Born to Bark (23 page)

I did learn something from all of this. Clearly, Flint was no threat to Mate, who was twice his height and weight. Mate’s real problem was his owner’s anger. As her anger grew, Mate began to feel that something in the situation was unsafe, and the last thing that a dog wants is to be a stationary target in unsafe circumstances. The wild ancestors of dogs always preferred to run away from danger if that were an option, and so Mate expressed his discomfort by breaking from his sit or down position.

Observing the situation with Mate caused me to rethink what I was doing when Flint moved away from the place where I had told him to wait. As I repeatedly placed him back in position, I would order him to stay with an ever more forceful tone of voice. After he’d break several times from position, I probably sounded like a marine training officer putting the fear of God into a platoon of raw recruits. Perhaps I was making Flint insecure by my voice tone. If he couldn’t run, then he was probably reasoning that the safest place in a time of potential trouble was by my side rather than across t
he room lying still.

So I changed my strategy, carefully giving all of my commands in a calm, businesslike tone. If Flint broke from position, I would simply put him back and repeat the command in as bored and emotionless a tone of voice as I could manage. Eventually, he learned the exercise well enough to allow us to move on to the advanced beginners’ class, and after repeating that class only three or four times, Flint had graduated to the point where he would stay in position perhaps four out of every five times. On that fifth time, however, he would happily prance off to explore the world or to
greet the other dogs in the class, as if he had never been trained at all.

Flint was not fully reliable, but I was feeling better about his performance, so we took the opportunity to move into the novice class, joining dogs who really understood what was expected of them. Apparently, the club’s instructors were also feeling good about Flint’s performance, because Shirley and Barbara Baker came up to me one evening and said that Flint was doing well enough that they thought I ought to put him into competition.

I glanced down at my dog, who was spinning around at the end of his leash trying to convince a Shetland sheepdog to play with him, and asked, “Really?” There must have been something about the tone of my voice, or maybe Flint was just escalating his request to play, but at that exact moment he barked happily.

Shirley said, “You see, even Flint agrees,” and the decision was made.

Day by day, Flint was behaving more like a classic terrier. The root
terra
in
terrier
means “earth” or “ground” and is associated with a genetically wired set of behaviors to follow game into its burrow and to either flush it or kill it. Old-time breeders often say that what a terrier needs is “coat and courage.” His heavy, hard, or wiry coat protects the dog from abrasion as he plunges through rocky areas and down into the lair of a fox or badger. His courage allows him to work completely alone wh
en entering a burrow after his prey, where all is in darkness underground and retreat is difficult, if not impossible. Here the dog’s life might depend on his fighting ability. Many terriers have died underground, locked in a final struggle with their quarry.

Flint’s courage was undeniable. The size of his opponent or the severity of th
e threat made no difference. One day we were having a new refrigerator delivered. I opened the door to find two men negotiating a hand cart loaded with the refrigerator wrapped loosely in plastic sheeting that was flapping in the breeze. Flint interpreted this as some huge beast that was invading his home territory and started to bark
. When the
plastic-wrapped monster did not back up or stop its flapping, he charged it, leaping into the air and hitting the appliance hard at a height of around 3 feet, and sinking his teeth into the plastic wrap. Unable to free himself, he hung with his hind legs several inches off the ground and his upper jaw entangled in the plastic, growling angrily.

Imagine the courage needed for a dog that stood 13 inches at his shoulder to take on a flapping monster 5 feet taller than him. As I gently worked his jaw out of its entanglement with the plastic wrapping, I spoke reassuringly to him.

“It’s all right, Sir Galahad,” I said. “This dragon won’t hurt us.” I then clipped a leash onto his collar and invited the men into the house.

Flint quieted down and watched as they unwrapped the refrigerator, accompanying their activities with low, rumbling growls. His eyes flitted back and forth between the pile of plastic sheeting on the floor and the big white rectangular thing that now stood in our kitchen, until the men exited with the old appliance and the plastic wrap.

When I had closed the door on the departing crew and unclipped his leash, Flint immediately dashed back into the kitchen to stand in front of the new refrigerator, staring at it and softly growling. Then he barked twice and waited for a response. When none came, he eased his vigilance (perhaps the monster was dead), but for several days afterward he would occasionally glance at the new refrigerator and give a little threatening growl that seemed to say,
“Stay dead, you big beast!”

Then there was the first time Flint encountered the great dog beast in the sky. In Vancouver, electrical storms with lightning and thunder are relatively rare, and Flint must have been around a year and a half old when he encountered his first. I was sitting
at my dining room table surrounded by many sheets of data from a research project when suddenly Flint froze. He spun around, looked up, and then dashed toward a window with such fervor that I stopped my work to watch him. A moment later, my own less-sensitive human ears picked up the rumble of distant thunder. Flint was growling and making a low throaty sound much like the sound of thunder. Suddenly, there was a bolt of lightning followed by a burst of thunder to which Flint responded with angry barking.

Many dogs have a fear of thunder, which sounds to them like the ferocious growls of an enormous dog or similar animal that is threatening to attack them and that is far too large to fight off or defend against. The idea that thunder was the sound of dogs growling has made its way into a number of myths. My favorite comes from a tribe of Plains Indians in the Northwestern United States who told stories of the Fire Cat, a puma who is the Sun’s pet. When the Sun is shining, Fire Cat sleeps and absorbs some of the Sun’s fire and heat, but when the Sun disappears because it is obstructed by stor
m clouds, Fire Cat becomes angry and unleashes the fire he has stored in the form of bolts of lightning. If not stopped, he could burn out great forests and plains and destroy everything on Earth, so the Great Spirit created the Thunder Dogs, whose job it is to chase away the Fire Cat before he does too much harm. That is why every lightning bolt is followed by the clamor of growling Thunder Dogs who have come to drive off Fire Cat. It also explains why the noise of the Thunder Dogs’ warning growls can be heard long after there are no more lightning bolts—they are making sure that Fire Cat
has run away to hide and will stay away until the Sun returns.

After another flash of lightning and burst of thunder, Flint barked angrily again. Instead of cowering from the great dangerous dog growling in the sky, like any sensible dog his size might, my courageous little terrier had appointed himself a member of the Thunder Dogs, Guardian of the Earth, Enemy of the Fire
Cat who was raining lightning upon the helpless denizens of this world. I got up and went to the window just as another lightning bolt struck.

Flint barked again and I joined in, shouting, “Get away, Fire Cat! There are too many brave and strong dogs here, and we will bite you if we catch you! Ruff-ruff-ruff! Get him, Flint. Ruff-ruff-ruff!”

Flint barked again at the thunder, and I joined in, shouting, “Get away, Fire Cat!”

Flint looked at me with his eyes alight and his tail straight up in the air and then ratcheted up the level of his barking and growling. Then Joannie came into the room.

“What’s going on here?”

“Flint and I are helping the Thunder Dogs chase away the Fire Cat before his lightning can do anybody any harm,” I replied with a smile.

“You’re teaching him to bark at lightning and thunder?” she asked.

“It’s the sacred duty of any brave and noble dog.”

“Is it the sacred duty of their university professor owner to bark at the sky as well?”

“In times of danger every citizen must contribute what he can.”

Joan looked at us and asked, “I can accept living in a madhouse, but does it have to be such a noisy madhouse?”

“We’ll stop as soon as Fire Cat has gone away,”
I reassured her.

For the rest of his life, Flint would growl at the sound of thunder and bark at the window. I was not as brave as my dog, however, and rather than upset the woman I love, refrained from helping the Thunder Dogs—at least not when Joannie was within earshot.

In addition to coat and courage, terriers need to bark. A functional terrier must bark when the least bit excited or aroused. Because the earliest terriers didn’t bark very much, hunters would attach bells to their collars to help them locate their dogs underground so they could dig them out if they got stuck in a burrow. A lot of terriers choked to death when their collars caught on snags or because the hunters could not hear the bells underground, so hunters bred terriers to bark whenever they were excited.