This is not the story of the greatest dog who ever lived. It is the story of all dogs who ever lived, because they are all that dog.
This particular dog was called Bob, and he made a choice that was hard, and worth knowing about.
Bob lived on the A Bar Three ranch in the Texas Panhandle west of Plainview. At the time, my father, who was a lawyer in town, had a hunting lease on the ranch, which is why I knew Bob. He belonged to Buddy Rockwood, the son of the owner and heir to this great Texas ranch. He was my friend, Buddy, and Bob was my friend, too.
After Buddy went off to the Marines, Bob disappeared from the A Bar Three. It was a hard time for the Rockwoods, as hard a time as a family can have, and Bob's disappearance was not the largest part of their pain, but it mattered. He mattered.
Ranch life can be good for a dog—real good—but it's also dangerous. If one day a ranch dog doesn't come in, there'll be a search, but soon life has to go on. Ranch work doesn't wait.
I had not been out that way in a very long time when I saw on the news something that my dad had not bothered to mention to me. They'd had quite a serious storm in Plainview.
I called Dad to be sure that he was all right, and got the usual from him, "Why sure, Son, I've been through a few tornadoes in my time, and I'm just fine." So I asked him if he had power. He said, "I don't need it today."
As he was then well north of ninety, I traveled up from Houston to make sure that he wasn't sitting on a chair in the middle of a ruined house, reassuring me over his cellphone. I flew to Lubbock and then drove in on roads rich with memories. I had ridden my bike on these roads, and my horse Nero, and driven my first car with my first date, a girl called Nell Saunders whom I thought might have dropped down from heaven, she was so pretty.
I courted my wife Kathleen at the University of Texas, but Nell was my first girl. She and her husband have a sporting goods store in New Mexico, I believe.
When I arrived at the house, I found that Dad was indeed fine. Two or three of the old places along the road were in pretty bad shape, but our house had been spared.
There was a man in the front yard with a chain saw, cutting up a fallen tree, one which I had climbed as a boy. I remembered the crooks in those branches and the secret high places, and felt a grief at what I was seeing. But death is part of life. In the end, balance comes, and God's peace.
My dad was on the porch. "I climbed that tree," he said as I came up from the driveway.
"Me, too."
Our eyes met. There was nothing more we needed to say, or could say.
I was glad that Dad had a hired man around the place, somebody to look after him besides his big old Maine Coon cat Milton, and the darned geese he insists on keeping. You don't want to get near that goose house, which he knows and enjoys.
My impression was that Sanchez was even older than him. He looked like a raisin, Sanchez. When I asked him his age, he said fifty. Dad said, "He's a hundred and two. I hired him because old people need the encouragement of work."
We brought out the bourbon and we talked, me and Dad and Sanchez. You'd think that there wouldn't be a lot to talk about in Plainview, but it's not city talk. It goes slower, that's true enough, but to tell the truth, I think it also runs a little deeper.
I mentioned that I was going to ride out to the A Bar with the thought of walking some of the trails again. Maybe I'd even go for some quail, as the season was on. I said, "I wonder if they've got a dog out there to go with me. Maybe like old Bob. Now, that was a dog." Then I said, "I wonder what became of that old dog?"
Sanchez said, "Well, I think I have a pretty good idea." Now, that surprised me. I said, "Did you work the A-Bar?"
He was quiet for a while. "That was a dog," he said finally. He seemed to settle into himself, to go deep. "That was a dog."
Bob could do a lot of things. It takes intelligence and training to be a quail dog, and Bob excelled at it. He could also retrieve, which is another skill entirely, and he could certainly have won the Frisbee Dog World Championship if it had existed back in those days.
But what he was bred to was cattle work. He was a wonderful cow dog. He could make a Brahma bull dance on a redbud bush, as I seem to remember. You could tell him, 'get that heifer out over there, Bob,' and you'd have a heifer cut out inside of two minutes and hardly a stir from the rest of the herd.
The trouble with dogs who herd cattle is that they can spook them if they're too enthusiastic. Not Bob. When he worked, it was ballet. Beautiful.
I never saw an animal or a man or anybody who loved work or loved life like Bob did.
Sanchez, as it turned out, was pretty sure that he'd had Bob in the Plainview pound not long after he disappeared from the A-Bar. Now, this is a big state and it's seventy miles to the A-Bar from Plainview, but I didn't doubt Sanchez for a minute. Bob was powerful and he was not a dog to tire easily. He'd tried to follow Buddy, poor fella, and he could easily have gone seventy miles. Easily.
"That dog was so ugly," Sanchez said. "That wasn't a dog you were gonna forget. I wish I'd known the Rockwoods back in those days, I would've driven him right back out there. But who'd've thought you had a dog from seventy miles out? I thought he came off the Matador or someplace closer." He was silent for a time. I waited. Often these days, folks don't wait for a man's talk to come. But I do like to wait. I think it brings better talk.
Sanchez pulled a little bourbon and finally dug some more words out. "He outwitted me. Got away. Here I was running a pound, and a dog comes in I couldn't manage to hold onto. So I guess I just kept what happened to myself. He tricked me, that's the truth of it. He was some dog."
I thought a long time on that. Here was a dog who had tricked a man and very cleverly, to manage an escape like that.
I remembered looking into Bob's eyes, and seeing there what you can see in every dog's eyes, which is the truth. You can see God looking right through at you. It can be a scary business, if you have reason to hide. But in Bob's eyes there was also something else. Some kind of knowledge, like maybe he and God were familiar.
When I had that thought, sitting on the porch looking at the sky where our tree had been, and reflecting that now you could see the clouds and the larks and the eagles, I felt him come close to me, like his soul had heard our talk.
I guess that was where this all started, where I began to feel that this dog was still here in some way, and had a job for me. I began to feel the old kinship again. I began, also, to remember the unexpected feeling of importance that came with the dog. You knew that Bob mattered, and because of that everything changed for you. All life began to matter, and you saw something, which I think might have been the beauty inside not just the dog but the whole world, that is bigger than any of us, or all of us, busy, noisy creatures that we are.
I began to think that I wanted to be a voice for this dog, because I sensed that he had a story he wanted to tell, and maybe it was an important one. Maybe it was about the adventure of life, Bob's story, and how to go along the road in a good way.
When I went out to the A-Bar, it looked just the same. It wasn't as tumble down, I will say that. That big old ranch house, rock with wide porches and tall windows, was refreshed with new paint on the trim and a fine new roof.
They have some fine Australian cattle dogs now. The cattle business has had a fair run lately. Their hunting remains unparalleled, and they have special quail dogs, not jacks-of-all-trades like Bob.
John Rockwood's son Sam owns the place now. He was a late child, not yet born when Buddy and I knew each other. Sam and Sally have a girl, Emma, and two boys, Julian and Jack. The oldest is Jack, and by Rockwood tradition that means his nickname is Buddy. I guess if it had been Emma first, she would be this generation's Buddy.
Rockwoods go back five generations in this county, to 1878. Really, they were about the first people to stop here. They liked wind and dry weather, I guess. The light of the prairie will touch your heart if you let it, and the night here is a cathedral. When you look up at the stars that hang above these plains or see the moon coming up or hear the wind sigh, you know that, despite all our troubles, there is good in this world, and it is general.
Maybe the Rockwoods felt that, but maybe they also had an eye for good grazing.
We're not ranchers, but we go back in this place to 1881. There's a wagon wheel in the back yard, up against the fence, from the wagon that brought us. It hasn't been specially preserved or anything. It's just all that's left of the wagon.
This generation's Buddy is twelve and he never had the good fortune to know the Buddy who was my friend, or to know Bob. He knows the stories, though, and so do his brother and sister. They've been taught all the A-Bar stories, and they are good at telling them, too. The A-Bar is like the Matador, it is part of the soil and soul of this place. To be in these ranches is to be in a path of the spirit, too. Nobody makes much of it. In fact, they'd laugh to hear it said. But it's true.
So I said hello to Sam. I had to remind him who I was. He asked me, "What keeps you in Houston?" I wanted to say, the good Lord keeps me in Houston, because that's where my journey took me. But I chuckled and he chuckled. There's things that don't need to be said. That big old city has become my home. I have given my life to it. Still, when I sleep at night, these old trails out here are where my spirit walks.
Bob got home, too, in the end.
Sam and I sat on the side porch, which used to be the dog porch. But now they are in fine kennels, the ranch dogs. Beauregard, a snappy little rat terrier, takes care of the house, and he's mostly an indoor dog.
Sam had some Shiner, which is good beer. It's from down south in German Texas. So we sipped on it and talked a little. He understood that I was here to visit my past, and he knew to let that be. He told me a little more about Bob, though. It seems that Bob made it home. He said to me, "Dad said that he was here for a while." I waited, but he kept his silence after that, thinking on his father, I suppose, on his older brother whom he never knew, maybe on the dog, too. I thought on them all, and it was as if I could hear them again, and the cattle when they came up that draw to the south of the house pasture, the lowing and the rumble of hooves and the barking of Bob and the other cattle dogs, and see them going down the chute, big old beeves with scared eyes.
The thing was, you could hear Bob bark from a good way off. A good way. He had a bark like a cannon.
After a bit, I walked back in the hills some, going pretty much where my memories took me. The prairie wind seemed to bring me old Buddy's voice, even as a boy saying what was needed and not a lot more.
I remembered how Bob would run just for the pleasure of it, a dog captured by that wind. It really defines this place. The high plains of Texas are the land of wind.
After Buddy answered the call of his country is when Bob lit out, and what I want to do is to record what I imagine happened to him during that time.
I want to do it because I think Bob would want this, so it's important to me, and I think it's just plain important. I feel this way because of the life I have lived. I've been a lawyer for a while. I have seen hate and injustice, love and courage, seen them in the dry legal briefs and the rulings of the courts that change lives and sometimes take them, in the journey of the law, which attempts to make a path for the people of Texas through the intricate web of right and wrong.
The most important thing I know is love. A lifetime in the law has taught me this. My life has also taught me how important it is to look to what is simple to find what is good.
Dogs are filled with love, so they matter, and maybe more than we realize.
Perhaps I am a little different in this respect, but my years have taught me that the good God wastes nothing, not even dogs, and least of all the souls of these pure creatures.
Love is important, and they have so much of it that they are important, too. Just look closely at your dog. You'll see.
The part of Bob's journey that seems to me to be the most important is the same part of life that is important to all of us, when he had to make choices of the kind that stay with you always.
It was about a month after Buddy went off to the Marines, I think, that Bob found himself in the Plainview pound. Sanchez says the dog he remembers was so big he hardly fit in the cages. He says he must've called every ranch within twenty miles looking for his owner, or to place him with somebody. He couldn't live in a town, let alone a house, no way. But those were hard times in the ranching business—it was real dry—and there was no call for extra dogs when you could barely keep the cattle alive.
So Bob took matters into his own hands, and played that trick on Sanchez, and went on the journey that took his soul to its fundamental moment of choice.
Come with me, to try to see and feel—and, of course, smell—what it must have been like for him at that fork in the road that we all reach at some time in our lives, when you can either go to your truth or stray from it.
Looking back, I can vividly recall how fantastically ugly that old fella was. When you first saw him, your eyes were just glued. He was real big and sort of spotted. There might have been some hyena in there, even, lord only knows. He had liquid eyes and they really saw you. They saw you more than a man's eyes do. Well, maybe my dad's eyes see you like that. They were clear eyes, anyway, clearest eyes I ever saw in a dog.
Is it presumptuous of me, I wonder, to do what I intend here? I am going to try to go inside his mind and speak from it as he might have spoken, if dogs had words.
But I don't see any other way to tell what his journey was like and what it meant to him, and what all such journeys maybe ought to mean to all of us.
Bob's got a lesson for us. Because he's simple, his lesson is simple. Where do we find heaven? How do we get there? What is the true path?
Bob found it, but it was hard, and it almost didn't happen.
To learn how he did it, which might help us very much, let's imagine that we are on the journey with him. Let's allow ourselves to enter his mind and see the world as he saw it.
What I am going to recount is Bob's life from his own viewpoint, as I imagine he lived it and felt it when he was in the wind and trying to find the true path.