Born to Bark (2 page)

One day, when I was around eight or nine years of age, my mother and her sister, my Aunt Sylvia, were having coffee together and looking at some old family snapshots. As they sat chatting and laughing at the black-and-white images, the page turned to reveal that particular picture of Rex and me. Sylvia was appalled.

“Chesna, that is disgusting!” my aunt said, and immediately went into the lecturing mode that she used when she felt that she needed to instruct someone and bring them to her own moral and intellectual high ground, “Stanley is chewing on a dog biscuit. It’s unsanitary. It’s unhealthy! It’s nearly child abuse!”

“Sylvia, it’s just a dog biscuit,” my mother gently replied. “The first time I gave Stan a biscuit to give to Rex, he started to chew on it himself. I don’t think that he much liked the taste, but he liked the fact that Rex would hang around him until he finally gave him what remained of the treat. After that, Stan
wouldn’t go anyplace without a dog treat in his pocket, and Rex would never be more than an arm’s length away from him. That’s what saved Stanley’s life.”

During the early years of World War II, just after my father, Ben, had earned his officer’s commission, he had been assigned to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where we lived in a mostly military community just outside the gates of the camp. It was sort of rural, and the place we rented was pretty bare and run-down, but it did have a little fenced yard where Rex and I could play. My mother was inside doing the wash one day when she heard me give a frightened shout, followed by angry sounds from Rex. When she ran out of the house she found me hiding behind Rex who was barking and growling at a “nasty-l
ooking snake, pink and black and orange, making hissing and buzzing sounds.” Rex had defensively put himself between me and the snake. My mother shouted for us to get back and as soon as she could, she pulled me away. Meanwhile, Rex dived at the snake and caught it in the middle of its body, but it swung around and bit him on the face. Rex yelped and dropped it and then grabbed its neck and snapped it up and down. When it stopped moving, Rex looked a bit dazed and blood was oozing from puncture wounds on his face.

My mother’s shouts and Rex’s barking attracted the attention of our next-door neighbor, who came running out to help. She was from Georgia and recognized the snake as a copperhead rattlesnake, which is poisonous but not as bad as a cottonmouth or some others, although such snakes can certainly kill a young child or dog. Fortunately, she knew what to do about Rex’s wounds. She made a little X-shaped cut over each of the bite holes and squeezed them until there was a good flow of blood that helped drain the poison. Afterward, Rex was pretty sick and his face swelled up, but he pulled through.

As my mother looked at the photo, she recalled that Rex and I had acted as if we were glued together, and that I had used
those dog treats that I always had with me as rewards, managing to teach Rex dozens of different words and several tricks.

Rex had put himself right in front of me for my protection
.

When my father left with the troops to go to Europe, my mother began to pack our belongings to go back to her family in Philadelphia. Shortly before we left, a driver lost control of his Jeep and hit Rex, who died on our front lawn. My mother looked across the room to where I was sitting and told me, “You took it pretty hard. You kept kissing Rex’s face and telling him to wake up. For the next few weeks you insisted on taking a dog biscuit to bed with you because you said that Rex would expect it to be there when he came home.”

My mother told me the story of Rex only that one time, but it hurt me a great deal. Here was a dog who had loved me so much that he had nearly given his life for me, and I had no memory of him, no matter how hard I tried to recall the events. In fact, the only evidence that I had that he had ever lived was in a couple of small, faded black-and-white photos. It is difficult to imagine that I might never have survived to live the rest of my life if it had not been for an unremembered dog who had stayed
close to me in the hopes of getting an occasional bit of dog treat, and whom I had clearly cherished.

My first personal memories of a dog are all about Skipper, a beagle. He arrived in my life after we were back in Philadelphia, the war was over, and my father was home. I don’t remember Skippy as a puppy. In my mind he was always a full-sized beagle who loved to snuggle and run. Mostly he loved to sniff things, and he had enough strength and traction so that when he was on leash he could drag my light young body over to any target he needed to explore. I always carried around bits of food with me that I could use to reward Skipper to get him to do the things that I wanted him
to. A typical beagle, Skipper was not particularly trainable, but he was sweet and social and willing to curl up next to me while I read, worked, or slept. I loved him dearly, in spite of my having been bitten by a rabid dog not too long before Skipper joined our family.

When I was growing up, dogs were not commonly being vaccinated, rabies was a greatly feared disease, and dog bites were the most usual means of transmission. Rabies symptoms include partial paralysis, an inability to speak or swallow, and psychological deterioration with confusion, anxiety, agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, bouts o
f hostility, and delirium. Without treatment, and once the symptoms show themselves, rabies is one hundred percent fatal within 2 to 10 days. Death by rabies is quite ugly and excruciatingly painful. Before 1885, the year when Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux first successfully cured a victim bitten by a rabid dog, the most common treatment for human rabies was euthanasia—doctors or close family members actually smothered the patient with a pillow, which was considered to be much kinder than allowing him to suffer an agonizing death from the disease.

Thankfully, when I was bitten, a treatment was available for the disease, but that treatment was itself painful and traumatic. I had gone to visit my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Alex and my cousins who had rented a house for the summer in Atlantic City. Only one day into my holiday, I was approaching a dog with my hand out to pet it when it bit me. Although it hurt, my principal emotion at the time was surprise, since dogs had always responded well to me and I’d never been bitten before. Someone grabbed me and lifted me off the ground and away from the dog while someone else grabbed t
he dog by the collar, dragged it away, and locked it into another yard behind a gate.

The dog was believed to be rabid, and treatment—a series of horribly painful shots—was started immediately. The shots were given with a wide-bore needle (which looked like a lance to my young eyes) and injected directly into the abdominal muscles with no anesthetic. I came to dread the sight of the doctor and his needle, and left his office shaking and sobbing, pleading with my mother and aunt not to take me back for the next injection. Everybody in the family was in a state of panic, but after the fifth and last shot, since I wasn’t showing any symptoms, they knew that I would survive.

A colleague who is a clinical psychologist has told me that, given the pain involved in that treatment process, I should have been left with persistent posttraumatic stress–related symptoms that should appear whenever I am around dogs. It would be reasonable to expect that I would have a lifelong fear of dogs, but I have no fear or negative residual feelings for dogs because the dog hurt me a little bit and just once, while the doctors hurt me a lot, and many times. As a result I have been left with a lifelong discomfort associated with doctors and hospitals.

At the time that I had Skippy, we were living in West Philadelphia, in a duplex, where my family lived upstairs and my mother’s parents, Jake and Lena, lived downstairs. My grandmother was a significant influence when I was growing up. Since
both of my parents were working, that meant that except for weekends I got to see my parents for only a few hours at night and in the morning, so my grandmother was my primary caretaker. In the early evenings I would curl up in my grandparents’ living room next to the large radio, which was our principal form of entertainment. This radio was a big piece of furniture, a floor model that stood about 4 feet high. Skipper would curl up beside me as I listened to the three radio programs that I loved:
Superman, The Lone Ranger
, and
Lassie
. Of the three,
Lassie
was my favorite.

The
Lassie
radio adventures were true to the spirit of the original Eric Knight story, in which Lassie was clearly a dog, not a human in a fur coat. Lassie never spoke human language, but simply barked. Pal, the dog who played Lassie in the original movies, also did the barking on the radio show, but listeners were never told that the whining, panting, snarling, and growling were all convincingly done by a human actor named Earl Keen.

Each episode involved Lassie playing a different dog in a different setting and situation. The show had a certain magical charm about it because of the dog’s intelligence, emotion, and dedication. Virtually every episode also demonstrated that somehow we humans could understand and communicate with dogs. Lassie did not speak English, Spanish, German, French, or any other human tongue, but her family and everybody who heard her understood her completely, nonetheless. In one episode Lassie’s barking could mean that a child was hurt and in need of rescue, in another that the house was on fire,
or even “Your mother still loves you and wants you to come home.”

I would listen carefully, trying to work out the nuances of the barks, without great success. I was jealous of Lassie’s family and neighbors, who could all understand the language of dogs and knew how to make their dog understand exactly what they
were saying as well. While I sat next to the big radio fondling Skippy’s long, flannel-textured ears and feeling linguistically inept, I began to form a resolve. I would learn how to talk to dogs and understand what they were saying in return.

I got a head start in my attempts to learn all I could about dogs because my mother believed that it was possible to teach children how to read at a very young age and that such early literacy would give me an educational advantage. So she spent several hours each Saturday and Sunday morning teaching me how to read. I loved it and began to read everything I could lay my hands on. Well before my sixth birthday I could read at a third-grade level. This turned out to be fortunate, since my mother was now pregnant with my brother Dennis and our weekend mornings spent improving my readi
ng ability were becoming shorter and less frequent.

In a sort of enlightened self-interest, my mother next arranged for me to get my own library card at the Cobbs Creek Parkway branch of the Philadelphia Public Library. Anticipating that her time with me would be radically more limited with the arrival of the new baby, she knew that, if I had an interesting book to read, I would tend to hide in a corner and pore over it, my dog beside me, rather than hanging around getting underfoot. I used that library card quite a bit, and by the time I was 7 or 8 years old I had read every book on dogs, wild animals, biology, and science that was
in its tiny children’s collection. I also often read them aloud to Skipper, trying to imitate the instructional tones that my mother and first-grade teacher used when teaching. Sometimes, if it was a good story, I would try to read it dramatically, changing my voice according to what I thought the people in the book might sound like. My grandparents or
my parents would occasionally walk into the room while I was doing one of my melodramatic readings for the dog and smile or stop for a few minutes to watch and listen, but they never interrupted me or commented.