Chaser (17 page)

The next thing Wayne and I knew, the big ewe charged out of the little flock straight for my puppy!

Chaser darted out of her path but wasn't quite quick enough. The ewe butted Chaser on the hindquarters and rolled her onto her side.

Wayne and I both rushed up to get between Chaser and the ewe. Chaser was already fifteen feet away, in no danger. And in no apparent distress, either. She didn't have her tail down between her legs in fear or anxiety. That was a relief to see, and I told her she was a good girl and had done well. But Wayne and I quickly took her out of the pen, leaving the sheep almost exactly where they were when we'd entered it a few short minutes before.

Although Chaser seemed her normal self, I didn't want being butted and rolled down onto the ground by the sheep to be her last experience of this visit to Wayne's. I got a Frisbee out of the pickup and we played with it for a few minutes. While we did that I asked Wayne, “Is this experience going to ruin her for working sheep?”

“That's unlikely, Doc. She's happy as a clam now. She didn't get her confidence hurt serious.”

“What's the next step, besides waiting till she's older?”

“Well, you do gotta wait until she's at least a year old, probably. And then we can put her in the pen with some sheep and one of my experienced dogs. I'll work my dog on the sheep and Chaser can watch and learn, and she'll probably just naturally start imitating what my dog does.”

“That sounds great, Wayne. Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Doc.”

“I was too impatient,” I said.

“Don't worry yourself none about that, Doc. Chaser'll be fine,” Wayne said. He grinned at me and added, “You just carry her on home and knock yourself out teaching her more words.”

Driving home with Chaser curled up on the passenger seat, I couldn't stop blaming myself for my impatience. But I was happy about how Chaser had behaved all the way through. There was no doubt that she had the instinct and desire to work sheep, and the little scuffle with the ornery ewe hadn't made her downcast or frightened. I also chuckled to myself over Wayne's reactions. He wasn't surprised by Chaser's learning. He knew Border collies were plenty smart. But behind the wisecracks about my teaching, I knew he was happy to see what she could do and would be eager to hear about her progress.

I was sure Wayne was right that Chaser could learn a thousand words. I hoped he was also right about her being able to herd sheep when she was a little older.

9

T
EN-MONTH-OLD CHASER
was restless. She brought Merlin, a little wizard doll, over beside my chair and shook it, then bowed her front legs and wagged her tail, eager for play.

“No, Chaser. Not now, girl,” I said. It was a Sunday evening in late February and Sally and I were just starting to watch the PBS series
Nature
, one of our favorites. Tonight's documentary was entitled “Snowflake: The White Gorilla.” I was immediately caught up in the story of history's only known albino gorilla, who was born in Equatorial Guinea, captured by villagers because of his white fur and pink skin (the result of inheriting a recessive gene for albinism from both parents), and then, thanks to the intervention of a Spanish primatologist, taken to live in the Barcelona Zoo.

Fifteen minutes later I saw Chaser out of the corner of my eye and turned to look at her. She stood behind seven of her toys: Merlin, Uncle Fuzz (a stuffed monkey), Choo Choo (a rubber squeak toy in the shape of a railroad locomotive), Cinderella (a fuzzy pink poodle in a blue ballerina tutu), ABC (a cloth cube with those letters on its faces), Stubborn (a stuffed mule), and Santa Claus.

She'd learned some of their names early on and others only recently. At this point she knew more than three hundred objects by their proper noun names, and we were continuing to build her vocabulary by one to two new object names a day. The formal tests of long-term memory I did every month now included a hundred objects in five 20-of-20 trials, where Chaser had to retrieve each of twenty objects by name when they were all out of sight in another room.

Chaser had put the toys on the floor between us like sheep gathered together between a working Border collie and a farmer.

“No, Chaser,” I said.

“No” had long since lost any negative emotional quality for Chaser. Depending on the tone of voice in which someone said it, the word meant either “Stop what you are doing,” “Not now,” or “Try something else.” When we played finding games, I used “no” the same way I would “cold” or “getting colder”—“yes” meant “hot” or “getting warmer”—in playing a finding game with a child. When Chaser heard “yes” during these games she knew she was looking in the right area or heading in the right direction to find the hidden object. When she heard “no” she knew she had to look somewhere else.

Chaser understood the current “no” correctly as “not now.” That only spurred her determination to inveigle me into playing with her. When I looked over at her again, the pile of toys between us was twice as big. She had found seven or eight more of them in the living room, the bedroom, and the loft area upstairs. I recognized Mickey Mouse (there was no mistaking the Walt Disney character doll), Hobby Horse (a stuffed white horse with a blue mane and tail and with legs that ended in a rocking chair–like base), and Nosey, who would have been named Bullwinkle except that Chaser already had a slightly different Bullwinkle the Moose stuffed animal. I couldn't recall the names of the others, but I could have found out if I'd been willing to get out of my chair to go read the names I'd written on them in permanent black marker. Chaser stood behind the toys and looked from them to me while wagging her tail solicitously at medium tempo.

“No,” I said. “Be patient, sugar.”

“As soon as this program is over, we're going to have to play the cleanup game,” Sally said with a smile.

We both turned our attention back to the
Nature
episode, which was using Snowflake's almost forty years in the Barcelona Zoo, from 1967 to 2003, to chart the development of scientific knowledge of gorillas. During that period, the Barcelona Zoo provided the young Snowflake with a gorilla companion of the same age and later gave him an opportunity to mate and help raise a gorilla family (he had twenty-one children, none of them albinos, with different mothers). The zoo also strove to upgrade Snowflake's first bare enclosure into a habitat that resembled his and his gorilla companions' natural environment. These were milestones not just for him, but also for the care of gorillas in zoos around the world.

The next time I glanced in Chaser's direction, she was lying behind the toys, nose pointed straight to them and me in classic Border collie fashion. She raised her head hopefully as soon as I looked at her.

“No, Chaser, not now. Later,” I said.

Ten minutes after that there was a soft squeak. Sally and I turned our heads and saw that Chaser had Choo Choo in her mouth. She squeaked it again to encourage one of us to play with her.

“No, Chaser,” I said more firmly. “Time out.”

Chaser knew “time out” was serious, and she lay back down behind the toys she had assembled. A few minutes later she padded upstairs, and I figured she was looking for more toys to add to the flock on the living room floor. But I kept my eyes on the television. The next thing I knew a blue racquetball bounced down the steps, caromed off the inside of the front door, and wound up in the small trash can next to Sally's desk.

Sally and I both looked up at that. Chaser stood at the top of the stairs looking down at us, her tail wagging rapidly. The documentary still had a few minutes to go, and I let out a sigh of exasperation.

“She can get her own ball, Pill,” Sally said. “Chaser, come get Blue.”

That was Sally's characteristic reaction whenever Chaser knocked a ball under the furniture, had it bounce into a trash can, or otherwise got a toy snagged somewhere. If she really thought Chaser couldn't reach it, Sally helped her. But otherwise she encouraged Chaser to get it for herself—“You can do it”—and waited her out. I did the same, but I was much less patient, and Chaser counted on that.

“She's just trying to lure you into playing with her, John. Let her get it for herself,” Sally always said. We sometimes jokingly called Chaser a con artist, but she never had a hidden motive. Her behavior was always an invitation to play.

My impatience got the better of me. I retrieved the racquetball, beloved by Chaser for its super bounciness and perfect size for catching in her mouth, and went to the foot of the stairs and tossed it up to her.

Walking back to my chair in front of the television, I heard the ball bouncing down the steps again.

“Chaser, what in the heck are you doing?” I said. “Can't you hold on to your ball?”

This time the ball caromed back and forth between the bottom of the stairs and the front door before coming to rest in between them. I looked up at Chaser, who immediately wagged her tail vigorously and craned her neck to look at me. With another sigh I walked back over to the stairs, picked up the ball, and tossed it up to her again.

“Hold on to it this time,” I said.

She immediately dropped the ball and it bounced down the steps to me. I caught it on one of its bounces and looked up. Chaser wagged her tail triumphantly—it is amazing how many different shades of meaning a tail wag can convey—and I found myself chuckling.

“This is a new game, is it?” I asked. I tossed her the ball, and she caught it in her mouth. Then she held it in her mouth, grinning on either side of it. I waited a few seconds, but she was teasing me now and I knew it. “Well, if you're not gonna throw it,” I said, and turned from the stairs to the living room.

Chaser instantly dropped the ball onto the steps and bowed her forelegs in anticipation of my catching it. I missed the scenes of the documentary on Snowflake's final years. But I was witnessing a wonder of nature in my own house: my dog's invention of a game for us to play. Motivated by boredom and restlessness, which studies show are fertile conditions for creativity in human beings, Chaser had imagined the game entirely on her own, so far as I have ever been able to figure out. I could identify no behavior on my part that prepared her to stumble onto the idea of playing with a racquetball like this. But she knew how bouncy the racquetball was and how she liked to catch it on the bounce, and in the preceding weeks and months she apparently had observed balls rolling down those steps and bouncing off them by accident.

Chaser's brainchild became her favorite indoor game, and she has never tired of it. She enjoys it as much on the steps of Debbie, Jay, and Aidan's house in Brooklyn as she does at home in Spartanburg. Early on she varied the play in two main ways. Instead of dropping the ball onto the steps, she sometimes barely nosed it into a roll over the top step. Either way, the bounce of the ball off the steps was unpredictable, sometimes high and sometimes low. Her bright eyes, pricked-up ears, and wagging tail showed that my bending, turning, and twisting in one direction or another to catch the ball delighted her. She also sometimes zoomed down the stairs as soon as I caught the ball—at first I thought she was finished with the game—so that I could go to the top of the stairs and drop the ball down to her. That added to the fun because it gave her chances to catch the ball on its unpredictable bounces down the steps. She caught the ball, raced up the stairs to give it to me, and raced back down to catch it again several times before coming up more deliberately to change places again. This went on for as long as I cared to indulge her, sometimes with her initiating a change of roles and sometimes with me doing so.

All dogs show remarkable creativity in trying to engage our attention and get us to interact with them. This trait must go all the way back to dogs' first finding a place beside a human fire. This can be problematic for dog owners who aren't prepared for their dogs' drive to interact with people. As child psychologists and expert dog trainers alike know, negative attention is better than no attention, and dogs, like children, will be conditioned to misbehave if that is what most makes people take notice and interact with them, even if the interaction is far from positive. The only lasting cure for that, in the case of a child or a dog, is to react neutrally to misbehavior and strongly reinforce positive behavior.

Misbehavior wasn't on my mind as I marveled at Chaser's invention of a new game. Instead I was thinking of the scenes of Snowflake that Sally and I had just watched. As a highly social animal, Snowflake had a biological need for companionship. Deprived of that in the wild (his albinism would probably have meant a short life there, because his eyes' extreme sensitivity to light affected his coordination and ability to forage for food), Snowflake found a first friend in the primatologist who saved his life. After that the keepers at the Barcelona Zoo seemed always to have treated him with affectionate care, and finally he enjoyed good relationships with other gorillas.

Dogs' social nature is equally strong, but there is a difference. For Snowflake, human companionship could never fully substitute for close interaction with other gorillas. But domestic dogs have evolved to enjoy a unique interspecies social relationship with people. For Chaser, living with people isn't a poor substitute for companionship with other dogs. Being in harmony with a human family is a true fulfillment for her, as it is for pet, working, and service dogs everywhere.

As a Border collie, Chaser's daily requirements for attention and activity are at the high end of the spectrum. Sometimes this can be a little exasperating. Hungry for playful interaction, Chaser will sometimes nose a newspaper right out of Sally's or my hands. Whatever we are doing, she wants to be involved.

But Sally and I have welcomed that behavior for its own sake. And I have eagerly recruited Chaser's immense energy and need for activity with people to propel her language learning. With every passing day, Chaser has demonstrated to me how dogs' social intelligence enables them to learn to do new things with and for people.