Sam is quite the creature, certainly unlike most dogs I know, maybe unlike any animal I know—a sleek body built for running, long elegant legs, and those astonishing eyes, big and round; the black irises and the porcelain white sclera. And those coal black eyelashes, long and elegant, delicately curling upward, as if tempting you to touch them. When Sam is alerted to something, the lashes twitch, acting like the farmer’s forked tree branch, the dowsing stick, signaling some inescapable discovery.
On this evening it is squirrels.
The tree climbers are everywhere along our walk tonight. Rabbits, too. The temperature has dipped, humidity is down, so maybe that’s the reason they are bustling about—scurrying up trees, ducking in and out of hedges, hopping over curbs to dash across the street. It’s the season. Late August. Fall is close. It’s time for creatures to prepare. It’s time to get back to work.
I’ve also returned to work. The sabbatical is over and the college calls. I’m okay with that. I’ve had a productive and restorative stretch—a book has been released, an audio book complete, a new manuscript sold, I’ve written some music, something I haven’t done in a long time. Students will be back in the classroom in two weeks, and so, like the squirrels, I’ll be scurrying soon, too.
I had been at the college all day today and Sam and I now need some time together. An evening walk will do me good, as my stomach again has been touchy with off and on grumbling and mild queasiness. I told the doctor that sometimes walking helps. He still wants to do a colonoscopy, so there’s that. Also, Leslie and I had been dog sitting Franco, my son’s dog, for a few days. Sam now needs some singular attention and I would like to believe she missed me today. When I came home, she rushed to the door, carrying in her jaw a red rubber toy bone, a gift for my return.
Sam and I step off in our usual direction, south to the corner and east, and it is at the turn that we first notice the squirrels and rabbits—one after another, pairs of them, sometimes. I wonder what Sam sees and thinks. She, like all dogs, hears and smells more than I ever will. What is it that truly interests her here, the squirrels or dreams of chasing one? But is that all she thinks about? She’s an intelligent dog, she must consider more than this. Does Sam have desires bigger than squirrels? Does she have aspirations? What are they? Does Sam have dreams beyond the obvious?
I’m reading the book Rising Tide Falling Star by Philip Hoare. Hoare is an angel of the sea. He lives it, swims in it every day off the coast of Cape Cod or his hometown of Southampton. He communes with the ocean. I understand that urge. When I was a boy, I wanted to be an oceanographer. All those Jacques Cousteau shows on television captivated me. It was my dream to do what Cousteau did. When I was a young man, I visited Woods Hole and the Oceanographic Institution and fell more profoundly in love with deep waters. Somewhere that dream faded. New dreams took over. Has Sam ever had such hopes, such dreams? Does she want to be somebody? Does she know Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Lady from Lady and the Tramp? Does she want to be Marley, Air Bud, a pampered pet from Best in Show? Or does she live only in the present, only in the now, all those squirrels her only concern?
In a tall maple tree two squirrels sit together in the crux of dual branches just above our heads. Sam watches. She doesn’t bark. Doesn’t lunge toward them. But her ears lift and those lashes twitch. The squirrels have her full attention. It is a remarkable act, really. Such keen alertness, a level I might never quite understand. It may be one of the reasons dogs fascinate me so much, their ability to be so single-minded at a precise moment. And when they focus on us, the master and friend, it is extraordinary.
There was a time when humans worshipped dogs like gods. The Egyptians loved their cats, but dogs had a sacred role in religious art and tradition. The Aztec peoples had burial sites for their dogs. The dog is part of Chinese astrology. And when the patron saint of dogs in the Catholic Church, Saint Rocco caught the plague, as the story goes, and went to the forest to die, it was there that he befriended a stray dog that licked his sores and brought him food. Saint Rocco lived. And to this day in Bolivia, Christians celebrate Saint Rocco and the so-called birthday of dogs on August 16 of each year. Saint Francis of Assisi tamed a wolf, the dog’s ancestor, because he believed, like the human, that it was a creature of God. It is not unreasonable to think dogs were put here for a reason.
It is a lovely night to walk. The angle of the evening sun gives the late day a deeper color; the refracted light is more agile, more alive. The large locust tree in the parkway soars higher, the pink azalea in the big pot at the doorstep shimmers; the white lilies along a shaded walkway are more delicate. English ivy clings to the gray bricks of the home near the corner; the greenest growth climbing the highest. The giant evergreen in the yard permits the blue sky to filter through its branches, as if it is sharing its needles with heaven.
Does Sam see any of this? Is she using her amazing attentiveness to notice the beauty?
Sam is more interested in other matters—tugging on the leash to stop me, seeing another squirrel, this one scampering under a large leafy bush between homes. I watch Sam closely. Those eyes, darting, aware, and expressive. These are human characteristics, of course, but I see them in Sam. I’m interpreting her expression, something many of us do with our dogs. We see the sad face, the happy one; we see fear or anxiousness. Scientists in Finland recently found that humans are just as good at interpreting a dog’s face as we are another person’s. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can put ourselves in our pet’s place like we can with fellow humans. In Sam’s case, I can’t truly understand her interest in squirrels over the beauty of the evening light, but I might be able to tell how she feels. And maybe that is the real reason why dogs are here with us, to share something together, pure and real, beyond the complicated emotions of a human relationship. What does Sam truly see with those eyes of hers? And what do I see in those eyes of hers, below those glorious lashes? Maybe we see the same thing. Maybe Sam is admiring the evening as much as I am, just in a much simpler and authentic way, even when a squirrel snatches her attention. Maybe the answers are in those eyes.
At the last turn home, on the opposite street corner, there’s a man walking a little dog, a scrappy thing with wiry gray hair. The two take a short cut across the street. The man and I smile, catching one another’s eyes. I don’t know what the man sees in mine, but in his I see comfortable weariness. He, too, I imagine, has had a full day, and like me, he walks his dog to come down from the day’s buzz. And the dogs, they pull toward each other. We allow them to sniff noses and they, too, look briefly into each other’s eyes, Sam’s lashes twitch, and the two of them share something beyond squirrels, beyond what mere humans might ever know.