My Life in Dog Years (8 page)

He leaped from the vent in one motion, over my lap, through the car window and into the service window. With a small scrabble of his short back legs, he hung for a moment on the edge, and then he was inside. I heard some yelling, saw people running and jumped from the car and ran inside, afraid of what I’d find.

People were standing as if in a tableau: the boy in his Dairy Queen hat and customers
staring at Quincy. He had jumped from the window to the counter and was happily licking a sundae sitting next to the cash register.

The mother lode, I thought. From the Alaskan bush to a Dairy Queen in Minnesota— what a great span of time and luck he had.

His greatest moment was yet to come and it was one which would ensure a life of joy and leisure as long as he walked the earth.

We lived on the edge of the northern bush and were frequently visited by natives of that wilderness. Porcupines, skunks, wolves, foxes, bear, weasels—all came to visit, and many exacted tribute. The skunks, foxes and weasels made it virtually impossible to raise chickens and we stopped trying. We had four gardens and every year the raccoons and bears would wreak havoc with the corn. The gardens were critical to us as a food source since we had very little income, so we had arranged a precarious truce with our wild
neighbors. As long as the animals didn’t do too much damage we could live with their raids. I planted three times the corn we needed, twice the potatoes and four times the tomatoes, and any surplus the animals didn’t get we gave to friends. (One year this process resulted in our having nearly fourteen hundred
pounds
of tomatoes.)

But there were rogues, some that took too much, some that were violent. The worst of these were the bears. Most of them were mellow, some less so, and when they became too aggressive I would shoot a high-powered rifle near them and scare them off. This worked for a long time but some of them became accustomed to the crack of the rifle and didn’t run; they would ignore yelling or banging of pans, but even then we were hesitant to go to the next phase—destroying the bear. By law, we were allowed to if they destroyed property or threatened us, but I had
a rule that if they didn’t actually attack one of the sled dogs—frequently they ate with the dogs and didn’t bother them—or a person I would not shoot them. Indeed, in all my years of running dogs I had to shoot only one bear.

But one particular bear was becoming a problem. It had been in the garden several times and although it ran when I fired warning shots it seemed to hesitate. I decided it would be good to watch it.

But when the problem bear came back I wasn’t there. I was in the kitchen and my wife was working in the garden. Quincy, as always, was by her side and she was on her hands and knees weeding when she heard a strange
whoofing
sound nearby and looked up to see the problem bear coming at her. There was no warning, no stance, no threat— it was down and moving toward her.

We had procedures. Do not make eye contact,
get up, back away, and she did all these things. They did not work. It kept coming and was clearly going to attack, was attacking, when Quincy went for the bear like a fur-covered bullet.

It was a draw as to who was more astonished, the bear or my wife. Quincy launched himself from the ground, four-inch legs pumping, and caught the bear in the center of its chest. He grabbed a mouthful of fur and hung on, clinging like a burr. Surprised, the bear stopped and tried to bite at Quincy but the dog was in too close. The bear started scraping with its front paws and my wife chose that moment to use all the good luck from the rest of her life. She rushed in, grabbed Quincy, pulled him off the bear and ran for the house. For some reason—shock, perhaps—the bear did not follow her, and Quincy, miraculously, was not injured. Later, at the vet’s, we couldn’t find a scratch on him, nor any internal injuries.

Quincy just passed on last year at the ripe old age (he was well on when we got him in Alaska) of eighteen or twenty years, as near as the doctor could figure. At the end he was blind and close to deaf but he could still smell, and to his last days he would stick his nose to the vent and tell us when we were coming up on the Dairy Queen, and he still would have jumped through the window if he had gotten a chance.

He should have been named White Fang.

He sits now as I write this, watching me, waiting, his brown eyes soft but alert, full of love but without nonsense, his black-and-white coat shining in the New Mexico sun streaming through the window. He is old now—I think eighteen or twenty—and he is staid except when he feels like playing and he
is full of a gentle honor that I will never come close to achieving.

Josh is the quintessential Border collie. In many circles that would be all that needed to be said—he has all the traits of Border collies. He is loving, thoughtful, wonderfully intelligent—frighteningly so at times—and completely and totally devoted to the person he views as his master.

And yet…

Somehow, in some way he is different. Perhaps that is true of all Border collies, that they really
are
different, that they key in to the person they are with, and since all people are different all Border collies are different. I recently gave a Border collie pup to a friend who lives in a city—contrary to popular belief, they do not need to run all the time—and the dog (she named him Maddux after the incredible pitcher for the Braves) has keyed in to her life to the point where he
has
to help
her carry her mail,
has
to help her open envelopes,
has
to have coffee and a bagel each morning with her,
has
to be with her wherever she is in the house,
has
to greet people at the door. He monitors all the street activity and reports anything he thinks is odd and protects her from the evil monster that lives in the vacuum cleaner—and he’s only a pup.

But there is more with Josh.

He is … real. No, more than that, he is a person. I do not think in my heart that he is a dog. When I am riding with him in my truck and he sits next to me looking out the window I can speak to him, say, “Look at that nice lawn,” or “They have a sale on fence at the lumberyard,” and he will look and sometimes (I swear) turn back to me and nod.

Once while driving to get a submarine sandwich I took my baseball cap off at a stoplight and jokingly put it on Josh with the bill backward and put a pair of sunglasses on him (I know—people shouldn’t dress dogs
but it was more a friend fooling around with a friend) and told him, “You look cool, man.”

He looked at me and put his right front leg up on the ledge of the open window and kept the cap and glasses on (though he could have shaken them off easily) and really
did
look cool, caught in the moment, playacting with me, and when we pulled up to the drive-through window at the sub shop I said, “My friend and I would like a turkey sub.” Josh looked over, through his shades, nodded and went back to looking out the window.

There are major stages that affect our lives. Enlisting in the army, marriage, success or failure at our careers—leaps forward or backward. Having Josh has had such an effect on me. He has, in wonderful ways, shaken my belief structures to the core and brought me to a level of understanding of other species that has been so profound it will last the rest of my life. Along with Cookie, Josh has changed me forever.

He came to me because he was a “naughty” dog. The woman who owned him had some pet ducks and Josh herded them—as Border collies are wont to do—until he wore them out and one of them died. I had seen Josh earlier and thought he was a nice dog and jokingly said, “If you ever want to get rid of him let me know.”

And so he arrived one day. He jumped out of the car, moved into the house and started— as near as I could figure it—to study me.

It was very disconcerting at first. I would catch him at odd times, at all times, watching me, watching every move, studying everything I did—or said.

He once saw me hurry to get to a phone because I was expecting an important call and after that wherever he was when the phone rang he would run to it and wait until it was answered.

He saw me, just once, put on a Stetson, go
outside to saddle my mare and head out to ride fence. The next time I put the Stetson on he ran to the front door, slammed open the screen, loped to the corral, cut my mare away from the other horses and brought her to the gate, holding her there until I came to saddle her.

Once every nine days we get the flow of water in the communal irrigation ditch. The process is rather involved. I must walk to the head of the ditch and open the valve, then move ahead of the water as it pours down the ditch and clean out brush and debris with a rake. When the water gets to the smaller ditches that run to the apple trees or the pecans, these side ditches must be fully cleared of leaves and grass before the water can run on to the next side ditch, and so on for seven side ditches.

Josh accompanied me the first time and watched what I did. Just once. The next time I
went he actually tried to help open the valve with his teeth—cranking the steel-handled wheel—and when the water started he ran frantically ahead of it, scrabbling with his feet and claws to clean out the brush and junk. He went to each side ditch, one after the other, to clear it out carefully and make certain the water was running correctly, then on to the next ditch. I stood leaning on the rake, my mouth hanging open. Josh had actually figured it out quicker than I had the first time. And when the last ditch was running and too much water was coming—flooding out over the end—Josh studied the situation for a moment, then dug a cross ditch that made the water circle back into the ditch.

So many similar things happened that I thought maybe he was some kind of odd case—not normal even for a Border collie. When we had people to the house he would try to get them all in one room, gently pushing them into a group with his shoulder—it
would take him thirty minutes to move a small child from one room to another—and I thought it might be some perversion of the herding instinct. But it wasn’t that so much as it was the fact that he simply wanted to see them all, watch over them. When somebody went to the kitchen or the bathroom he would accompany them if possible and watch over them until they came back, and then when it was time to leave he would escort each of them to their car, wait until they were gone and then escort the next one. He was, I believe now, merely being polite— trying to be a good host. Understand that I’ve had hundreds of dogs and loved them and, I hope, been loved by them, and I’ve been in God knows how many different kinds of situations with them, but I had never, ever seen anything like Josh. I half expected him to come out of the kitchen with a tray saying, “Canapés, anyone?”

I thought I should learn if he really was
unique and so one summer four years ago I went to the international Border collie field trials in Sheridan, Wyoming.

It was absolutely astonishing. Had I not seen it myself, had somebody written of it in a book, as I am trying to do now, I do not think I would have believed it.

A man would stand in one place and send a dog out half a mile to where some sheep stood, and following whistles, and sometimes gestures, the dog would bring the sheep back through gates, around in a circle by the man, then into a small holding pen—all without making a sound and without ever biting (called “gripping”) or touching a sheep, using only eye contact and body language. That was incredible enough, but another thing was in some ways more incredible, and that was the behavior of the dogs themselves.

I have been to sled dog races where there were hundreds of dogs and if two or three of
them got loose—which inevitably happened— there would be an uproar—barking and snarling and most often fights or attempted fights. The dogs had to be kept tethered and watched closely.

All the collies were loose. There were hundreds of them, and I never saw a leash or a pen. Nor did I ever see a fight or even hear a bark. It was a hot summer day and a large stock tank had been brought in and filled with water. As each dog finished his work he (or she) would go to the tank, jump in, submerge until only eyes and nose showed, and stay that way for a few minutes, until he had cooled down. Then he would jump out and catch up with his master, who was by then a hundred yards off drinking lemonade and talking with other dog owners, and he would stop and sit by his owner’s leg and look up and listen to the conversation.

And they do listen. All the time. To
all
talk.
Josh has come to know dozens of individual words. To name just a few:
horse, mare, cow, truck, car, walk, run, bike, Dairy Queen
(also the initials
DQ), deer, cat, dog, sub sandwich, turkey sandwich, hamburger, pancake
(he
loves
blueberry pancakes),
gun
(he hates guns),
thunder
(the only thing I’ve ever seen truly terrify him—he comes to sit in my lap when it thunders),
fence, elk, moose, bear, blabber
(a kind of candy I sometimes share with him),
telephone, bug
(he sometimes studies bugs as they crawl along the ground—never bothers them, just walks along studying them),
baby, snake
(he respects rattlers but doesn’t fear them),
rabbit, flyswatter
(he leaves the room if you say the word—I do not know why), and several more Anglo-Saxon expressions he’s heard me use when required, such as
Get the
________
horse off my
_______
leg before I
_______
bleed to
__________
death!