarely left them.

  “Isn’t he a caution?” Emily said, noticing me watching Rex. “It’s like having a nanny for them. When I’m gone visiting with them he stays with Warren and follows the tractor in the fields but anytime the girls are here he’s with them. It’s so nice. There are so many things to worry about on a farm.”

  It made a very full day. When we milked at night Rex ran for the cows, cir
cled the yard and took care of all his business. When supper was done and it was getting dark I looked through the window expecting to see him sleeping, or at least lying down.

  He was sitting on the porch, the evening sunlight and breeze catching his hair, his eyes open and calm, watching the yard, the pens and stock. While I looked he stood, trotted off around the yard one more time before dark, then came back to the porch to sit again, always at work.

  The dog was enormous.

  We lived in a small cottage in the mountains of Colorado, where I worked in construction, mostly hitting my fingers with a hammer and making serious attempts at cutting something off my body with power saws while I tried to build houses during the day and write at night I had been looking at the local consumer guide, called The Shopper’s Bulletin, when I saw an ad:

  EMERGENCY! AM LEAVING FOR HAWAII FOR A CAREER CHANGE. MUST FIND HOME FOR LOVING GREAT DANE NAMED CAESAR AS THEY WON’T ALLOW DOGS IN THE ISLANDS. PLEASE HELP!

  All right—I know how it sounds. Nobody who lives in a small cottage in the mountains of Colorado with a wife and baby should probably even consider a pet, let alone a dog, let alone a large dog, let alone a very large dog—at least nobody with a brain larger than a walnut. But I had once been associated with a female Great Dane named Dad when I was in the army and had ever since had a warm place in my soul for them. The secondary force, the force that kicks in whenever I visit a dog pound, roared into my mind, the force that says, If you don’t take him, who will? This drive has brought me dozens of dogs and cats, a few ducks, some geese, a half dozen guinea pigs, an ocelot, several horses, two cows, a litter of pigs (followed by more and more litters—my God, they are prolific), one hawk, a blue heron, a large lizard, some dozen or so turtles, a porcupine and God knows how many wounded birds; chipmunks, squirrels and one truly evil llama (am I the only person in the world who did not know they can spit dead level for about fifteen yards, hitting your eye every time?).