One night, over pizza, around the dining room table, I told Owen and Maisy about Levinas and Bobby. I wondered aloud whether Kirby might be a descendant of the righteous dogs of Egypt. To two kids growing up in church, hearing that dogs were both present and helpful during the Exodus turned out to be exciting news. It didn’t take them long to reach a verdict: though not all dogs might be descendants of the righteous dogs, Kirby surely was.

Then Maisy asked, “What is a descendant?”

“Well, you are a descendant of your ancestors,” I explained. “When you were born, you came from your parents and from their relatives who came before them. They make you, in part, who you are.” For example, I explained, she was a descendant of her great-grandma (aka G.G.).

With this information in hand, Maisy pressed on: “Then who are the ancestors of the righteous dogs of Egypt?”

“Wolves,” I said matter-of-factly. My five-year-old, though, sensed that I had jumped the rails of my “Maisy to Mom and Dad to Great-Grandma” example.

“But, Dad,” she protested, “how did wolves become dogs?” She wasn’t sure she believed me, and I wasn’t sure how to explain. I would need to dig further.

Now that I had come to see the bond with dogs as potentially profound, even spiritual, I, too, needed to explore the question of origins: How did a wolf howling at the moon transform into a black Lab fixated on tennis balls? Where did the human relationship with canines start, and how?

By then, it had been weeks since Kirby’s passing—just long enough for the tears over him now to come only at bedtime. Right around then, the vet’s office called to inform us that the box containing Kirby’s ashes was ready for us to pick up. Along with the box of ashes, the vet gave us a plaster mold of Kirby’s paw print.

I picked up the print and inspected it like a prospector in the California gold rush peering at a chunk of ore. I traced with my finger each part of his paw print, every unique bump and twist and nail print that made up his pad. I remembered how Kirby would place that paw on me over and over again every afternoon as he begged to go outside and play ball. Now all that remained were his ashes in a box, a few strands of hair, and a paw print in clay.

Yet Kirby’s print reminded me of something else: the paw prints I had just read about, pressed into the clay on the floor of Chauvet Cave in southern Europe. The enormous Chauvet–Pont d’Arc Cave, first discovered in 1994, reveals evidence of human habitation and, more significantly, human consciousness from 26,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Deep underground in this cave, paintings on the walls depict a dreamlike menagerie of beasts, most now extinct (cave bear, giant horse, bull, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth), along with the outlines of human handprints. Unlike most cave art, the images do not seem to connect directly to hunting rituals, but to something higher. For the first time in their existence, hominids seem to have created spaces for the imagination, perhaps for worship and prayer.

Scholars say the paintings strongly suggest that Homo sapiens could now think about thinking, a remarkable accomplishment in itself. Yet what captured my imagination most about the discoveries at Chauvet was smaller, more personal. Pressed into the fossilized mud in the cave are the footprints of a boy. He is about the same age as Owen. He seems to be on a stroll through the cave, but he is not alone. There, beside him in the clay, are the paw prints of a wolf-dog.

Right at the time and place where humans are revealed as spiritual beings, a wolf-dog appears—and not at a distance, but accompanying a boy, perhaps guarding him.

The prints tell two stories, but of one journey.

Walking into a Shared Future

The prints in the mud reveal what appears to be a great leap forward at the same time for dogs and humans. Across the globe, archaeologists have found an extraordinary number of dog burial sites, some dating back at least fifteen thousand years. It appears that wherever there was culture, there were dogs. Archaeologists have even found a number of human graves with dogs in them, adorned to communicate clearly that this was no accident or mass grave, but an intentional burial of this human and this dog, highlighting the special bond between them.

The narrative that first appeared in the ancient clay is still being told in our neighborhoods. In the far corner of our yard in St. Paul lies a mosaic plaque that our children made for Kirby. It marks the place where our dog’s ashes rest with his favorite tennis ball and bone. The morning we put Kirby’s ashes in the ground, we stood together as a family and prayed. We had no idea we were doing something other Homo sapiens have done since the last ice age—it just felt right to give Kirby back to the earth in a reverent manner. Yet, that day in our yard, it turns out we were participating in something as old as Chauvet.

How did such an unusual bond between species come about? That’s what I want to explore in this chapter.

Unfortunately, the bones in the cave, the paintings, the intermingled tracks in the clay, suggest only at what the boy and the wolf pup were doing there. What we need, our friend Levinas might propose, is something like a midrash: an informed commentary that can bring hidden truths to light and help us fill in the gaps of our understanding.

For the story of the cave at Chauvet, and begging pardon from those rabbis of old, here’s mine.

A Midrash of Wolf-Dog and Child

A long, long time ago—I’ll say thirty thousand years ago—a boy stepped out of the brightness of the day and into an opening in the side of a hill. The boy was maybe eleven years old, and he took with him into the dark of that cave a burning torch to light his way and a silent companion to guard his steps. His companion was a wolf-on-its-way-to-a-becoming-a-dog.

The boy1 with the torch was on his way to becoming something, too. I think that’s why the underground rooms full of art he’d heard so much about drew him onward so powerfully, deeper and deeper into the cave. His people had found that the stillness and beauty of the art in these caves mysteriously moved them to connect with a higher Being, a Creator Spirit. We could think of the wolf-dog2 walking behind him, leaving its own paw prints in the same soft clay, as the precursor of the righteous dogs of Egypt, journeying with that child into the spiritual ritual of his people.3

Not that you and I would be surprised by this little scene. From our vantage point eons later, we know how dogs and people have shared in this kind of deep connection. Yet, on this particular day, the boy and his wolf-dog companion were making an evolutionary crossing that would be memorialized in the cave floor. Homo sapiens seem to appear from hominids as if for the first time in the flickering light of that cave, and the dog (Canis familiaris) also seems to appear for the first time, almost in the act of parting ways with the wolf (Canis lupus). We have to ask, what brought the boy and the beast to make their footprints so close together? For the answer, our midrash will tell a story of a shared meal and, before that, a shared hunt.

Sharing in the Spoils

As the brain of the boy’s evolutionary ancestors continued to enlarge, protein in meat became increasingly important. The beasts then roaming the tundra and Ice Age forests offered all the meat any hominid or wolf could want. Mastodons, woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses, giant deer, long-horned bison, musk ox, and horses—all these were enormous (megafauna) by comparison to today’s mammals.

Yet, looking to megafauna for dinner proved a challenge for the boy and his parents. Even with flint and stone projectiles, most hominids would need to be very close and very lucky to take down such beasts. Likely, most hominids came by the majority of their meat through scavenging from carcasses of animals taken down by larger predators: cave lions, panthers, bears, and cave hyenas.

This quest for food is likely where the boy’s kin first came into close and frequent contact with wolves. Though it was not at first apparent, wolf and hominid actually had much in common. They were relatively similar in size. They hunted and scavenged in packs, where members bonded; had empathy for those in the pack; and played, particularly with their young. Both species were willing to fight and die so their young would survive.

Still, whether a carcass was freshly killed or scavenged by one species (wolf or hominid), soon the other would come close looking for parts of the carcass to steal. The boy’s great-great-grandfather may have eaten his scavenged meat knowing it was stolen from a wolf chased away at spear point.

Unlike the disgusting regurgitating process of the wolf, Great-grandfather and his people needed to drag the meat back to their children. It is likely that wolves began to follow, first standing in the distance, breathing in the intoxicating odors of Great-grandfather’s prehistoric cooking fires (by then, his people had mastered fire).

In the midst of this survival dance, wolves must have taken on mysterious powers to humans. They showed up at every turn, staring from afar, watching curiously and with evident intelligence—perhaps to plan an attack or a raid, or perhaps just to observe. One day, our midrash tells, the boy’s great-grandfather looked up to see a wolf gazing at him in silent contemplation, as if to read his gestures and understand his intentions. At that moment, he was gripped by a sensation that the wolf could read his mind.

I know that feeling. When I first started dating Kara, she lived in a small bungalow in an urban LA neighborhood. The owner of the house had five dogs protecting her property. One of the dogs was named Dingo because he looked just like a wild dingo. Whenever I came over, three of the dogs would bark in delight and one in apprehension. Dingo, however, would sit quietly and stare at me as I walked through the yard. His wolf-y gaze always left me with a deeply eerie feeling.

I think it was that sense of shared presence in the wolf’s gaze that finally prompted the boy’s great-grandfather to take action. It happened on a day when a wolf sat watching, and maybe howling, closer than usual, and on this day, his great-grandfather did not chase it away with his spear. Instead, he turned and threw the wolf a piece of meat.4

Why? I think by then Great-grandfather already felt oddly bonded with the wolf. He had grown accustomed to its presence, seen it romping with its pups, and sometimes, when the horizon was empty, he found himself wondering where the wolf had gone. Before long, the meat toss became Great-grandfather’s ritual. And the more he did it, the closer the wolf would come. Increasingly, the watching and waiting turned into more shared food and closer proximity.5 Like pigeons eating sandwich crumbs in Central Park, shared food made the wolves tamer, more accustomed to human nearness, and eventually more dependent on us.

Now imagine a day when a litter’s mother was killed. Suddenly, the pups found that food had stopped showing up at the mouth of the den. Soon enough, with an empty stomach, at least one pup waddled its way right into Great-grandfather’s camp following the smell of dinner. Naturalist Mark Derr asserts that the volition to domesticate most other animals in the human story came from our desire. The wolves that became dogs are the only animals that came to us, crossing their own boundary of fear in order to reach out in friendship to us. For a generation or more, our midrash says, Great-grandfather’s people had been ritually feeding wolves, but the animals would take the meat and run. This time, the pups ate and stayed.

Over generations, the bond between human and canine became normal, and neither side wanted it to end. More significantly, the wolves’ new life with humans began changing their minds. They were learning to read human faces, words, and gestures, discovering the benefits of cooperating with our actions and, above all, coming to be infatuated with us.

This relationship was changing humans, too. In a world without cities and villages, where we were still part of the food chain and always in danger of a bear attack or a Neanderthal raid, having partnership with wolf-dogs with extensive capabilities of scent and hearing would have been invaluable. The wolf-dog puppies who grew and stayed became our alarm system. Scientists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger explain how this would’ve worked:

Stalking a prey, that is, sneaking up on it, while something is barking at you just doesn’t make sense. In most cases, approaching and barking at a predator are enough to divert its attention away from the hunt. Most carnivores can’t continue hunting if some dog is yapping at them.6

Yet this alarm system did much more than keep us safe. It allowed us to cultivate a particular basic resource that we couldn’t think of living without today. This resource is so simple, yet so deeply important, that in only forty-eight hours without it, our minds will seize up like an engine without oil. I’m talking about sleep.

In a dangerous world, uninterrupted sleep would have been hard to come by. To make sure the tribe was not the next meal for something out there in the dark, one or more adults would need to keep watch. Even then, fear of predator or hostile hominid would have stolen sleep on many nights. Partnership with wolf-dogs as sentries would have come as something of a breakthrough, inviting for humans the REM sleep in which we dream and renew our minds.

The spiritual traditions of hunter-gatherers gave particular credence to dreams, as do the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. By watching over them as they slept, protecting them and partnering with them, the wolf-dog allowed our forebears to expand their minds into deeper realms. During waking hours, Homo sapiens had the luxury of entering into the deeper contemplative state of daydreaming because the wolf-dog was standing guard.

When Owen was little and caught in a nightmare, he would cry out and thrash around, powerless to wake himself completely from sleep. Even after we woke him up, he remained afraid and confused about what was real and what wasn’t. We discovered, though, that when Kirby jumped on Owen’s bed, nuzzled his chin, and allowed Owen to reach up and hug him, the spell would be broken. Kirby’s presence drew Owen back to safety.

Daydreamers and Night Watchers

As humans and dogs evolved together, I believe the presence of a dog during our waking hours became even more important than security at night.

When Kirby died, I found that being alone felt different. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always spent long hours alone in my study reading and writing. I like being alone, but even when I was alone, Kirby would often be there lying at my feet. Even though I rarely was consciously aware of it, my mind was always on Kirby—not enough to distract me from my work, but enough to notice the absence when he was gone. When he was there, I felt free to let my mind roam and do my work of searching for new ideas about God. Yet in the weeks following his death, without my dog lying next to me, I struggled to get work done. I wondered if I’d ever be able to write again. I told myself I was being silly, but truthfully, it felt like part of my being was missing.

That’s why, in thinking about what happened between that child and wolf-dog, I have a hunch about what the two companions were intent on doing in the cave that day. I think they sought out those walls of art to experience something like wholeness, and maybe even worship. Here is what I mean: The boy came as a participant, not just an observer. On the walls of this shrine, he read and responded to his own story of becoming. I can see the flame flickering, hear the burning pitch popping and fizzing in the great cavern around them. Meanwhile, child and wolf-dog watch silently as the mysterious representations of giant beasts seem to move across their field of vision. The wolf-dog’s job was to sit in the boy’s presence, watching, too, and bringing its own heightened awareness while the human imagination traveled higher through states of meditation, contemplation, and prayer.

Is this exactly how it happened? We’ll never know. Yet we do know that there are two constants about human beings. One, from as far back as we can go, we have always had some form of spirituality: a yearning for God, gods, or transcendence. Two, we’ve always had dogs. Of course, I’m a theologian—the story of God and humans in search of each other is my passion. A painter or ethologist might tell a different story, or word it differently. Still, given what we know about the ancient humans who etched pigment and charcoal into the walls of those caves, I find hope in the thought that the deep, spiritual connection I felt to Kirby, far from being a delusion, is something we have experienced with dogs ever since our beginnings.

And if that connection stretches back to the furthest reaches of our past, there might be reason to believe it will stretch forward into eternity.