The card sat on my desk as a reminder. “Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

My friends assured me that Christopher and Tess were still with me. Gretchen Vogel, who had given us our first flock of hens as a housewarming present, is a spiritual medium, and she told me she could see both Chris and Tess when she came to visit our house. The spirit of our 750-pound pig was even bigger than he was in life. He floated around after me like a blimp, she said. And she could see Tess plain as day, sitting beside me on the black and white linoleum tiles in the kitchen.

But why couldn’t I see them?

 

 

I had never been a person gifted with visions or dreams or contact with spirits. In high school Bible study, to my disappointment, I never got tongues. I believe in the survival of the soul. It is an important tenet of my faith. But to my immense frustration, I could never feel the presence of loved ones who had passed on. I only missed them. I spoke of this to a friend whom I had met in the Amazon, a martial artist and former U.S. Marine. “Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

His wise words soothed me. But I couldn’t help but long for some sign, some feeling, some communication.

Then one night in January—after I had returned from Papua New Guinea, after I had written the memoir of my life with Christopher Hogwood, after completing the tree kangaroo book, after another research trip to the Amazon and yet another one to Italy, a year and a half after she had died—Tess came to me in a dream and showed me the promise of joy that lay ahead.

✧

I dream of animals often, and usually they are rapturous. But this dream was different. It began with a crisis. A friend had given us a border collie puppy. What could be better? But I was beset with anxiety. In the dream, the baby was only about the size of a newborn mouse, and I was terrified it would die. I had no idea how to keep the puppy alive. I felt utterly helpless.

Then someone came to the door. I didn’t hear a knock, but I knew someone was there. I opened the back door—and there stood Tess.

Oh! The joy of seeing her again! But even as I lay dreaming, I understood that Tess was dead. I knew in the dream that Tess was in her spirit form, and that she had come to help me. I raced to get Howard. He came to the door with me. But now Tess was gone. In her place stood a different border collie.

Like Tess, this border collie had a white stripe down the nose, white legs, and white tail tip. But she was even more luxuriantly furred than Tess. Her ears stood up taller, with no flop to the tips. She lacked Tess’s white ruff. She looked at us expectantly with intense brown eyes.

Instantly, I understood that Tess had sent this dog to us. From the moment I woke up, I set out to find her.

✧

Howard and, I unbeknownst to each other, had separately been visiting a website for a border collie rescue. Located in rural upstate New York, it’s the largest rescue devoted to the breed in the region, if not the nation. It features appealing photos and detailed stories of dozens of border collies and border collie mixes for adoption. Glen Highland Farm Sweet Border Collie Rescue was the obvious place to start looking for the dog Tess had shown me. I strongly felt she was female. But would I recognize her?

Adopting a dog from this rescue is not easy. The dogs have great lives on the farm. They run free over acres of fenced grass, ponds, and woods, sleep snug and warm inside at night on dog beds and couches, and have loads of toys, volunteers, and other dogs to play with. No wonder the rescue only lets these dogs go to homes that will be even better than this. To be considered as potential adopters, we had to fill out a lengthy form, include photographs of our house and yard, and procure letters endorsing our fitness for border collie stewardship from our veterinarian and at least one neighbor. Finally, after submitting the paperwork, a date was decided when we could visit. By this time it was February. We awaited a call confirming the time of our appointment.

The call didn’t come in time for us to make the trip; it was a daylong drive to the farm, and we would need overnight accommodations. Disappointed, we planned for another visit several weeks later, in March. This time we’d stay overnight at Howard’s parents’ house in Long Island and then drive to the rescue. My heart pounded as I packed Tess’s old leash, her bowls, and her blanket into the car. Howard and I had looked so many times at the different dogs profiled on the website. Which was the right one? Would she know us? Would we know her? What if I picked the wrong dog, and failed my stalwart, lionhearted Tess, who had come all the way back from the dead to try to show me the right one?

We returned from dinner the night before we were to set out from Long Island and found a message on Howard’s parents’ answering machine. Many of the border collies at the farm had an illness; our visit was canceled a second time.

Clearly, though many wonderful dogs awaited adoption at Glen Highland Farm, our dog was not there.

But where was she?

✧

I came home and looked at other rescue sites: Animal Rescue League of New Hampshire. Petfinder.com. Humane societies in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. New England Border Collie Rescue. For some reason, few border collies were available for adoption at the time, and no young females were available. I was starting to feel frantic. Now it was April, three months after Tess had come to me in the dream. It appeared not only possible, but likely, that I would fail her—and meanwhile, the dog who was meant to be ours was languishing out there, somewhere. I didn’t even know where to start.

A breeder was out of the question. We knew an excellent one in the next town over, but he bred professional working dogs, not pets—and besides, we had always wanted to give a home to a border collie who wouldn’t otherwise have a good one.

So, without much hope, I cast my dream upon the mercy of the universe. I told some of our friends that we were looking for a young female border collie. One friend was a Yankee columnist and knew, it seemed, half the population of New England. Another was on the board of the local Humane Society. A third friend had worked at the Massachusetts SPCA. Surely they would have some leads.

On a whim, I also called Evelyn—the woman who runs the private rescue where we had gotten Tess. We’d stayed friends ever since we’d brought Tess home. I had immediately told her about Tess’s death, and of course, I reasoned, she would have called us if, by some fluke, she suddenly acquired another border collie—which was unlikely. Tess had been the only border collie Evelyn had gotten at the rescue in fourteen years. But I phoned her anyway, just to tell her we were looking.

Evelyn was silent for several seconds, and then replied, as if stunned:

“Well, I’ve got a girl right here.”

✧

She was perhaps five years old. Evelyn wasn’t sure. The dog had lived in two different homes before arriving at Evelyn’s rescue, and neither owner appeared to care very much for her. Her name was Zooey, but she didn’t come when called—Evelyn thought it sounded too much like “no-o-o”—so Evelyn had renamed her Zack.

The dog’s story was pathetic. That winter, from an ill-timed coupling with the border collie next door, which Evelyn thought might have been forced, Zack had borne her owners a litter of eight valuable, purebred border collie pups. But because her people had made her breed in the winter, and then whelp on the concrete floor of the cold basement, the babies were freezing to death. Five of the eight had died before the man called Evelyn for help.

When Evelyn arrived, she found the new mother desperate, running in and out of the whelping box, aware that her pups were dying but helpless to save them. “I was sick about it,” Evelyn told me. “She was practically bald and loaded with fleas. I even treated her for mange. It was all I could do not to curse those people.”

Evelyn saved the three remaining pups, whom the man planned to sell for good money. But he had no use for the mother. So Evelyn took Zack and nursed her back to health. She had a full coat now, Evelyn told us. “She’s a beautiful dog,” she said. “But she’s not very well socialized.”

Howard and I went over to meet her.

✧

“Zack! Calm down, now!” Evelyn admonished as the dog pulled against the leash. At first sight, Zack looked shockingly like Tess: a classic border collie, with the typical white socks, white stripe down the nose, and white ruff and chest against a black background. But of course she was different, and soon the differences were obvious.

 

 

Zack was larger than Tess, about eight pounds heavier, furrier, with taller ears. Her temperament was utterly different. Tess had been incredibly tuned to us from the moment we met. Howard had fallen in love with Tess after his first toss of a Frisbee. But this dog, Howard noted with disappointment, ignored the flying disk. She wouldn’t fetch a ball. Zack didn’t seem interested in playing with toys of any kind.

She didn’t respond to her old name, Zooey, or her new name, Zack. In fact, she didn’t appear to know any English at all. Unlike with Tess, who had laser focus on us and what we were doing, everything captured Zack’s attention for a moment until something new tore it away.

Howard didn’t like her coat. Though it had grown back lushly after her mange treatments, and she was super furry, with some distinctive curls on her back toward her hindquarters, it wasn’t ebony like Tess’s but had a brown tinge to it. He didn’t like her tail, which curled to the right—possibly because of some injury. He didn’t like her age—five, he thought, was too old. Tess’s death had broken his heart, and if we were to adopt a new dog, he wanted one we would have at least as long as we had Tess. Even though she leaned against him appealingly when they met, he didn’t want her.

But I had noticed something important when I saw Zack from the side. Though she had an extravagant white ruff, it didn’t go all the way around her neck. On her right side, her neck was solid black. She looked like she had no white ruff at all. This was the dog from the dream.

We visited Zack again, and still Howard couldn’t bear to take her home. Beside myself, I drove off to my friend Liz Thomas’s house and sobbed at her kitchen table. When I returned, Howard was in bed, the light out. In the darkness came his voice: “Let’s get the dog.” The next day, we drove to Evelyn’s to take her home.

“Good luck!” Evelyn called as the three of us drove away. “She’s a lot of dog.”

✧

Evelyn was right. She was a lot of dog. Her first day with us, she pooped in almost every room of the house, including (though we, unfortunately, did not discover this for several days) the basement. She was also a counter surfer. No food she could reach was safe. She dug holes in the lawn, which Tess never did, and she enjoyed rolling in, as well as eating, other animals’ excrement. She seemed completely innocent of any English at all.

But she was also a good learner. We renamed her Sally, which she understood from her first day with us. And after that first day, she never soiled in our house again—except for the basement, which, perhaps because she had been confined in a basement to whelp her pups, she considered an appropriate latrine.

Sally and I worked with a private trainer and took group obedience classes at two different locations. Soon her recall was perfect—she always came when called—and she would reliably obey all the other standard commands, even shaking hands on cue. At the end of a month of training, she earned her Certificate of Good Manners from the local Humane Society, which we proudly displayed on the refrigerator. But the very evening she earned it, before I served Howard his dinner, she ate his crabcakes off the plate from the kitchen counter. She ate the birthday cake I made for a friend. She opened a cabinet door in order to eat an entire box of oatmeal—with explosive results.

I liked to say “Sally does everything I ask—and so much more!” It was things we did not ask her to do that caused problems. Her recall was so good that she could reliably hike through the woods with us off-leash—some of my greatest daily pleasures were our morning walks alone, and our afternoon walks with my friend Jody Simpson and her standard poodles, Pearl and May. But while doing so, Sally would often eat and/or roll in something awful. Once I had to ride back from a hike hunched with Sally in the cargo hold of Jody’s dark blue SUV because Sally was too smelly and sticky to ride in the back seat with the other dogs.

Another time, we were walking up a dirt road where a family of German shorthaired pointers lived. The pointers’ yard had an invisible fence, keeping the resident dogs from straying. But it did nothing to prevent Sally from rushing inside the house through the dog door, disturbing a mother dog who had recently whelped puppies and somehow instigating a fight between two of the resident pointers that the owner had to break up—in so doing, acquiring a bite on her hand that required a trip to the hospital emergency room. Especially because the homeowner was a lawyer who could have easily sued, I was very grateful that she forgave Sally for causing the melee.

Sally loved to steal. She stole lunches from backpacks. She would grab a sandwich right out of your hand on its way to your mouth. One morning she seized the steel wool from the kitchen and left a trail of rusty orange splinters across the dining room rug. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink to fish items from the garbage. She always looked so proud of these accomplishments. I couldn’t help but laugh. Howard called her Little Sally Rap Sheet. But when he’d drive with just the two of them in his truck, he’d sing to her the Bruce Springsteen song “Little Girl, I Want to Marry You.”

Despite being the same breed, Sally and Tess were almost complete opposites. Tess was a graceful athlete. Sally knocked things over. Tess loved her Frisbee and tennis ball but disdained other toys. Sally, as it turned out, became crazy for toys—except for the Frisbee, which she would catch only grudgingly to please Howard. Tess loved us, but felt that more than a few minutes of petting was excessive, and she disliked being brushed. But Sally was extravagantly affectionate. She leaned into strangers; she pressed her snout against their faces, begging for kisses. She loved the brush and would luxuriate for over an hour while I lovingly groomed her lush fur each night. We switched her dog food and her coat lost the brown tinge Howard had disliked. Now it glowed ebony.

I felt whole again. Sally made me unspeakably happy. I loved the softness of her fur, the cornmeal-like scent of her paws, the rolling cadence of her gait, the gusto with which she ate (even the stick of butter softening for the dinner table and the bowl of cereal abandoned for a moment to take a phone call). I loved the way she’d eviscerate the stuffed toys I would always bring her from my travels—delighting in the destruction of a blue shark, a red rhino, and one stuffed hedgehog after another. I loved her tall ears. Shortly after Howard and I had graduated college, the rock group the Police came out with the hit “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” and that’s how I felt about Sally.

The three of us slept snuggled together, all our limbs—arms, legs, tail—entwined. Unfortunately, Sally often leapt up and barked replies to distant dogs and foxes during the night. Soon after, she’d be snoring again beside us while we lay, hearts pounding, staring at the crack in the plaster ceiling for hours afterward. And if Howard got up at night, Sally would immediately and deliberately rearrange herself to take up his sleeping lane, with her head on his pillow. When he got back, she’d give him a puffy smile. She thought this was a hilarious joke. And so did we.

People often speak of a lifetime dog, a phrase that may have been coined by the author and fellow border collie owner Jon Katz. “They’re dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways,” he’s said. Tess was our lifetime dog.

But so was Sally.

Sally was no replacement for Tess, or for Chris. She was not a serious, intense, laser-smart border collie. She was not a great big Buddha master like Christopher Hogwood. She was not a wise mentor like Molly. And yet, from the moment Sally came home, I loved her no less than I loved them.

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love. Thanks to the animals before Sally, I adored her with all the love I had for Molly, all the love I felt for Tess, all the love I had for Chris—and all the love I had for this silly, goofy, sweet, smiley, uniquely wonderful new dog.

“Tess must be laughing at us,” Howard would sometimes say as I cleaned up the bag of dog kibble Sally had strewn all over the kitchen floor, or hosed the smelly remains of a rolled-in deer carcass from her fur. I never doubted it. I loved thinking of Tess smiling down on us from heaven, knowing that every time I looked at Sally, I thought gratefully and lovingly of Tess, too. For after all, everything had turned out as Tess had intended when she came to me in the dream.

✧

Years later, as I was looking over notes I had taken from talking with Evelyn about Sally long ago, I realized another miraculous aspect to that dream. It had started with a crisis: a puppy whose life was in danger but whom I felt powerless to save. The dream had occurred in January, the same month—and, who knows? possibly the same night!—that Sally, then named Zooey, was imprisoned in a cold basement many miles away from me, desperately trying to save her freezing pups from dying. Had I glimpsed, through the dream, the heartbreaking dilemma that, without my knowing her, Sally was facing?

I wondered: Did Tess appear to Sally, too? Did she show her me, a promise of a new future? Perhaps, thanks to Tess, Sally and I had seen each other that same night, in our dreams.