My Life in Dog Years Read online

  “How much?” I asked.

  The truth was, it was silly to buy a puppy— you could go to any mall or shopping center parking lot and find someone trying to give them away. Add to that the fact that I was terminally broke and it became doubly crazy.

  “Fifty dollars,” the boy said without smiling or batting an eye.

  “For a mutt puppy?”

  He looked at me, calculating. “How about five bucks?”

  “Done.”

  I gave him the money and took the dog and box and wood shavings and put them on the floor of the cab of my old truck. I had just lost a friend to cancer. His name had been Fred and I thought it would be nice to hear his name now and then, so I looked down into the box while I drove and I said, “Your name is Fred.”

  At home I took the pup out of the box and into the house, where he promptly peed on the floor and tore a hole in a couch cushion, spilled trash all over the kitchen floor, ripped open two bags of beans and rice in the pantry, dismembered a doll that a neighbor’s daughter had left, ate the laces and tongues out of four pairs of shoes (but only the left shoe of each pair), absolutely destroyed a vacuum cleaner somebody foolishly had left in the same closet as the shoes, and stuck my wife’s cat, Matilda, almost permanently onto the ceiling.

  This was in the first twenty minutes Fred was in the house, while I was looking for my wife to tell her I had brought a puppy home.

  Of all the dogs I have had, Fred was the closest to being actually nuclear in his capacity for destruction. None of it was done with evil intent. He was a wonderfully happy pup and adult dog—inventive and with a great sense of humor, more of which later— but he was also amazingly persistent. Once he started a project, he simply would not stop until it was done. I think nothing illustrates this better than what came to be known as the great wire war.

  Fred grew, in spite of early attempts by Matilda the cat to disconnect his head from his body. As an adult dog he became rotund and only fourteen inches tall—I think he must have been a Labrador-Norwegian elkhound cross—but his shortness did not extend to his thinking or his appetite. He was as devoted to eating as he was to finding things to destroy. This fact led to the war.

  We lived close to the land then, with four gardens and a wood-heated cabin in the forest where we canned and preserved our own food. This included raising a pig for ham and bacon. Because we didn’t wish to become too attached to the meat supply, we simply called it Pig. (This didn’t work, of course, and we wound up with a nearly quarter-ton pet named Pig who lived to be a ripe old age and died with his head in the trough, eating potato peelings.)

  Fred quickly found that he and the pig shared a basic drive—to eat—and he took to hitting the pig trough in search of goodies. This often proved marvelously fruitful. I had a friend who owned a supermarket and we obtained all his dated food for the pig. I once came home with a dozen angel food cakes, forty pints of whipping cream and fifty pints of strawberries. I dumped all this in the trough and watched Fred and the pig put their heads under, looking for berries and bits of cake and snorting bubbles of cream as they hunted.

  Soon Fred became fat and spent most of his time with Pig. He would sleep and cuddle next to Pig at night, and during the day we almost always found them together.

  The problem started when Pig looked over one day and saw the garden. Pigs are very smart—as smart as dogs and many people I have met—and no doubt deduced that if old food is good, fresh food must be better. By this time he weighed over two hundred pounds and was built like a tank, and like a tank he simply walked through the garden fence and started eating.

  He ate most of a row of new red potatoes, burrowing the plants up with his nose, before I caught him and herded him back. After that no fence could hold him. He went under, over and around whatever I tried to build and was fast wrecking the whole garden. One day I was talking to an old farmer neighbor, who thought I was crazy not to just kill Pig and eat him, but if I wasn’t going to kill the pig, he said, I should get an electric fence. I, of course, knew of electric fences—I had once talked my cousin into peeing on one— but they had slipped my mind.

  “Get the kind that burns off weeds when they touch it. They’re the strongest,” the farmer added.

  It took an afternoon to buy a fence and hook it up, during which time we lost half a dozen tomato plants and another row of potatoes.

  The fence worked better than I had expected. I strung the wire around Pig’s pen, then stood back and watched while Pig ambled close and took a snap in his ear. He never tried it again. I remember actually thinking that my troubles were over.

  I had forgotten Fred.

  I happened to be in the yard when the battle started and saw the whole thing. Fred knew nothing of electric fences. He was out tending the boundaries and, no doubt feeling a little peckish, decided to drop in on his old friend Pig for lunch.

  The wire caught him exactly across the top of his head and dropped him as if he’d been hit by a stone. He was on his feet at once, his hair up, his teeth bared. There was no doubt who his enemy was. The wire. He shook his head, dug his feet in and lunged, grabbing at the thing with an iron-jawed death grip.

  The result was spectacular. The voltage hit his wet mouth like a sledge and stiffened him like a poker. He snarled, growling deeper, and tried to hang on, but the jolt was too powerful and slammed him back and down on his rump.

  Any other dog would have stopped. Not Fred. He shook all over, looked at the twisted and bent wire, gave a ferocious bellow and attacked again. This time he must have really been hammered. He slammed back and forth and his hair stood on end until his tail looked like a black bottle-brush, but he would not let go. I ran to help him, worried that the electricity would kill him. Though his eyes had rolled back, with only the white showing, he had the wire clamped in his teeth in a vise grip and was slashing his head back and forth.

  Just as I got there the wire snapped, disconnecting the circuit. Fred stood there, his hair still on end and his chest heaving. Then he spit the wire out, growled at it and walked away, still looking like a bottle-brush but with a great deal of dignity.

  In the great wire war, only I was the loser. Pig continued to eat well and stayed happy I reconnected the wire to hold him in.

  Fred did not want to do battle again and stopped visiting Pig. But one morning I looked into the garden and saw him walking casually through the tomato patch, picking and eating only the good, ripe, full tomatoes. Fred had won.

  He did not look like a dog that ought to be named White Fang and come from a Jack London story. Indeed, he did not look like much of a dog at all. When I first saw Quincy he looked like a dust mop that had been dropped in grease and rolled in old coffee grounds.

  It was, in the long line of dogs that have come into my life, one of the few times I had misgivings about taking on a new dog.

  But sometimes joy comes in convoluted ways, and the way Quincy came to me was so complicated it didn’t seem possible.

  Briefly (as I pieced it together later):

  I had decided I could not live unless I ran the Iditarod. I lived in Minnesota and began acquiring sled dogs and training them for the run north. It seemed an impossible dream. I had no money, not even a vehicle, no dog team, no chance of getting to Alaska.

  At the same time somebody—either a fool or somebody truly evil and demented—left Quincy at the side of a freeway going into Anchorage, Alaska. Considering that I later found he had no car sense at all, it’s a miracle he wasn’t run down at once. A truck came along being driven by a dog musher. He saw Quincy and stopped and picked him up.

  Meanwhile the town of Bemidji, Minnesota—or a large portion of it—decided to help me run the Iditarod. They had potlucks and raffles, and many people sponsored me. One man gave me an old truck, another a battery. Yet another man gave me a tire. A woman stopped me on the street and handed me ten dollars. “For the dogs,” she said. “Spend it on the dogs.”

  In Alaska, Quincy was taken to the home of the do
g musher. The musher lived well back into the bush—thirty miles from the nearest neighbor. Thirty miles of rivers, swamps, wolverines, wolves and black and brown bears. Quincy promptly ran off. He was approximately nine inches high at the shoulder, had four-inch legs and a long tail, and his whole body, including the tail, was covered with ratty, curly hair.

  In Bemidji, I was loaned and given dogs. One of them came to me by devious means. A family had a Siberian husky that their child loved, but the dog had killed just about every pet and squirrel, chipmunk and rabbit in the vicinity. The neighbors wanted the dog shot—several had threatened to shoot it themselves. The owner smuggled the dog to me to try on the team and told his child the dog had run off. The dog was a love and she could pull—or so I thought at the time—like a truck. I was glad to have her. (She was, incidentally, the only purebred dog—a registered Siberian husky—I had on the team. The man who came in dead last in the race had a team of purebred Siberian huskies.) I plugged her into the team and began training in earnest.

  At the same time, Quincy journeyed through thirty miles of wolf-, wolverine- and bear-infested wilderness on four-inch legs— it’s hard to believe he could even get through the swamp grass, let alone the forest and predators—and showed up on the doorstep of a single woman in the process of building a log cabin and living in the woods with her two children. The woman had no idea where Quincy had come from but she took him in and loved him, after a fashion. She’d wanted a dog for a long time, for the kids. Not a small dog but something large and friendly they could roughhouse with. She told a friend she really wanted a Siberian husky. But Quincy had come to her door and she took him in and was happy with him—until she found he had an obsession with getting into trash. At the same time, she built a loft in her cabin and found that she didn’t quite have the expertise to lay up a set of steps and instead was using a ladder to go to bed at night.

  The Bemidji man who gave me an old truck decided to take some time off and go with me to Alaska to help me keep the truck running and handle the dogs for me while I trained in the mountains there. This man is also an expert carpenter and believes, always, in helping people.

  We drove to Alaska from Minnesota. It was a major undertaking to drag a trailer holding twenty dogs in back of a 1960 half-ton Chevy pickup, in December, through country so daunting that many people hesitate to drive it even in the summer. It took eight days, driving twenty-four hours a day, often in low gear at four miles an hour, just to get to the Alaska line, stopping every four hours to let the dogs out, at temperatures fifty below and colder.

  Meanwhile Quincy was snuggling in the warm cabin with the woman and her children, now and then getting into the trash and scattering it about the house.

  We arrived in Alaska and set up camp in the bush. Everybody within half a state came to call—mostly to check out our dogs—and often they would stay a day or two to wait out a blizzard.

  I soon found the Siberian husky had a serious flaw. She pulled wonderfully well for thirty miles. Not thirty-one, not twenty-nine. Exactly thirty. At that point each day she would stop pulling and simply trot along. Since the race is over a thousand miles and it is necessary to run seventy or eighty miles a day, a thirty-mile-a-day dog wouldn’t make it.

  One day a man I consider the most repellent man I have ever met came to call—green snot had frozen in his mustache and he kept licking at it while he talked—and he mentioned that he knew a woman who was living alone with her children in the woods and was so sick of climbing a ladder to her loft that she had promised an Alaskan salmon dinner to anybody who could make a set of stairs. We had been eating nothing but camp food for weeks—boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, stewed potatoes with hamburger, hamburger, and hamburger, in that order.

  It sounded like a good offer so I hooked up a sled, my carpenter friend jumped in and off we went. Because it was only thirty miles I thought it a good chance to let the better dogs rest and run the Siberian husky. I had stopped running her altogether because she couldn’t keep up with the rest.

  We came on the cabin in the bush in the dark—it was light only an hour and a half each day at that time of the year—and I picketed the dogs to a chain I’d brought for the purpose. By the time I went in, my friend had met everybody and was busy laying out the stairway.

  Our hostess was as good as her word, and we had a wonderful salmon dinner. Quincy greeted everybody with wiggles—he was always wonderfully affectionate—and I scooped him into my lap and fed him scraps while I ate and the conversation (as always) turned to dogs.

  “He’s a good little guy,” I said.

  “He gets in the trash all the time,” she said.

  “Still, he’s a great dog.”

  “I really wanted a Siberian husky but I can have only one dog…”

  “Have I,” I said, holding Quincy closer, “got a deal for you.”

  So we left with one less dog in the team and Quincy bundled in a sleeping bag (he had no guard hair and couldn’t take the cold well), riding in the sled, eyes peering out at the dogs pulling, and barking and whining encouragement now and then in the dark. And I had a new dog in my life.

  What a dog he was, what an incredible dog! Many animals, even dogs, are predictable. Say a certain thing, do a certain thing and they will respond a certain way.

  Quincy always kept us hopping, just trying to keep up. During the race he stayed in camp and when my wife came for the race he immediately became her dog. He loved me, he would play with me, he would talk to me, he would consider me, but if she was around I simply ceased to exist.

  We took him home. I warned my wife, “He’ll get into the trash,” but he never, not once in the nine years that he lived with us, not a single time did he get into the trash.

  I told her, “He may run off.” He never left her side. I told her, “He seems to be timid around other dogs.” He trotted into the sled dog kennel as if he owned the place, walked right into the circle belonging to Big Mac—an enormous dog from the Yukon that loved to fight and had nearly eaten a sled dog once— and Big Mac wagged his tail and started playing like a puppy with Quincy. I told her, “He might not be the smartest dog we ever got,” but with the possible exception of Josh, a Border collie that is now in my life, Quincy proved to be easily the smartest dog I have ever seen.

  An example: He loved to ride in cars with the window open and catch the air by leaning out. When we got up to seventy it was too much and blew him half into the backseat. He quickly learned that the vent would provide the same effect and so he would sit and watch out the windshield and when he saw something interesting ahead—a dog, a cat, another animal—he would jump down to the floor and put his nose against the vent to smell them as we passed. If the smell bothered him he would jump up and bark just as we went by.

  One time we stopped at a bank drive-through window and the teller handed me a small dog treat for Quincy. Quincy’s quick eyes seemed to light up when I gave him the treat. A week went by before I went to town again—we often didn’t get there for weeks—and then a week later I had to run in for something around lunchtime. Quincy jumped in the car, and as we approached the bank he saw it coming, jumped down and smelled the vent, then jumped back up and barked softly, just once, as we drove past. A block later there was a Dairy Queen and I thought, What the heck, I’ll get us a treat. Big mistake. When I stopped at the speaker to order, Quincy looked out at the service window, then jumped down and took a whiff at the vent. I’m not sure what he smelled but it apparently agreed with him, and as I drove forward to pick up my order, Quincy left me.

  He leaped from the vent in one motion, over my lap, through the car window and into the service window. With a small scrabble of his short back legs, he hung for a moment on the edge, and then he was inside. I heard some yelling, saw people running and jumped from the car and ran inside, afraid of what I’d find.

  People were standing as if in a tableau: the boy in his Dairy Queen hat and customers staring at Quincy. He had jumped from the window to the
counter and was happily licking a sundae sitting next to the cash register.

  The mother lode, I thought. From the Alaskan bush to a Dairy Queen in Minnesota— what a great span of time and luck he had.

  His greatest moment was yet to come and it was one which would ensure a life of joy and leisure as long as he walked the earth.

  We lived on the edge of the northern bush and were frequently visited by natives of that wilderness. Porcupines, skunks, wolves, foxes, bear, weasels—all came to visit, and many exacted tribute. The skunks, foxes and weasels made it virtually impossible to raise chickens and we stopped trying. We had four gardens and every year the raccoons and bears would wreak havoc with the corn. The gardens were critical to us as a food source since we had very little income, so we had arranged a precarious truce with our wild neighbors. As long as the animals didn’t do too much damage we could live with their raids. I planted three times the corn we needed, twice the potatoes and four times the tomatoes, and any surplus the animals didn’t get we gave to friends. (One year this process resulted in our having nearly fourteen hundred pounds of tomatoes.)

  But there were rogues, some that took too much, some that were violent. The worst of these were the bears. Most of them were mellow, some less so, and when they became too aggressive I would shoot a high-powered rifle near them and scare them off. This worked for a long time but some of them became accustomed to the crack of the rifle and didn’t run; they would ignore yelling or banging of pans, but even then we were hesitant to go to the next phase—destroying the bear. By law, we were allowed to if they destroyed property or threatened us, but I had a rule that if they didn’t actually attack one of the sled dogs—frequently they ate with the dogs and didn’t bother them—or a person I would not shoot them. Indeed, in all my years of running dogs I had to shoot only one bear.

  But one particular bear was becoming a problem. It had been in the garden several times and although it ran when I fired warning shots it seemed to hesitate. I decided it would be good to watch it.