My Life in Dog Years (9 page)

And he knows them out of context. I have
often been having a conversation on the phone about, say, the weather, and inserted a word: “I think it’s going to be cow a nice day,” with no emphasis on the word at all. Wherever he is in the house he will rise, even if sleeping, and come in and look at me or wait by the door. More, he listens to everybody all the time. If several people are in a conversation and just one of them says a word—again, just in a normal tone—Josh will come in and look up and wait. It can be very disconcerting if you’re having a conversation in which you might use one of the words a lot. I had a sick horse and called the vet and used the word
horse
several times in the conversation, and each time Josh went to the door and tried to get out, finally coming back to me and biting me on the leg to get my attention, gently at first and then harder when that didn’t work and finally— he’s learned this is particularly effective—grabbing
my kneecap and exerting enough pressure to make me utter a profanity. Usually I react then and do what he wants.

He has wonderful limits. He will do anything I ask and many things I tell him to do, unless he thinks they are too stupid or repetitive or boring. He will retrieve, for instance, and do it with great élan, leaping to fetch things thrown in water, over land, in brush, far away or near—but only five times. If you throw the ball the sixth time he will get it, look at you, then leave with the ball in his mouth and never bring it back. He hides it. If you want to play again the next day you must buy another ball. I was recently moving some old hay bales and when I lifted one that had been near the back corner of the storage area, I found eleven tennis balls and four Superballs and a professional retriever’s canvas dummy bird. Josh had hidden them all when he thought the game had become too stupid.

Josh is wonderfully facile and will humor me and learn dog tricks—up to a point. I taught him to sit up and hold a cookie on his nose until I commanded him to flip it in the air and catch it. He loves cookies and he learned the trick in less than ten minutes. And he did it five times. The sixth time, he looked at me over the cookie on his nose as if I was completely insane, then lowered his nose, let the cookie drop on the floor and walked away, and we don’t do the cookie trick anymore. Not unless I want to sit up on
my
hind end and put the cookie on
my
nose and flip
my
head up and catch the cookie, we don’t.

Living with Josh is a never-ending lesson in how we can never truly catch up with somebody who is smarter than we are. One day I was moving some sacks of feed and as I got down to the last sack I saw a rat run in back of it and hide. There was nowhere for it to go and Josh was there so I looked at
him and grabbed the bag and told him, “Get ready—get ready now. There’s something there. Are you ready? Ready?” until he was excited enough to jump out of his skin, and then I moved the sack and the rat made its break. Josh grabbed it without hesitation but didn’t kill it. Holding it in his mouth, he looked up at me in total disgust as if to say, “You fool—I’ve got a
rat
in my mouth,” then turned sideways and spit it out—he distinctly made the sound
ptui
as he did it—and then walked away from me.

It wasn’t finished either. The next morning in my boot there was a dead gopher. It had been dead for some time and smelled as rotten as old, long-dead gophers dragged off the highway can smell, and I shook it out in the trash and thought, Fine, message received.

I discovered one day by accident that Josh is wonderfully, wildly ticklish on his ribs and sometimes when he seems to be getting too
serious about things—say two or three dozen times a day—I will grab him and flip him on his back and tickle his ribs while he woof-laughs and wiggles and air-snaps his fangs, always just missing my hands and arms. It’s a ritual we have both come to love and sometimes when he is feeling a bit glum he will come up to me and flop over and invite me to tickle him.

Life is not always up and once I had about a three-day run of luck that was all bad and I never smiled. Some complete jerk shot a new Border collie pup I had gotten for Josh to train. (The pup’s name is Walt and he has more or less recovered but it was so stupid and ridiculously violent—the idiot just shot him to see if his damn gun worked—that it made me sick of the whole human race for a time.) I also had a friend die and couldn’t get to his funeral in time … just misery. At the height of this I was sitting in an old easy
chair with my legs stretched out thinking dark thoughts and Josh came up in front of me and sat, studying me for a full minute, his eyes clear and calm. Then he seemed to shrug, turned around so he had his back to me, straddled my boot, then backed up my leg until his teeth were even with my foot. I had never seen him do anything like it and thought he might be going crazy when suddenly he reached down, grabbed my boot and with a mighty lunge jerked me completely out of the chair on my butt and then jumped on me and pretended to be biting my ribs, back and forth, tickling me.

Enough of the blues, by God—it was time to laugh. And I did, rolling on the floor with him, and we tickled each other until we knocked over an end table and had to quit.

Then—his job completed; I was cheerful again—he was sober once more, sitting quietly, listening in case I said a word he
needed to respond to, watching me, anticipating where I would go, what I would do, out ahead of me like an infantry point—no, like a spirit, like an extension of my mind.

If possible Josh is always with me. Sleeping, awake—I even took him on an author tour once—he is always, always there. When I ran sled dogs he tried to go, put himself in the team, and when I threw a harness on him he pulled wonderfully. But he was too … too refined for that work. The sled dogs are wonderful but they are primitive, basic, grandly prehistoric and animal. It was like putting a neurosurgeon in the middle of a professional hockey team and expecting him to be able to function, so I took Josh out.

    A last picture of Josh:

I am riding a horse, leading a packhorse up into the Bighorn Mountains out of Story,
Wyoming. All mountains are beautiful but there is something about the Bighorns that is particularly wonderful, and I have trained one horse to carry a pack so I can head up and spend some time alone wandering, looking.

Well, not alone. The horses are there, of course, and they provide some company, and there is Josh.

When I left the sled dogs because of my heart and went to horses, Josh fit right in, as I should have known he would. At first he trailed along on rides—just at first; then he saw that most of the problems with horses come from the front: deer, snakes, moose, bear, mountain lions—anything that would scare the horses and make them shy and throw me (which happened several times). Then he moved of his own volition to the front.

Josh knew his job was to lead always, to
handle problems, to run ahead, out there about forty to fifty yards, trotting up the trail leading bear off, turning moose and elk away, dodging around snakes; doing all this day in, day out, until the mare knew him, understood what he was doing and trusted him. I think in a way the mare came to love Josh, because she would sometimes come up to him when he wasn’t looking and nuzzle the back of his head as if petting him.

But that one picture of him is always clear in my mind. Head and tail down slightly, body relaxed but still somehow tensed and ready The Bighorn Mountains wild across the sky above us and Josh trotting up the trail ahead, looking back at me on the horse, to make sure I’m coming.