Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

The Dogs’ Sabbath

153 TheDogs’Sabbath T he next day dawned dry and fine. Wales shook itself like a wet dog and became a green and pleasant land. Enough was enough. Mr. and Mrs. Dog had endured too many high­stress days. Yeah, I know: they’re only dogs. Yep, life is stress. Would you have done as well as they did? They’d been body­rolled (helpless!) by dog­ignorant TSA strangers, before being bundled into the black, noisy hold of an air­ liner. Twelve hours later, they’d been loaded into an unstable luggage heap and trundled through thousands of humans that didn’t sound, look, or smell like any humans they’d previously known. For a couple hours they’d teetered atop slick plastic crates before being abandoned in a wire cage in the bowels of an exhaust­stinking, clatter/bang/rumble ferry. Another strange car, up four weary flights into an unfamiliar lair before sleep over­ took them. Luke and June crossed Britain from Dover to South Wales and when­ ever they got out of the car to stretch, they stood on narrow grass verges between busy parking lots and a roaring motorway. Nothing, absolutely nothing was familiar. The humans they met, grass, plants, sheep, smells, and humidity were new. Even their food was unfamil­ iar British grub. The dogs had trained hard, up before daybreak and breakfasting in the car. They’d survived a car crash. They’d worked and trialed difficult sheep on unfamiliar ground. Their morning and evening walks had been by flashlight. They’d been wet so often their fur stank of mildew. Home­away­from­home? Two plastic crates in a damp stall. Throughout, they’d been mannerly. At Dulles, in Charles De Gaulle’s 154 mr. and mrs. dog nasty parking lot, in the ferry terminal, in buses and taxis, while greeting strangers—whatever I asked, Luke and June had answered. They never sulked, complained, or let the unfamiliar rattle them. They said hello to humans who needed hellos and ignored those who didn’t. Amongst hun­ dreds of strange dogs, they kept their own counsel. Tomorrow would be the opening ceremonies of the World Sheepdog Trials. Luke would run Thursday, June on Friday, and if we were very lucky we’d make the semifinals. The great absence in their lives had been Dog Time: no requirements, no commands, no leashes, just two dogs alive in the world, sniffing their sniffs, investigating what they would, wandering where they wished to. So this bright day would be the Dogs’ Sabbath. Downtown Carmarthen’s castle isn’t much of a castle. Citizens pass through its ruins to the municipal car park. But signs on its parapets told me it had guarded the River Towy and that the ocean—Carmarthen Bay and Cefn Sidan, a famous beach I hadn’t heard of—were thirty miles downstream. So close as that? I jumped Luke and June into the car and away we went. Yes, the Cefn Sidan gateman assured me, dogs are allowed. “On the beach?” “The main beach is closed to dogs until October. But dogs are welcome at either end.” “Okay.” Sternly: “Dogs must be under control at all times.” “I think we can manage that.” The parking lot was surrounded by dunes and a faint trail meandered toward the ocean. Apparently dune sniffs are something special doggily: June and Luke were agog with joy. They ran here. They ran there. They asked doggy questions of the world while I climbed over one dune and up the next. On the broad empty sand beach Luke and June rolled and rolled, tongues lolling, being just as silly as they needed to be. “Why here’s some flotsam: how fascinating!” The Dogs’ Sabbath 155 “A fishing net float! Hey! Bizarro!” A grinning June suggested to Luke that they might “play,” but the old stick­in­the­mud wasn’t interested. The dogs dashed, they rolled, they had a big time. And like tired children, they slept all the way home. ...