My Life in Dog Years Page 6

  But when the problem bear came back I wasn’t there. I was in the kitchen and my wife was working in the garden. Quincy, as always, was by her side and she was on her hands and knees weeding when she heard a strange whoofing sound nearby and looked up to see the problem bear coming at her. There was no warning, no stance, no threat— it was down and moving toward her.

  We had procedures. Do not make eye contact, get up, back away, and she did all these things. They did not work. It kept coming and was clearly going to attack, was attacking, when Quincy went for the bear like a fur-covered bullet.

  It was a draw as to who was more astonished, the bear or my wife. Quincy launched himself from the ground, four-inch legs pumping, and caught the bear in the center of its chest. He grabbed a mouthful of fur and hung on, clinging like a burr. Surprised, the bear stopped and tried to bite at Quincy but the dog was in too close. The bear started scraping with its front paws and my wife chose that moment to use all the good luck from the rest of her life. She rushed in, grabbed Quincy, pulled him off the bear and ran for the house. For some reason—shock, perhaps—the bear did not follow her, and Quincy, miraculously, was not injured. Later, at the vet’s, we couldn’t find a scratch on him, nor any internal injuries.

  Quincy just passed on last year at the ripe old age (he was well on when we got him in Alaska) of eighteen or twenty years, as near as the doctor could figure. At the end he was blind and close to deaf but he could still smell, and to his last days he would stick his nose to the vent and tell us when we were coming up on the Dairy Queen, and he still would have jumped through the window if he had gotten a chance.

  He should have been named White Fang.

  He sits now as I write this, watching me, waiting, his brown eyes soft but alert, full of love but without nonsense, his black-and-white coat shining in the New Mexico sun streaming through the window. He is old now—I think eighteen or twenty—and he is staid except when he feels like playing and he is full of a gentle honor that I will never come close to achieving.

  Josh is the quintessential Border collie. In many circles that would be all that needed to be said—he has all the traits of Border collies. He is loving, thoughtful, wonderfully intelligent—frighteningly so at times—and completely and totally devoted to the person he views as his master.

  And yet…

  Somehow, in some way he is different. Perhaps that is true of all Border collies, that they really are different, that they key in to the person they are with, and since all people are different all Border collies are different. I recently gave a Border collie pup to a friend who lives in a city—contrary to popular belief, they do not need to run all the time—and the dog (she named him Maddux after the incredible pitcher for the Braves) has keyed in to her life to the point where he has to help her carry her mail, has to help her open envelopes, has to have coffee and a bagel each morning with her, has to be with her wherever she is in the house, has to greet people at the door. He monitors all the street activity and reports anything he thinks is odd and protects her from the evil monster that lives in the vacuum cleaner—and he’s only a pup.

  But there is more with Josh.

  He is … real. No, more than that, he is a person. I do not think in my heart that he is a dog. When I am riding with him in my truck and he sits next to me looking out the window I can speak to him, say, “Look at that nice lawn,” or “They have a sale on fence at the lumberyard,” and he will look and sometimes (I swear) turn back to me and nod.

  Once while driving to get a submarine sandwich I took my baseball cap off at a stoplight and jokingly put it on Josh with the bill backward and put a pair of sunglasses on him (I know—people shouldn’t dress dogs but it was more a friend fooling around with a friend) and told him, “You look cool, man.”

  He looked at me and put his right front leg up on the ledge of the open window and kept the cap and glasses on (though he could have shaken them off easily) and really did look cool, caught in the moment, playacting with me, and when we pulled up to the drive-through window at the sub shop I said, “My friend and I would like a turkey sub.” Josh looked over, through his shades, nodded and went back to looking out the window.

  There are major stages that affect our lives. Enlisting in the army, marriage, success or failure at our careers—leaps forward or backward. Having Josh has had such an effect on me. He has, in wonderful ways, shaken my belief structures to the core and brought me to a level of understanding of other species that has been so profound it will last the rest of my life. Along with Cookie, Josh has changed me forever.

  He came to me because he was a “naughty” dog. The woman who owned him had some pet ducks and Josh herded them—as Border collies are wont to do—until he wore them out and one of them died. I had seen Josh earlier and thought he was a nice dog and jokingly said, “If you ever want to get rid of him let me know.”

  And so he arrived one day. He jumped out of the car, moved into the house and started— as near as I could figure it—to study me.

  It was very disconcerting at first. I would catch him at odd times, at all times, watching me, watching every move, studying everything I did—or said.

  He once saw me hurry to get to a phone because I was expecting an important call and after that wherever he was when the phone rang he would run to it and wait until it was answered.

  He saw me, just once, put on a Stetson, go outside to saddle my mare and head out to ride fence. The next time I put the Stetson on he ran to the front door, slammed open the screen, loped to the corral, cut my mare away from the other horses and brought her to the gate, holding her there until I came to saddle her.

  Once every nine days we get the flow of water in the communal irrigation ditch. The process is rather involved. I must walk to the head of the ditch and open the valve, then move ahead of the water as it pours down the ditch and clean out brush and debris with a rake. When the water gets to the smaller ditches that run to the apple trees or the pecans, these side ditches must be fully cleared of leaves and grass before the water can run on to the next side ditch, and so on for seven side ditches.

  Josh accompanied me the first time and watched what I did. Just once. The next time I went he actually tried to help open the valve with his teeth—cranking the steel-handled wheel—and when the water started he ran frantically ahead of it, scrabbling with his feet and claws to clean out the brush and junk. He went to each side ditch, one after the other, to clear it out carefully and make certain the water was running correctly, then on to the next ditch. I stood leaning on the rake, my mouth hanging open. Josh had actually figured it out quicker than I had the first time. And when the last ditch was running and too much water was coming—flooding out over the end—Josh studied the situation for a moment, then dug a cross ditch that made the water circle back into the ditch.

  So many similar things happened that I thought maybe he was some kind of odd case—not normal even for a Border collie. When we had people to the house he would try to get them all in one room, gently pushing them into a group with his shoulder—it would take him thirty minutes to move a small child from one room to another—and I thought it might be some perversion of the herding instinct. But it wasn’t that so much as it was the fact that he simply wanted to see them all, watch over them. When somebody went to the kitchen or the bathroom he would accompany them if possible and watch over them until they came back, and then when it was time to leave he would escort each of them to their car, wait until they were gone and then escort the next one. He was, I believe now, merely being polite— trying to be a good host. Understand that I’ve had hundreds of dogs and loved them and, I hope, been loved by them, and I’ve been in God knows how many different kinds of situations with them, but I had never, ever seen anything like Josh. I half expected him to come out of the kitchen with a tray saying, “Canapés, anyone?”

  I thought I should learn if he really was unique and so one summer four years ago I went to the international Border collie field trials
in Sheridan, Wyoming.

  It was absolutely astonishing. Had I not seen it myself, had somebody written of it in a book, as I am trying to do now, I do not think I would have believed it.

  A man would stand in one place and send a dog out half a mile to where some sheep stood, and following whistles, and sometimes gestures, the dog would bring the sheep back through gates, around in a circle by the man, then into a small holding pen—all without making a sound and without ever biting (called “gripping”) or touching a sheep, using only eye contact and body language. That was incredible enough, but another thing was in some ways more incredible, and that was the behavior of the dogs themselves.

  I have been to sled dog races where there were hundreds of dogs and if two or three of them got loose—which inevitably happened— there would be an uproar—barking and snarling and most often fights or attempted fights. The dogs had to be kept tethered and watched closely.

  All the collies were loose. There were hundreds of them, and I never saw a leash or a pen. Nor did I ever see a fight or even hear a bark. It was a hot summer day and a large stock tank had been brought in and filled with water. As each dog finished his work he (or she) would go to the tank, jump in, submerge until only eyes and nose showed, and stay that way for a few minutes, until he had cooled down. Then he would jump out and catch up with his master, who was by then a hundred yards off drinking lemonade and talking with other dog owners, and he would stop and sit by his owner’s leg and look up and listen to the conversation.

  And they do listen. All the time. To all talk. Josh has come to know dozens of individual words. To name just a few: horse, mare, cow, truck, car, walk, run, bike, Dairy Queen (also the initials DQ), deer, cat, dog, sub sandwich, turkey sandwich, hamburger, pancake (he loves blueberry pancakes), gun (he hates guns), thunder (the only thing I’ve ever seen truly terrify him—he comes to sit in my lap when it thunders), fence, elk, moose, bear, blabber (a kind of candy I sometimes share with him), telephone, bug (he sometimes studies bugs as they crawl along the ground—never bothers them, just walks along studying them), baby, snake (he respects rattlers but doesn’t fear them), rabbit, flyswatter (he leaves the room if you say the word—I do not know why), and several more Anglo-Saxon expressions he’s heard me use when required, such as Get the________ horse off my _______ leg before I_______ bleed to__________death!

  And he knows them out of context. I have often been having a conversation on the phone about, say, the weather, and inserted a word: “I think it’s going to be cow a nice day,” with no emphasis on the word at all. Wherever he is in the house he will rise, even if sleeping, and come in and look at me or wait by the door. More, he listens to everybody all the time. If several people are in a conversation and just one of them says a word—again, just in a normal tone—Josh will come in and look up and wait. It can be very disconcerting if you’re having a conversation in which you might use one of the words a lot. I had a sick horse and called the vet and used the word horse several times in the conversation, and each time Josh went to the door and tried to get out, finally coming back to me and biting me on the leg to get my attention, gently at first and then harder when that didn’t work and finally— he’s learned this is particularly effective—grabbing my kneecap and exerting enough pressure to make me utter a profanity. Usually I react then and do what he wants.

  He has wonderful limits. He will do anything I ask and many things I tell him to do, unless he thinks they are too stupid or repetitive or boring. He will retrieve, for instance, and do it with great élan, leaping to fetch things thrown in water, over land, in brush, far away or near—but only five times. If you throw the ball the sixth time he will get it, look at you, then leave with the ball in his mouth and never bring it back. He hides it. If you want to play again the next day you must buy another ball. I was recently moving some old hay bales and when I lifted one that had been near the back corner of the storage area, I found eleven tennis balls and four Superballs and a professional retriever’s canvas dummy bird. Josh had hidden them all when he thought the game had become too stupid.

  Josh is wonderfully facile and will humor me and learn dog tricks—up to a point. I taught him to sit up and hold a cookie on his nose until I commanded him to flip it in the air and catch it. He loves cookies and he learned the trick in less than ten minutes. And he did it five times. The sixth time, he looked at me over the cookie on his nose as if I was completely insane, then lowered his nose, let the cookie drop on the floor and walked away, and we don’t do the cookie trick anymore. Not unless I want to sit up on my hind end and put the cookie on my nose and flip my head up and catch the cookie, we don’t.

  Living with Josh is a never-ending lesson in how we can never truly catch up with somebody who is smarter than we are. One day I was moving some sacks of feed and as I got down to the last sack I saw a rat run in back of it and hide. There was nowhere for it to go and Josh was there so I looked at him and grabbed the bag and told him, “Get ready—get ready now. There’s something there. Are you ready? Ready?” until he was excited enough to jump out of his skin, and then I moved the sack and the rat made its break. Josh grabbed it without hesitation but didn’t kill it. Holding it in his mouth, he looked up at me in total disgust as if to say, “You fool—I’ve got a rat in my mouth,” then turned sideways and spit it out—he distinctly made the sound ptui as he did it—and then walked away from me.

  It wasn’t finished either. The next morning in my boot there was a dead gopher. It had been dead for some time and smelled as rotten as old, long-dead gophers dragged off the highway can smell, and I shook it out in the trash and thought, Fine, message received.

  I discovered one day by accident that Josh is wonderfully, wildly ticklish on his ribs and sometimes when he seems to be getting too serious about things—say two or three dozen times a day—I will grab him and flip him on his back and tickle his ribs while he woof-laughs and wiggles and air-snaps his fangs, always just missing my hands and arms. It’s a ritual we have both come to love and sometimes when he is feeling a bit glum he will come up to me and flop over and invite me to tickle him.

  Life is not always up and once I had about a three-day run of luck that was all bad and I never smiled. Some complete jerk shot a new Border collie pup I had gotten for Josh to train. (The pup’s name is Walt and he has more or less recovered but it was so stupid and ridiculously violent—the idiot just shot him to see if his damn gun worked—that it made me sick of the whole human race for a time.) I also had a friend die and couldn’t get to his funeral in time … just misery. At the height of this I was sitting in an old easy chair with my legs stretched out thinking dark thoughts and Josh came up in front of me and sat, studying me for a full minute, his eyes clear and calm. Then he seemed to shrug, turned around so he had his back to me, straddled my boot, then backed up my leg until his teeth were even with my foot. I had never seen him do anything like it and thought he might be going crazy when suddenly he reached down, grabbed my boot and with a mighty lunge jerked me completely out of the chair on my butt and then jumped on me and pretended to be biting my ribs, back and forth, tickling me.

  Enough of the blues, by God—it was time to laugh. And I did, rolling on the floor with him, and we tickled each other until we knocked over an end table and had to quit.

  Then—his job completed; I was cheerful again—he was sober once more, sitting quietly, listening in case I said a word he needed to respond to, watching me, anticipating where I would go, what I would do, out ahead of me like an infantry point—no, like a spirit, like an extension of my mind.

  If possible Josh is always with me. Sleeping, awake—I even took him on an author tour once—he is always, always there. When I ran sled dogs he tried to go, put himself in the team, and when I threw a harness on him he pulled wonderfully. But he was too … too refined for that work. The sled dogs are wonderful but they are primitive, basic, grandly prehistoric and animal. It was like putting a neurosurgeon in the middle of a professional h
ockey team and expecting him to be able to function, so I took Josh out.

  A last picture of Josh:

  I am riding a horse, leading a packhorse up into the Bighorn Mountains out of Story, Wyoming. All mountains are beautiful but there is something about the Bighorns that is particularly wonderful, and I have trained one horse to carry a pack so I can head up and spend some time alone wandering, looking.

  Well, not alone. The horses are there, of course, and they provide some company, and there is Josh.

  When I left the sled dogs because of my heart and went to horses, Josh fit right in, as I should have known he would. At first he trailed along on rides—just at first; then he saw that most of the problems with horses come from the front: deer, snakes, moose, bear, mountain lions—anything that would scare the horses and make them shy and throw me (which happened several times). Then he moved of his own volition to the front.

  Josh knew his job was to lead always, to handle problems, to run ahead, out there about forty to fifty yards, trotting up the trail leading bear off, turning moose and elk away, dodging around snakes; doing all this day in, day out, until the mare knew him, understood what he was doing and trusted him. I think in a way the mare came to love Josh, because she would sometimes come up to him when he wasn’t looking and nuzzle the back of his head as if petting him.

  But that one picture of him is always clear in my mind. Head and tail down slightly, body relaxed but still somehow tensed and ready The Bighorn Mountains wild across the sky above us and Josh trotting up the trail ahead, looking back at me on the horse, to make sure I’m coming.

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author