Born to Bark (26 page)

A few days later I asked Joan if she would like to marry me. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me as her eyes filled
with tears. “I never thought that you would ask me,” she said. “I would love to marry you, but there is one condition: I don’t want Flint to be part of the ceremony in any way!”

“Oh,” I said, “you must have seen the note from the theological seminary that I had enrolled him in. I was planning on having him read us our vows!”

Her pretty eyes twinkled and she hugged me again. “If he is not already ordained as a minister, then he is not any part of the ceremony!”

The following August we were married. Joan made her own wedding dress and looked lovely. Our far-flung families converged on the city, and a group of our friends gathered for the event. Peter arranged for a bagpiper to play as Joan and I entered the hall. I did momentarily wonder to myself how Flint would have reacted to the sound of bagpipes, but after that we just had a good and fun party.

I actually made two promises to Joan when I asked her to marry me. In addition to agreeing that Flint would not be part of our marriage ceremony, I promised her that as soon as I could pay off the mortgage on my little house in the city I would find her a tiny bit of farmland within easy driving distance. Coming from the prairies, she wanted her own bit of land with a garden where she could plant flowers and grow vegetables. If things went well, she also hoped someday to have a house large enough so that we could have visitors stay over—particularly her children and the grandchi
ldren she was longing for.

Less than a year later, Joan’s brother-in-law, Cameron, managed to find a small piece of farmland that he thought might work for us. A bit more than an hour’s drive away from the city, the 5 acres were being offered at a very low price because the property had been on the market for a long time in an area that was not very prosperous then. The owners wanted to get rid of it and accepted the low bid that I could afford. In addition to the land, there was a small shack of a house heated only by a
woodstove in the main room, although electricity and indoor plumbing made it livable. There was also a structure that was supposed to be a barn—an empty shell of a building that was propped up on the east side while the wind kept it up on the west side. Joannie was ecstatic and set about clearing overgrown sections and planting her flowers and vegetables and trying to save some fruit trees that were already growing there.

We spent most of our weekends and a good chunk of the summer out on the farm. I set up a little office space and began to work on my next book, for which the quiet of the farm was conducive. In between bouts of writing, I would take Flint out into the field and work on obedience exercises with him. Come the fall there would be a lot of pressure from members of the club for me to put him into competition. Joan seldom came into the house during daylight hours unless the weather was too inclement to garden. The little shack was rather ramshackle, and bits and pieces occasionally seeme
d spontaneously to self-destruct, but Joan soon had constructed a trellis with beautiful roses over the door. The windows of the house were too warped to open and close easily (or sometimes at all), but when you looked out of any one of them you would see the pleasant array of flowers and shrubs that she had planted and nurtured.

Out at the farm Flint showed his prowess as a hunter. As with most farms, lots of vermin were around: rats, mice, moles, rabbits, opossums, skunks, and raccoons. All seemed intent on doing some form of damage. Some raided Joan’s little vegetable patch, some chewed on the trees, tore at the siding on the walls, tore holes in the roof, or worked their way into the house and cupboards and ate their way into boxes of crackers and other foodstuffs. It was a real problem trying to keep things safe from these pests.

Soon after moving in, however, we began to find dead rats and mice in corners of the house or near Joan’s garden. At first Joan was upset because she thought that I must have set out poison, but I assured her that I would never do that because it could hurt Flint. Then one afternoon, as I stopped work and stepped outside with Flint to look for Joan, an opossum dashed across the grass, heading for a nearby tree with a carrot from Joan’s garden in his mouth. Flint, who had been walking beside me, immediately streaked forward, grabbed the opossum by the neck, and swung the animal i
n a violent snapping motion. The result was instantaneous death for the vegetable thief.

Once again the marvels of genetics brought me to a halt. Suddenly the source of the dead rodents that we had been finding became clear. My dog—who had lived in the city all his life and had never been exposed to the situations for which terriers had originally been bred—followed his instincts the moment he was in the appropriate environment. Flint had become a formidable vermin hunter. I marveled at the dead opossum, which has more teeth than any other land mammal and can be ferocious when cornered—they don’t always play possum. Compared to my little dog, it certainly looked large
and dangerous.

Flint was happily prancing around and his proud voice boasted,
“Call me Bwana, the great hunter! I am stalker and killer of all things with fur that enter my domain.”
Then he simply left the site of his adventure, not even looking back at the body of his victim.

When I told Joan about it, she smiled and replied, “Well, if that is true, then perhaps he’s not completely useless.” She then got a faraway look in her eyes and continued, “I wonder how he would be in the city.”

We had a recurring problem with mice in our little old house in town. Due either to its age or to the fact that it had been put together quickly from a mail order catalog, it was never quite as well sealed as it should be, especially around the basement.
Every year, as the autumn rains began to fall and the weather started to turn cold, mice got inside. They started in the basement, eventually reaching the kitchen where they would chew at food containers and leave their droppings. Mice had also damaged some of Joan’s favorite books and torn holes in some bolts of cloth that she’d stored in our basement. It was an unpleasant situation, but neither of us was comfortable using poison, and traps were inefficient, so it had seemed that we had to put up with them.

When we returned to the city, Flint had the opportunity to shine. Joannie began to leave the basement door ajar and some of the floor-level cupboard doors open to allow him to find and catch the mice. Flint was great. He hunted rodents the way that terriers were bred to do and with a degree of patience and dedication that would make cat owners envious. He was a fabulous biological mousetrap.

Joan was quite pleased with Flint’s proficiency. Typically, when he would kill a mouse he would leave it on the floor where it fell just as he had done for the larger vermin out at the farm. Joan gladly disposed of the small carcasses and would gratefully praise Flint for his efforts, giving him a friendly pat and sometimes even a treat. She seemed to be warming toward my little dog, and I had high hopes that the cold war between them had ended.

Perhaps Flint saw this as his opportunity to make amends with Joan, that other human that he lived with, or perhaps he just reverted to being a terrier with a sense of humor. In any event, one morning Flint decided to make a peace offering to Joan. It was quite early, and Joan had awakened in bed to the gentle pressure of Flint’s front paws resting on her. She looked down at him only to find that he had deposited on her chest a mouse—still warm but quite dead. I fear that the gift was not accepted in the tender and accommodating spirit with which it was offered. She jumped up with a startle
d shriek and Flint began
to dance around happily. He knew that he had done something truly great and grand, since it was causing such a commotion on her side of the bed and such convulsive laughter on mine.

One morning Flint decided to make a peace offering to Joan
.

Joannie was upset. “You put him up to this, didn’t you?”

I protested, “Of course not. Flint was just trying to please you, not insult you.” But Joan glanced back and forth
suspiciously between us. Even as I tried to regain my composure and look innocent and reassuring to my wife, I could hear Flint’s voice in m
y head,
“My motto is, if two wrongs don’t make a right, then try three!”

For the next several days, Joan would wake
up in the mornings and automatically sweep her hand down over the covers to make sure that Flint had not deposited any more “gifts” for her.

Although Flint’s hunting instincts were useful, there was one instance in which his behavior could have gone wrong. I had taken Flint to work with me, as I often did, and since I had nothing scheduled for the next hour or so and it was close to lunchtime, I decided to take him for a short walk around the campus.

The university was in an expansion phase, with new buildings being erected and new wings added to existing buildings. Older structures were being torn down, most of them “temporary” wooden buildings that had been built as barracks and office spaces for the military personnel stationed
on campus during World War II. When the war ended and many returning soldiers accepted the government’s offer to pay for their university education, there had been no space in the existing buildings for the sudden surge of returning veterans who were becoming students. As a result those temporary buildings were adapted for use as classrooms, offices, and labs. After a while these old, weathered wooden structures simply came to be accepted as normal campus facilities. Some new departments had been born and housed in these old structures for all the years that they had been functioning.

Several wooden barracks were located behind the education building and now, some 40 years after the war’s end, were finally being demolished to allow the construction of a new wing. The wooden edifices disappeared one at a time. Each one would be knocked down, the debris cleared, and then the next one razed. This orderly work pattern made activity predictable, and on sunny days education students would sit outside their building and watch the demolition of these old structures while eating lunch or sipping coffee. Flint and I wandered in the direction of the building scheduled to
be pulled down that afternoon.

Two large bulldozers were parked next to the doomed building. I’d taken Flint to this area to allow him some sport with the large population of mice, rats, rabbits, and squirrels. The university sits out on a peninsula and is completely surrounded
by woods that continue down to the shoreline. A lot of wildlife call this area home. Three main groups of predators hunt the small animals. The largest group is the predatory birds: hawks, owls, and eagles. There are also a small number of coyotes, which are seldom seen except after sundown when much of the human population has gone home. There are a number of cats, too, both domestic (which are allowed to roam by owners living in nearby campus residences) and feral (which live and breed in hidden spaces, under older structures, or anywhere else that they can find). Like the coyote
s, feral cats are seldom seen unless they are out hunting. We could now add to these groups one gray Cairn terrier who got to explore the terrain at the end of a 25-foot extendable leash.