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Bottom Dog

Dogs are us, only innocent. cynthia heimel Bottom Dog Within a week of moving in we saw a funny little orange beagle hunting on the bottomland trail below our house. The floodplain was the beagle’s territory. He divided up the hillsides and worked the scents he found for deer. Toby and Ellie Mae formed a chorus of similar sounds every time I got up my nerve and let our dogs off leash to run in the privet. The beagle didn’t live in the bottom—he had a home up the street, in a brick split-level ranch house on the corner. He lived like dogs used to in the country and the suburbs before the county had leash laws and concerned owners installed electric fences. He slept in a plastic igloo in the garage, had two stainless steel bowls (one for water and one for kibble), and several toys scattered in the driveway. I don’t think he ever went inside. Nobody had to cut his toenails. They were worn down from ranging all over the tar and gravel roads of the neighborhood. The beagle had an admirable—if risky—freedom. When we first arrived, the sound of the beagle hunting was 161 constant, a sharp series of barks that continued for hours sometimes . Our first year in the house the beagle’s song was our sound track, the dark trees out my windows his vast stage. Right away I gave the beagle deep metaphoric significance, much more than he deserved. He became my way of making contact with one aspect of the past of this place. He was a hunting dog caught—like us—on the edge of these foreign domestic suburbs. The early Indians had hunting dogs here in the watershed of Lawson’s Fork. I imagined that in the baying of the beagle I could hear all the way back to De Soto or even further, into the paleo past, when the first small hunting bands ranged up the Broad River basin hunting for bison and mastodon. Dogs were more than tools for the people who lived here thousands of years before us. Humans and dogs in North America have a relationship going back twelve thousand years. Cave paintings show dogs walking with early humans, much as they still walk with us today. Dogs back then occupied a similar favored status as our two hounds. They carried gear, hunted, and guarded the camps. At night they curled close around the feet of the foragers who had walked long distances that day. They sought the warmth of human fires just as our hounds curl close to our hearth now. But Toby and Ellie Mae are no longer tools, or if they are tools their use is mostly as companions. Sometimes our dogs even feel like family. Because of this complex relationship I often treat our dogs more like children. I fear for their safety the moment they step out the front door unleashed. I monitor what they eat, and I rush them to the doctor if they show signs of illness. The lives of our dogs are lived in stark contrast to the roaming of our neighbor’s beagle hound. Seven years ago, when Toby was little more than a puppy, Betsy lived in Converse Heights downtown. She called him “the Marco Polo of beagles” because of his frequent escapes and 162 ° Bottom Dog explorations. Once Toby was found on the second floor of a house under construction four blocks away. Another time he escaped the fence and turned up four streets away in the other direction, scavenging for scraps left from another contractor’s lunch sack. When we moved out here, Ellie Mae was too old to disappear into the privet and boggy depths of the creek bottom, so we let her walk with us unleashed. We figured at fourteen she’d earned some freedom. She’d wander out into the woods a little ways but always returned. Life on the edge of the suburbs suited her. She doesn’t get along with any dog except Toby, and she was always nervous when the wandering beagle hound was around. “Would Toby be that color if we let him run in the swamp?” Betsy asked once as we watched Toby and the mudstained beagle playing in the street. Life for a backyard dog is confining, so when Ellie Mae was much younger...