FIFTEEN DOGS

RIP, BUCK, JERRY, JOE, RED ISSIE. POINT, SUPERMAN, Callie. Linus, Otis, Homer, Ann. Hondo, Sam, Auna. The temptation is to talk endlessly about them—their breeds and dispositions, the great hunts we made together, how they lived and loved, how they died, where they’re buried, what I buried them with—so many home movies. How many man-hours, how many days, weeks, months—what percentage of a life—passed by in which I was cleaning up after them in their first year of life, and again in their fading last years? How many hours spent warming water to add to the kibble? Sweeping the hardwood floors of the daily shedding? Lifting the crates in and out of the Subaru, fumbling with leash clips in the snow. How many trips to the vet, how many hours and years spent training them, and learning to read them. Waiting for them to pee, waiting for them to poop. Gloved with a plastic bag, picking it up steaming, looking for the distant trash receptacle. The sweet irony being, of course, that we serve them far more than they serve us. Service animals, we all are.

SAM, DOG ONE, was a basset hound. I don’t remember reaching through the wooden lacquered bars of the playpen, grabbing his velvet ears, and gnawing on them while he whined but submitted to the indignity—yet because the story was told to me so often, I believe I remember.

Dog two, another basset, was named Hondo, after an old man my parents knew who docked dogs’ tails. Hondo, the Spanish word for “deep.” We had a backyard in suburban Houston, a new neighborhood out on the oak prairie that was barely a suburb, with so many of the forested lots not yet built on—little refuges of what I thought of back then as wildness. Some of the houses were a bit older than others, but all of them were made of brick. It seemed natural to me to live shoulder to shoulder with tall wooden fences separating one lot from another, and on the dozens of times each week a tennis ball or football went over one of the fences, I simply climbed over and retrieved it rather than going around to the neighbor’s door and ringing the bell. Back in my own yard, it was a source of great entertainment for me to give Hondo an empty gallon-sized ice cream carton. He would snuffle his long head into it, sometimes getting it stuck over his head, while he galloped about the yard in suddenly sightless ecstasy. Hondo’s half a century gone now. He was sweet, but I was racing past him. He was the first dog I remember dying.

Fast-forward through my adolescence. I grew up amid a stable of my father’s bird dogs, impossibly high-strung English pointers, Rip, Buck, Joe, Jerry. Dogs three, four, five, and six: I was moving too fast to bother much with them. I didn’t yet know one of the world’s great truths, that there are few places a good dog cannot go with you.

My next two dogs, Homer and Ann, numbers seven and eight, were twin black-and-tan hounds, picked up roadside in Mississippi so long ago it was before I became a writer—back when I was just a picker-upper of stray dogs. The first dogs I owned as an adult. I was working as a geologist in Mississippi, living in an old farmhouse out in the country. One morning I was driving back home from my girlfriend’s when I passed two tiny pups sitting knock-kneed on the road, outside a crumbling wooden shack, kudzu swarmed and sapling sprung. There was a Gothic wrought-iron fence with impaling spikes, the gate tilted permanently open, a weedy brick walkway leading up to the collapsing porch. Not an unbroken windowpane left in any of the frames.

The pups, little black-and-tans, were patchy as if with mange, disconsolate. Refugees, outcasts. I drove on past, thinking of love, and adventure. My blood back then was carbonated all the time, the blood of an alien. When I walked beneath streetlamps, the lamps sizzled and sparked. I had no time for dogs.

It was green dusk, springtime. Fireflies were just about to start blinking along the Natchez Trace. I could be home just after twilight, settle in, cook my meal. Read, listen to crickets. Maybe call Elizabeth before bed. I kept on driving. Immediately, there was a voice in each ear. I had seen such things in cartoons—not exactly angel and devil whispering in each ear but definitely a back-and-forth conversation between two people who seemed to know me so well they could have been masquerading as me. The two voices only wanted what was best for me, and as I drove the black-ribboned road, I listened. You really should go back and pick up those little pups. / Ah, they’re feral, they wouldn’t make good pets, they’re irredeemable. / At least go back and try to get the other one, you ought not to split them up like that. / They’re wild, goners already.

A thing I often forget—because I did make a U-turn and go back for them—was that there was a third one, pavement fodder, dead beside where the other two were seated, as if they were in mourning, or awaiting its resurrection.

When I stopped in front of the old abandoned shack, one of them charged me, yipping—at five or six weeks already a defender of the family crest—while the other rolled over on her back and began peeing, a golden arc of a fountain.

The barking pup danced away from me—I was almost able to grab her—and dashed off through the gate, up the weedy brick walkway, puppy-stumbled up the sagging steps, and disappeared into the depths of the haunted house.

I picked up the remaining pup. Improbably, she began to pee again, and I aimed her up high at the evening’s first star as if in a ritual. When she was done, I carried her up the walkway to search for her sibling.

I went from room to deserted room. There was no furniture, though in one room there was an old wheelchair constructed of wood, like a miniature covered wagon. All the house’s doors had been stripped from their frames decades earlier, possibly for firewood, though the chinks and gaps in the splintered walls were insulated with old yellowed newspapers not as ancient as one might have presumed—some were from the 1940s and ’50s, but others from the ’60s and not-at-all-distant early ’70s. And though there were numerous dried twists of puppy turds stippling every room, the wild little runaway pup was nowhere to be found. There was a back porch even more rotted than the front—trees large enough to be sawlogs pushed up through the floor as well as the roof, their branches seeming to hold up the house—and the forest beyond rolled right up to the back porch like rising floodwater: greenbrier, poison ivy, yaupon, loblolly, cedar. The wild pup had leaped off the porch, I deduced, and hurled herself into the jungle.

Too wild, anyway, I told myself again, as I walked out of the spooky house with my prize, which I did not yet recognize as a prize. I got into my truck and set the pup on the floorboard, should she pee again. I took off down the road. She watched me with doe eyes, and there was no mistaking the message. Where’s my sister? I turned around and went back.

I didn’t have to look very hard. The other pup had already returned to the road and was waiting there like a passenger who’d missed her bus. But as I approached, she whirled again and dashed back into the collapsing house. I hurried through the gate after her, but she was nowhere to be seen. She must have launched herself into the dark forest out back, where I imagined her living in a burrow, like an armadillo or a gopher.

Back in the truck, I told the pup, “I tried, girl.” We headed up the road.

I could still barely see the shapes of things: the dark road darker still than the evening itself. I could still see birds fluttering to roost, and bats beginning to hunt.

I went back a third time, and in the darkness, the wild pup was sitting beside the road again. I leaped from the truck and ran hard up the walkway, just behind her. I raced through the house, to that back room with its doorless threshold opening to the jungle, thinking, There’s no way that tiny pup can keep hurling itself out into all those thorns. I went from room to room, looking harder, and finally found her, cowering under some newspapers. I picked her up, held her to me, and walked back out into the spring night.

THEY TRAIN US too, as writers, I mean. As writers, how many hours do we spend in a lifetime, working to please—what—the page? Why do we do it? For love, surely, is the only answer—love, and companionship. “Why do you write?” someone once asked Flannery O’Connor. “Because I’m good at it,” she said. By which she also meant, “So I’m not quite so lonely.”

Novels are like dogs, and writing years are like dog years, or worse—they fly past. Some novels you get done in ninety days, others twenty-five years. Dogs fill our art, and it would be easy for future anthropologists to believe we worshipped them. We bury them with their trinkets and toys, and we dream about them decades after they have gone on.

Jack London’s Call of the Wild: a book about dogs, it seems, was once an author’s rite of passage. The great Eudora Welty wrote the best simile ever, about a panting bird dog’s tongue being the color of a faded pink rose.

A long time ago, I slammed a car door on the thumb of the writer Terry Tempest Williams. She looked down at the blood spurting from her thumb, trapped like a coyote in her own car door, said nothing, just watched as if from thirty thousand miles away while I tried to open the door to release her.

Ten years later, on a sidewalk in Livingston, Montana, her and Brooke’s dog, Rio, a Chihuahua to whom I was giving a taste of elk gristle, leaped into the air like one of Oz’s winged monkeys and latched onto my hand, blood slinging everywhere as I sought to shake him free.

On days when the world is moving too fast, the dogs I’ve had—all fifteen—can blur and compress. I begin to have trouble remembering exactly which dog did what, particularly when the heroics of bird dogs are involved. Hunter and dog become a continuum, combining over time to serve as the distillation of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s advice about shooting (which works for writers as well)—that one should attempt “to seize the bird, venomously.”

Some dog memories do not blur, however, and are etched into the spirit that remains unaltered long after the contours of memory have eroded. Dog number nine, Point, a speckled German shorthaired pointer, contracted the sentinel case of mesothelioma for a pet in Lincoln County, courtesy of the W. R. Grace asbestos mine. On the day I had to put him down, I carried him out into the field—he was too swollen with fluid to walk well, and I had been draining him every day, a hideous, poisonous, pinkish admixture of blood and water—whereupon he lifted his head and, tottering, made his way deeper into the swaying grass that towered over him, the tall grass waving in the wind like sea fronds and making a murmuring, shushing sound.

After only a short distance of tiptoeing, he locked up on point, with a rooster pheasant just ahead of him. Point raised his front left paw carefully, as if taking an oath. I stepped forward, and the bird flushed straight up, cackling, and mercifully, mercifully, I was able to hit it for him or I would have been haunted forever after.

His liver-colored brother, Superman, dog number ten, from the same litter, and all but joined at the hip to Point, somehow avoided that fate: Why is one chosen, or not chosen?

Once, on the prairie with Superman—who was not named by me but by the girls for the white V on his chest, and also for their pleasure of imagining me, out in the field, shouting to the sky, Superman! Superman!—I jumped a flock of mallards, drakes, and hens tangled together, so that I couldn’t shoot right away. By the time they got themselves sorted out and I shot, I missed clean the greenhead drake I desired and watched them all disappear over a low hill.

Superman, as was his unbreakable custom in the days of his youth, followed them anyway, and at a sprint. I whistled and shouted his name to no avail; after several minutes, he returned, cresting that low hill and dragging a white swan that was as large as he was. I could not have been more surprised had he been toting a baby elephant.

The bird was only recently dead, and it saddened me to know there was someone who would shoot such a bird. Had it died earlier that morning, or had it flown nonstop from the Arctic, headed to New Mexico, carrying with it the lethal wounds from some savage Canadian?

It’s a sin to waste meat, whether gotten by one’s own hand or another’s, and so I carried the immense bird, cradled in both arms like a sleeping queen, across the prairie, and placed it in the back of my car. A few weeks later, for Thanksgiving, I brined it and cooked it as if it were a goose and served it to the guests, who commented favorably on its flavor.

All dogs shape us by giving us the opportunity daily to become better versions of ourselves. They were here long before we were, and without question it is they who showed up at our campfires uninvited and who have sculpted us into who we are, and into who we are yet becoming.

They certainly do not need to be our dogs in order to shape us. Many of us have experienced at least once the profound responsibility of caring for a beloved other’s beloved dog. Which brings me to dog number eleven, Red Isabelle, an Irish setter.

She had the longest legs, a long red mane, the elegant, feathery red tail, and soulful brown eyes. As she lunged and sailed over the snows of northwest Montana, I would write to her owners, Bob and Catfish, who were living in Italy for six months and had entrusted me with her. I was trying to gradually wean them to the idea that Issie was as willful and headstrong as she was beautiful and—well, how to say this elegantly, indirectly, nonjudgmentally, tactfully?—possessed at certain times a depth of vacuity so pure as to be perhaps the elemental distillation of innocence. I do not mean she was dizzy, disoriented, or inattentive, nor would I in any way use the word dumb. It was instead something deeper and impossible to touch or understand. A beautiful red dog permanently, eternally simple.

She ran away at pretty much every opportunity, and it was my great fear that a mountain lion or wolf would get her while she was in my care. During a call to Italy, when I tried to explain what a runaway she was being, and the part about that vacuousness, Bob or Catfish would make little cooing sounds and hypothesize that she was just missing them inconsolably and was trying to find them. Trying to get to Italy. “Have you read The Incredible Journey?” Bob asked. Not quite insinuating that it was my fault Issie was unhappy.

I’d never had a dog that needed a leash before. Red Isabelle disappeared for days at a time—and once, for weeks. It’s a terrible way to spend one’s days, staring out the window at nothing, waiting for the big red dog to come bounding up the driveway. And waiting. And waiting. And considering too how to break the heartbreaking news to her owners.

Her disposition toward chaos was mythic. I reread the works of Jim Kjelgaard—Big Red and Irish Red—curious about the deeper qualities of the breed. She slept in the daytime as if entombed in a glacier but awakened whining at all hours of the night.

Things she loved: butterflies, birds, clouds, breezes, particularly the self-generated kind achieved when she topped twenty-five, then thirty miles an hour. I am not speaking of when she stuck her goofy, grinning head out the truck window but rather of when she was running along behind it, then ahead of it. The most runaway dog ever. All I had to do was blink, and she was gone.

The disparity between her speed and the seemingly slow-motion reach-and-stretch of those long legs conspired to mesmerize a viewer into believing he or she was witnessing nonchalance rather than pandemonium. Grace, and elegance: in no way did she need intelligence. I think she used the lack of it as a weapon. Of course she tormented me. She was my penance. Bob and I could not be more different; he loved to argue and usually thought he won. I began to believe he’d left her with me on purpose, hoping to wear me down, so that the next time we got into an argument, he would win.

This was back in the days when there was no phone service in the Yaak Valley. I don’t mean no cell service—I mean no landlines. No electricity. No nothing, just bliss, and wolves. To make a phone call—to check in with parents back in Texas, just to let them know all was well, or to go over some stuff with an editor or agent, or, for that matter, to talk to someone in Italy—you had to drive seven snowy miles to the pay phone out in front of the tavern, the one with a stump for a chair inside the little glass booth with the folding front door broken off. The pay phone was out of order about half the time, so you never knew until you got there if it was going to be working and if the line was going to be busy—there was not yet the technology of call waiting—or if, maybe worst of all, there was somebody already sitting on that stump, leaning against the glass, head down, an Edward Hopperesque pool of incandescent light pluming down on them.

The night that made me crack, the night in the six-month psychic prison of holding such a carefree spirit hostage, under house arrest, came in lonely February, when I fired up the truck to make the fourteen-mile roundtrip on the long shot of catching my editor. I left Issie in the cabin, lounging in front of her element, the fire, and drove purposefully though not quickly, admiring the winter stars and being a little glad to be out of the house and on an errand.

I pulled into the empty parking lot—no socializers, no talkers that night—and just as I got out of the truck, the great red racehorse of a dog, seeming so much larger, galloping up from out of the night and into that pool of light, leaped upon me just an instant before I realized it was her and not some savage woods creature.

There was no escaping her; she had run behind my car the entire way, and a mercy it was for Bob and Catfish that I had not been driving to Troy, fifty-four miles distant—though I had little doubt that there too she would have greeted me as I stepped out of the truck.

I didn’t know how she had escaped. Her will to ramble was as great as were the dark woods dangerous for so blithe an innocent.

It was way too much pressure. I pictured a compass, with its 360 radial degrees emanating from the house. She could just as easily have ended up at Lost Horse Mountain or Lost Girl Creek. Lost Soul Mountain, Lost My Friends Bob and Catfish Creek.

Bob, Catfish, I said, later that week from the pay phone—ten years before email—y’all gotta come home early.

It was harder than I let on. Only now, thirty years later, am I exorcising those red demons. They shaped me. They made me cautious, a troubleshooter. If there was a way, a seam, a fissure through which chaos could travel, I could see it first. It governed my days, for years afterward. I’ve been a long time in recovery, and it has taken much work for me to relearn how to be reckless, carefree.

And she wasn’t even my dog, is the hell of it. She was my six-month dog. But how she carved me. She helped move me toward a greater valuing of my privacy, my time; the incredible glory of being free.

Auna, number twelve, yet another German shorthair, I had but four years. She had seizures. She sat behind me in the chair while I worked, her chin resting on my shoulder. The basement in Missoula, the year of the Great Recession, gray inversions all winter long, me working on travel brochures and album liner notes, and grateful for the work. She made it to the Yaak, a good little bird dog, skinny as a knife. The day before she disappeared she assembled a strange hieroglyph of little sticks and branches, shaman-like—something she had never done before—on the front porch, then dashed off the next day into the marsh. Elizabeth whistled for her but she only accelerated. And she never came back.

We, as well as neighbors, searched the marsh, and the old forest, for miles in all directions. No blood, no hair, no bones, no collar or dog tags; no eagles, no raven shouts.

Callie, dog thirteen, is six now, a German shorthaired pointer whose full name is Caledonia, not quite eponymous, from the song “Caldonia (What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?).” She is the result of an artificial insemination between her mother, a Westminster Best of Show dog, an extremely social, inveterate crowd-pleaser who trotted in metronomic figure eights between each of the judges’ legs, and a hard-charging sire who was a three-time world field trial champion. In other words, Callie is a dog I could never have afforded. Her litter was presold to rich folk who were flying in from Italy, England, and France to choose their various slots in the anticipated litter of six, but—sweet mystery!—her mother, Dixie Dancer, gave birth to thirteen so that the breeder had a crisis of abundance on his hands. I was awarded one of the pups in exchange for agreeing to write about her: a Maserati of a dog, gotten for a song.

She is sweet and hunts like a fiend but gets a little cross-wired sometimes. She points the setting sun, staring across the prairie at the end of each day, frozen, until, after the distant little ball of it slips beneath the wheat fields, she slinks forward, tiptoeing, believing the golden bird is attempting to get away from her.

When I drive, Callie sits beside me and rests her paw on my shoulder.

I remember a friend teasing about her husband, who described their dog as “a little boy dressed up in a dog suit.” Damn.

Linus, dog fourteen, and his half-brother, Otis, number fifteen, are frilly French Brittany spaniels, dashing little caballeros, who spring and prance like Jack Black in Nacho Libre. They jump straight up, above the wheat—a quick airborne glimpse out at the sea of grass in which they and I thrash—and then crash back down. Linus, pointing his first pheasant beneath the snow at 25 below, blue sky, butter-yellow stubble sticking up through the snow, the rooster tumbling, then running, Linus chasing it, catching it, his first lock-solid point and his first retrieve, brilliant feathers falling from the sky.

My daughters love my new dogs, the two Brittanies, and the lost soul, test-tube Callie, at least as much as they did all the previous generations of puppies, then dogs, with whom they tumbled and wrestled in their childhood. They insist on sleeping with all three of them, and also that I bring the dogs with me whenever I pick the girls up at one airport or another on their journeys back home: so much so that no matter which airport we’re going to, the spaniels get excited as soon as they see or hear a jet overhead, and once we’re parked by baggage claim, they watch the sliding-glass doors intently, their docked tails twitching every time someone comes out, waiting for it to be one girl or the other.

I used to drive through Starbucks with the dogs and request a Puppuccino. The girls delighted in my having to say the word and in filming the Brittanies’ frantic strivings for the tiny paper Dixie cup filled with whipped cream, the dogs’ tongues lapping at the cup with tongues like those of the specialized nectar-feeding pollinators one sees on nature specials. As the dogs slurped their Puppuccinos, their eyes burned with the same ingot light that ignited when they gazed unblinkingly at the spot in the brush or cattails where a hidden bird was nestled deep, unseen by anyone’s eyes but illuminated just as surely by their scent: a billion or ten billion neural firings of ecstasy blossoming in slow-motion starbursts of bliss that then reattached to their fevered, even incandescent brainpan, in the shape of a neon pheasant. Colors not able to be seen by the eye or tasted or touched, but scented, deliriously. A catatonic intoxication.

How will I survive my affections? writes Terry Tempest Williams. To the dogs, the wolves, who saw our campfire, feeble in the all-else blackness, and first wandered up to us, it must seem like but an eyeblink ago.

Not long after Issie, Elizabeth and I had children—Mary Katherine and, three years later, Lowry, and it was with great delight that I gave them my full attention, in my thirties, forties, and then into my fifties. It was what I wanted to do. I’d had enough freedom. We had dogs, lots of dogs: shoeboxes full of photographs. Little girls and puppies? Please. We took film down to Libby at least twice a week to send it off to be developed. Hardly anyone lives up here, as I think I’ve mentioned. We had all the time and space we could hope for or imagine. It was, I think, a pretty good place to be a dog, and—I want to believe this—a good place to be a child too.

In those photos—dogs-and-children—it’s amazing to see how quickly the dogs grow old, as do the parents, in the photos. Only the children remain young, as if suspended in time: in a valley where time touches only parents and dogs.

And yet, not suddenly—it was not sudden at all—I’m in my sixties, living in a big, old, empty house. One tamale for breakfast, a grilled cheese for lunch, an elk-ginger burger with no bread and a kale salad for dinner—with two glasses of Côtes du Rhône, and my Fitbit’s 10,000 steps a day, my thirty-minute stretching routine. A week might go without my starting the car. Shoveling snow, splitting firewood, fixing things, or trying to fix them, keeping the floors swept and the windows washed so they let in the bright winter sun—everyone has been gone now for, depending on how one thinks of gone, about five years.

I take photos of the dogs and email and text them to the girls—Mary Katherine in California, Lowry in New York—and film short clips of the spaniels roughhousing, or of test-tube Callie, bedazzled, nirvana-bound, by the swirling vortices of snow crystals that slide from pine boughs high above jet on a blue sky, a sunny day after a heavy snow the night before. The sun shoots through the ghost-glitter twisting shapes of them—is it smoke, is it sunlit spirit?—and she leaps and lunges through chest-deep snow, trying to point each individual flashing frost crystal, a snap-bulb of ecstasy going off in her mind in every second of every minute of every hour of every day: or when the sun is out.

The rest of the time, she lies by the fire, staring into it, warming herself like a cat, and waiting. Waiting for the next snowfall, or for hunting season, when her genius roars: the best pheasant dog I’ve ever seen.

The ticking of the old windup clock—my great-grandparents’ wedding gift to my grandmother—echoes throughout the house. I putter, I wait for them to come back home. I love my freedom, my space, and the thing that is perhaps second rarest, all the time in the world. Or so it seems.

The spaniels dive into the snow. “Hey, sugarbutts,” I call to them. I take pictures of us romping and send them to the girls. It seems a long time ago that I was so psychologically undone by Issie trying to run away, and by Issie galloping alongside me everywhere I went, serving her whims and wills rather than my own.

In the evenings, I go to bed pretty early. I drink a cup of tea and read for half an hour, never a full hour, before falling asleep. (The next day, after writing, I will take a nap.) The dogs, though young, adjust themselves to my schedule. They sleep on the bed with me and nap beside me in the mornings, all of us stretched out on the wooden floor, no pillows, no padding, just wood.

They ski with me, and power through the deep drifts, porpoising, while I glide in circles around the marsh, watching the light change slowly on the mountain—around and around, as if raveling tight the coil of time, then unraveling it. No one is taking my picture, so I am not getting any older. It’s good to have something to take care of besides oneself.

Fifteen dogs is not enough. Thirty feels like a good number. Too many dogs have I buried with Jim Harrison’s advice, giving them a pound of ground meat to be gulping down just as the needle’s administration hits the bloodstream. The late great John Graves wrote of his dog Blue—how the shape of his head, more than any other, fit the shape of John’s hand, the palm of it.

I remember when the coyotes got Ann, gutted her, and she came crawling home with thirty feet of entrails trailing pink in the dust from where the coyotes caught her. I shoved them back in, held her together, raced to the vet, an hour away; he cleaned her and sewed her back up, and in less than a week she was her old self again.

We know the heart of a dog is a powerhouse of an organ, capable of compressing seven years of passion into but a single year. When I walk through my yard and out into the forest, it’s hard to navigate a path that does not pass by or across the burial site of a dog or dogs, each residing at a different level in the geological strata, the foundation of which I, in my four hundred and twentieth dog year, am becoming. Anyone who has ever loved a dog and been loved by one knows, with the humility of the experience, that they love us even though they know us so well. It’s breathtaking.