Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

The Thing About Dogs

m 27 The Thing About Dogs I have never liked dogs. One. They drool. Whenever you sit down, here comes a dog to rest its chin on your knee and leave behind a glistening tracery of saliva, like a tent caterpillar or something. Two. They smell like dogs. Three. They do uncivilized things, like lie on their backs, twist themselves up, and lick their own tail ends, setting a bad example. So we have never had dogs. Our pets have always been things like lizards and water striders and, until recently, Buddy the Scorpion—clean, cold-blooded, self-respecting animals. However, when I was growing up in Ohio, our family had a dog. Her name was Pixie, which is impossible to understand, since she was a stubby, fat beagle. My sister says that when her children are unhappy in that lonely time before sleep, they ask for Pixie stories. But it is beyond me how this provides any comfort at all. Here is Pixie, following us to school, ensuring that one of us will be late— because no matter how much we yell “Go home, Pixie,” one of us will have to grab her, lift her scrabbling and squirming, run home to shut her in the house, and run back to school, hearing the tardy bell ring when we are still two blocks away, running with a desperation that still comes back in dreams. So what stories does my sister tell her children? I’ll have to remember to ask her, but maybe I don’t want to know, since this is the sister who called in her own dog when her youngest child vomited into the bottom dresser drawer. 28 m Holdfast So I was not especially happy when, after the children were in college, Frank and I moved into this sabbatical house on the Wyoming prairie and found that it came complete with three dogs. Spike, an arthritic old black lab who lost an eye in an attack on a badger. Duke, a dalmatian. And Rocky, a young German shepherd with an extra set of claws halfway up his back legs like a rooster, and with a rooster’s view of himself. These dogs are always around. When I take my work to the picnic table, I feel like I’m sitting in a dog mortuary—three dogs laid out stiff in the sun, their eyes closed and their tongues hanging out, barely breathing. When I go for a walk along a bridle trail, there is always a great rush of wind behind me and a pounding of feet, and then here come the three dogs, rushing hell-bent up the trail, scattering magpies and grasshoppers. At each intersection, they sit and wait, panting. Then, when I have committed to a direction, they screech off in front of me if they approve of my choice, or give me a surprised look if I have chosen the wrong way around or the way that bypasses the creek. I’m not used to the prairie, actually. I’m from a land of tall trees and shoulder-level fogs that leave a fairly narrow band of sky. Out here in Wyoming, we are in the middle of ten thousand uninhabited acres. Hogbacks and rimrock break up the horizon here and there, but basically, it’s all sky, and you can tell it’s a lot of sky, because you can see different weather in different directions—a couple of states’ worth of weather. With so much sky, there’s no lingering for the sun; it’s got to keep moving or it won’t make it across on time. So, it is either night or it is day, the sun blasting up over a dark ridge, and suddenly it’s hot. Or, you just get comfortable with a glass of wine, waiting for the sunset, shading your eyes, and bam, a few clouds in the east turn pink and it’s night. There’s nobody out here but Frank and me, and for the last two weeks, there’s been nobody out here but me, because Frank went to Germany for a meeting. The Thing About Dogs m 29 So now I have four reasons not to like dogs. Four. They make me lonely. I don’t know what to say to a dog. “So, how was your day?” I venture. “Roll in anything disgusting?” This conversation the dogs...