Born to Bark (35 page)

Wizard modeled many of his behaviors after Flint. When Flint would scratch at the door to be let back into the house, Wiz soon followed suit. When his water bowl was empty, Flint would noisily push it across the floor to attract my attention so that I would fill it. Wiz didn’t quite understand the rationale behind this behavior, but dutifully imitated it, nonetheless. He would push the water bowl over a distance of around 3 feet from its normal place so that it would end up directly in front of the stove or the refrigerator—and then he would carefully push it back to its original spot. Sinc
e he was imitating Flint rather than thinking for himself, it made no difference to him whether the bowl was empty or full, and the wet trails of puddles and splashes on the floor were beginning to annoy Joan. So, using my favorite dictum—that technological solutions are often better and faster than behavioral solutions—I simply replaced the
metal water bowl with a heavy plastic one with a rubber ring at the bottom that a small puppy could not slide across the floor.

Flint seemed to like having the puppy follow him around, and ultimately became quite protective of him. One weekend day, when we were out at the farm, Joan had gone to town to pick up something that would help her plan the new house. I was sitting on the rickety deck that the back door of the “shack” opened out onto. The dogs were wandering around outside, which I allowed since the area was fenced with an orange plastic mesh that was quite adequate to contain two small dogs who never seemed to be that interested in escaping.

The dogs liked to sniff around the outside of the little house, and Flint had shown Wizard where Joanie planted several varieties of mint and some herbs, including lemon thyme, that were quite tasty and that they would gently nibble at. Joannie did not like it when the dogs browsed through her herb garden, but they didn’t eat all that much, and the herbs gave their breath a refreshing scent.

I was not paying much attention to the dogs, since I was reading a technical journal and was quite engrossed in some new data. But when I heard Flint give a small growl, I looked up just in time to see a raccoon drop into the yard from a low branch of the willow tree at the far end of the garden. This masked intruder lightly hit the ground, lowered himself slightly, and in a catlike manner appeared to stalk Wizard. The puppy, who had been lying down, simply turned his head and stared at him, apparently frozen. Flint was several feet away and made a mad dash that placed him directly
between the raccoon and Wizard. Now Flint’s growl had dropped in pitch and become low, sustained, and guttural.

It took several moments for what was happening to register in my brain. Raccoons are omnivorous and eat nuts, berries, insects, and grubs, but nearly one-third of their diet is obtained by hunting birds and mammals. Raccoons regula
rly kill squirrels,
rats, and rabbits. To a raccoon, a 5- or 6-pound puppy could be a target much like a rabbit. This large raccoon, perhaps 20 pounds or more, was clearly equal in weight to Flint and with his fur fluffed out looked larger than my dog. Nonetheless, Flint stood his ground between the predator and the cringing puppy. His growl continued to rumble deeply, broken by bursts of two or three barks, which was his alarm call. “Call the pack! There is trouble here! The barbarians are at the gate!”

When I realized what was happening, I jumped up and grabbed a broom that was leaning against the wall. Th
e word “rabies,” popped into my mind, and I was worried that this raccoon was out in the afternoon rather than his usual dawn or twilight because he was crazed due to rabies. The broom no longer seemed like much of weapon against a potentially infected predator, so I looked around for something else. The raccoon made a noise that sounded much like the hiss of a cat, even above Flint’s barrage of barks and growls. The rifle in the house was too far away to be of any value, so I grabbed an empty bucket and began to beat it with the handle of the broom. It made a great ringing clamor to which
I added by yelling “Back! Back! Back!” in the deepest voice that I could muster.

The noise, my approach, and Flint’s threats convinced the raccoon that there must be safer ways to find dinner. He turned and scampered back to the tree, where he crouched on a low branch, staring at us. I continued to approach, beating on the bucket and shouting, while Flint raced forward to stand beside me, adding a cascade of barks to the din. The raccoon looked down from the branch, and with what looked like an attempt at a dignified retreat crossed to the other side of the tree and jumped off well outside the fenced area. He then trotted off at less than a gallop.

I turned to Flint, “Good job, my gray warrior!”

I bent down to pat my heroic dog, and he was quivering. He looked up at me for a moment, and said, in a bad imitation of
Humphrey Bogart,
“Well, the kid seemed to need some help. He really doesn’t know the ropes yet. He didn’t even bark! I’ve got to work on that. A dog who doesn’t bark can’t defend himself or anybody else.”
Then he gave a brief wag of his tail and trotted over to Wizard, who was still huddling down and had not moved an inch during the entire episode. Flint licked the puppy’s face and moved to his side to give him a poke with his nose. Wiz slowly rose to his feet, and his tongue darted out once or twice to lick the air in front of Flint’s face.

Wiz was so young, yet he clearly had to say something. I was surprised to hear how soft, gentle, and composed his voice turned out to be as he first spoke to Flint,
“Thanks. I owe you one—Boss!”
He then turned to look at me and gave a hesitant wag of the tail,
“You too—Sir!”

Wiz would eventually “talk to me” as much as Flint did, but always in that same soft, composed voice, whereas Flint’s voices changed with the mood of the conversation and the nature of the events happening around us. Conversations with Wiz would seldom contain the level of satire, irony, or argumentation that conversations with Flint did. Wizard acted as if he had only one gear in his transmission: he always worked at the same speed, always had a calm disposition, and always talked in my mind with that same gentle and respectful tone that was born the day the raccoon attempted to invade and t
he heroic Gray Knight, Sir Flint, stood at the battlements to protect his endangered charge.

“Puppies, let’s go get a treat,” I offered, and we all entered the safety of the little shack. I never did like being outdoors in the country. Give me the comfort of the city and God’s good concrete.

Fortunately, for the peacefulness of my house and marriage, Flint never did teach Wizard to bark. Over his entire lifespan, I heard Wiz bark fewer than a dozen times. It is not that he failed
to pay attention to situations that Flint felt warranted barking. When Flint would race to the door to bark at some sound, Wizard would follow along staring in the direction that Flint was looking. If Flint would jump up on the window seat to bark at something he saw through the glass, Wizard would look over his shoulder to check out what had caused his housemate to sound the alarm, but he would never join in.

The surprise was that Joan was sitting on the rocking chair, with Wizard on her lap
.

Occasionally, Flint would look behind to where Wizard was standing. He seemed to be saying,
“Come on, Pup. I’m showing you how it’s done and when it needs to be done, so bark already!”

Apparently, the message just passed over Wizard’s head, since when Flint turned to look back, Wizard would also turn to look back to see what Flint was now looking at. The idea of barking never seemed to occur to him.

Wiz, however, did accomplish something without either Flint’s or my instruction. One evening I returned home to find Joan lying on the sofa, asleep. Resting on the crook of her arm was Wizard. I smiled and quietly went into the kitchen to begin to cook dinner without waking her.

Later on, when we were sitting and eating, I said to her, “I thought that dogs weren’t allowed on the furniture when you were using it.”

“They certainly are not,” she insisted.

“When I came in tonight, Wiz was sleeping next to you on the sofa.”

She looked down somewhat sheepishly and explained it away saying, “He must have sneaked up there after I was already asleep.”

A month or so later I came home to find Karen, Joan’s daughter, sitting on the sofa petting Flint, who was resting his head in her lap. Joan and Kari were engaged in some kind of mother-daughter conversation that seemed to involve knitting or sewing. The surprise was that Joan was sitting on the rocking chair with Wizard on her lap.

I didn’t want to disturb this lovely scene, so I simply greeted them both and offered to open a bottle of wine. Wiz seemed to be having the desired calming effect on the woman I loved.

Now I had two dogs to train and two dogs to compete with in obedience trials. The early part of Wizard’s training was easy, since he had learned most of his basic commands from simply modeling his
behavior after Flint’s. When he was only about 14 months of age, I put him into his first real obedience competition, and that weekend he earned two qualifying scores. A month later, in another competition, Wiz earned a final qualifying score and his Companion Dog (CD) degree. Working with Flint and my continuing study of dog behavior and training techniques clearly helped speed Wizard’s learning.

Meanwhile, I was training Flint for his next degree in
Open Competition
, which leads to a more advanced title, something like a high school degree for dogs. Training at this level is much more exciting because the dog must work completely off leash and he has a variety of interesting tasks to perform, such as retrieving and jumping a high jump and a broad jump. You can teach a dog to jump in a number of ways, but the easiest involves showing him another dog jumping and then encouraging him to join in. In the same way that Wiz w
as modeling his behavior after Flint, Flint needed someone to model his behavior after. Since Flint focused his attention on me, I had to become the model.

We started with a high jump, which is just a wooden barrier that the dog has to vault over. Initially the jump that I asked him to make wasn’t very high, about 4 inches or so. I put Flint on leash, gave a happy “Flint, let’s go!” and ran to the jump. As we reached it, I gave the command “Flint, jump!” and I made an exaggerated jump over the low barrier with Flint jumping right beside me. I then raised jump and we repeated our side-by-side jump, now without the leash. This process continued until ultimately Flint and I were simultaneously going over the jump set somewhat higher than Flint’
s shoulder height.

Flint liked this game and was soon answering my command to jump with a single happy bark, followed by a charge forward toward the jump. Next I had Flint sit facing the jump while I went to the other side. I now called “Flint, jump!” and tapped the barrier with my hand. It did not take a second try. My gray dog answered with that happy bark and leapt over the high jump and then proceeded to circle me several times in excitement.

Another type of jump is the broad jump, which is made up of a series of horizontally arranged boards low in height but covering a wide area—twice the dog’s height at the shoulder—that he must leap over. The basic training procedure was the same, with me modeling the behavior and going over the jump with Flint. The big difference was that just after we reached his full jumping length and I went over it with him, I tripped and fell in such a way that the boards scattered noisily on either side of me causing Flint to yelp in surprise and leap back from the site of the accident. He stood
there staring at the white boards and grumbling to himself while I painfully picked myself up and rearranged the jump to Flint’s jumping length and hobbled back to the starting place.