Wolfgang von Skeptik

Another Respite: More Dog Stories

(Editor’s note: This item is posted much later than usual and I apologize, though my tardiness was unavoidable. The problem was a massive server failure that shut down the entire Munuvian system.)

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FORCIBLY SEPARATED FROM MY beloved dogs Brady and Jasmine, probably barred by circumstance from ever having dogs again – obstructed by a combination of housing regulations from which there is no appeal and financial barriers that are almost certainly insurmountable – I battle the painfully dogless silence of this bright new comfortable apartment by surrounding myself with photographs: cherished mementos of a blessed canine companionship that may never again be mine. There are pictures of Brady – half Springer, half Brittany – the best hunting dog who ever accompanied me in field or forest; pictures of Sadie – half Labrador, half Newfoundland – 100 percent faithful and very much the den-mother to a local pack of about six other dogs; pictures of LeeRoy – half Rottweiler, half Golden retriever – the most breathtakingly fearless dog I have ever known.

On my desk there is a portrait of Sadie, smug and happy and black and bear-like in a foot of new-fallen snow, her muzzle frosted and her brown eyes a-shine; a portrait of Brady nested amongst the pillows at the head of my bed and contemplating his favorite toy, a blue rubber ball; but mostly there are pictures of LeeRoy, who was my near-constant companion all his too-short 12-year life. There are even more dog pictures on my bookshelves.

For some curious reason – now seemingly prophetic – I never made any photographs of Jasmine, and perhaps that very lack makes it easier to deal with her absence, never mind the fact that she and Brady are both in good homes.

LeeRoy was born on the Vernal Equinox of 1987, was with me from his seventh week and was euthanized on Midsummer’s Day of 2000, dying in my arms as our long-time veterinarian freed him from the pain and paralysis of the old age that had finally reduced him to pathetic immobility. He was always a country dog. He is buried beneath a marble plaque adjacent an alder grove on the rural tract that was indisputably his domain from July 1993 until a few months before his death. Sadie, who lived two years longer, is buried beside him beneath her own marble plaque.

In a sense, it is as if LeeRoy and Sadie chose the grave-spot themselves. It is the shady place from which they (and often Brady and later Jasmine too) always gathered to watch me work a nearby vegetable garden, one of two large vegetable gardens I had developed on the land we all lived on, which until 2002 was owned by my two best friends but was then bought by a family member I foolishly believed to be well-intentioned but thanks to whom I will never be allowed to visit those graves again. The graves are in the place from which I am permanently banished, the acreage from which I was vindictively evicted last August by this same relative and the assaultive husband with whom she had so astoundingly decided to reconcile.

LeeRoy and his seven litter-mates were the result of a boarding-kennel accident. Their mother, a pedigreed Golden retriever, unexpectedly went into a second heat – she had been in heat only a month before – and no one in the kennel noticed her condition. One morning when she was loosed in the exercise yard to run and play with a big male Rottweiler, nature took its course. Seven of the pups looked like Goldens, or perhaps Lab-Golden crosses, but LeeRoy was configured like a Rotty – big broad head, rippling muscles, sleek panther-black coat and rust-yellow facial, chest and ankle markings – though he had the mellow, love-everybody-even-some-cats-and-especially-children good nature typical of Goldens. On one occasion he even brought home a stray kitten, depositing it at my feet as if to say, “here, this little one needs you to take care of her.”

But if you were a bad guy intent on injury or theft or invasion, LeeRoy was your worst nightmare come to life. One of LeeRoy’s many nicknames was “Mister Monster.” He was a massive, unbelievably strong dog, 100 pounds in his prime and sometimes quicker than the human eye could follow. I'd look at LeeRoy and watch him chase a stick or even move through my house and I'd always remember what a professional burglar once told me back in my newspaper days when I was interviewing criminals for anti-crime stories. The burglar said it isn't true the most terrifying sound a crook can hear is somebody racking the slide of a shotgun. The most terrifying sound is that low deep quiet almost seismic growl of a Rottweiler waiting somewhere in the dark. "You can run from a shotgun," the burglar said. "But by the time you hear the Rottweiler, it's too late to run. He's already got you."

LeeRoy bit at least one car prowler I know of – a junky who surprised him asleep in the cab of my yellow Datsun pickup truck in downtown Bellingham – and once, maybe in 1990, when a gang of over-pampered, over-privileged teenage sadists decided it would be fun to attack an elderly man in the woods, LeeRoy made it clear I would have a dog in that fight even before I let it be known one of the other surprises that would come into play was what else I had taken into the mountains that day: a pair of stainless-steel Ruger Old Army revolvers, Dragoon-size percussion pistols, caliber .44 and loaded, as formidable and intimidating as any big-bore firearm can be. Problem solved: the potential trouble wisely retreated back down the road from whence it came. Ne’er a tooth met bone, and not one round was fired.

In those days you weren’t required to go to a formal range and shell out $5 or $10 for the dubious privilege of standing in line and waiting half a day for a few hurried minutes to shoot – the Feminarchy of Washington (ever in service to the matrifascist anti- Second Amendment agenda) had not yet closed all the informal back-country shooting spots and prohibited their use by posting them with “no shooting” signs or gating the access roads shut – and I was going through one of those periodic episodes of folly in which I had somehow forgotten what a pain it is to clean a muzzle-loader. Hence I was enthusiastically working up accuracy loads for both the Rugers and a .54-caliber Thompson/Center Hawken. The Rugers turned out to be easy: especially with maximum loads, they remain among the most accurate revolvers I have ever owned, better in fact than many modern handguns. But the Hawken was being persnickety, and on this particular day – maybe a month before the encounter with the teenagers – I intended to test it with a new brand of 425-grain commercial bullets. I had driven a dozen miles from home, into deep forest and then up the remnant of a mountain logging road to an abandoned sand pit. Now I set up a target at 100 yards and commenced firing. LeeRoy was of course with me: one of his delights was dragging the target frame down range and hauling it back to the truck when I was finished shooting.

The day drifted easily from late morning to afternoon as black-powder days so often do, the lazy hours compressed by the widely spaced but regular thunderclaps and huge blooms of orange flame and bitterly sulphurous white smoke produced by the big muzzle-loading rifle. By the time the sun had declined enough for its light to begin moving my points of impact noticeably eastward across the face of the paper target, my powder-horn was nearly empty, but by firing from my impromptu spare-tire/sandbag rest and cleaning the bore after each round, I had the piece regularly grouping three rounds into slightly less than two inches, and I was satisfied the sights were dead on out to 125 yards. Minute of elk, as we say in these parts. It was time to go home – but where was LeeRoy?

I called LeeRoy’s name until my voice failed, and then finally in dismal dark drove home with tears in my eyes. I could not imagine what had happened to my dog, and all the very worst possibilities haunted my thoughts and gnawed at the edges of my mind. Once, as a yearling pup, LeeRoy had tried to jump out of my (moving) vehicle to attack a roadside Spring bear. Now it was Spring again, and I wondered if he had wandered off, encountered an early out-of-hibernation bear, stupidly charged, and of course been killed. Had the wolves who sometimes come down from Canada gotten him? Had he been attacked by a cougar? This was wild country, less than five miles from the border – from atop the dirt embankment at the north end of the abandoned sandpit I could actually see into Canada – and even the few nearest residences were three or four miles distant.

The next several days all I did was search for LeeRoy. I went back to the sand pit again and again but found no new traces of him. I literally drove hundreds of miles on the lower-altitude logging roads, stopping every five minutes or so to call his name. Finally, resigned to his loss and saddened beyond words, I distracted myself from grief by indulging my normal curiosity about the elevation of the remaining snow: it was early April. I drove my yellow truck up the mountain’s main logging road until I reached the point where the snow pack barred my way. It was near the crest. The view – the dark dense green of the tall second-growth firs of the interior forest partially obscured by thick gray streamers of fog or snow-mist – was impressive enough I set the handbrake and dismounted to see it all the better. And there in the snow almost under my truck, perhaps two dozen road-miles south of the abandoned sandpit and maybe 2000 feet above it, was a single set of dog tracks. Big dog tracks. I did not for an instant doubt they were LeeRoy’s, but I could not fathom what he was doing here at this altitude, nearly 5000 feet, nor where he was going, save that his tracks showed him moving southward near the crest of the mountain, southward at that steady, distance-eating canine lope, southward even in the deep compact snow of this realm of bears and wolves and cougars. I studied the tracks. A raven peered down from a nearby snag, a dead fir, bleached wood pale as bone. The raven grawked once in the cold damp silence, as if Raven himself were encouraging my quest.

It had been, by then, six days since LeeRoy had vanished, and already I had been thinking that to heal my hurt I should get another dog. But having seen the tracks, and despite the fact the thawing that blurred their edges indicated they were already days old, I was now certain LeeRoy was still alive, and when I drove home that evening I resolved the next day to extend my search to the southern end of the mountain, another eight or ten miles from where I had been, and a point at which there was a two-lane blacktop highway and a bridge and the convergence of two forks of a river. But the next morning, a Thursday, I awoke somehow knowing exactly where LeeRoy was: at another place we had visited together, another place I sometimes went shooting, near a stretch of deep water I often fished for trout. In my mind I saw the place not from my usual bipedal perspective but from closer to the ground and somehow in high contrast, as if for a moment I was seeing it through LeeRoy’s own eyes. I did not even bother with coffee: I drove my truck toward the place I had envisioned – and nearly there, a couple of miles after I turned off the highway, I met LeeRoy walking toward me at the edge of the gravel road.

He had lost maybe 20 pounds and seemed profoundly tired. He was obviously delighted to see me but was neither surprised nor the least bit apologetic. I opened the passenger door; LeeRoy climbed into the cab of the truck and promptly tried to lie across the passenger seat with his head on my lap, something he had often done as a pup but now was much too long to accomplish. Yet he managed it anyway, bending himself into a tight curl with his tail hanging to the floor, looking up at me with a half grin and then falling asleep. By the time I was back on the main road he was snoring.

Two months later the mystery of where he had been and what he had been doing was solved. It was June now. The monsoon had dwindled to an end in May as it usually does and the weather was mostly sunny and warm, but not so hot you had to leave your dogs at home. I was grocery shopping at a crossroads supermarket, and LeeRoy was waiting in the cab of the yellow truck. When I returned to the parking lot with my purchases, LeeRoy was standing in the cab so that his slowly wagging tail stuck out the passenger side window in a high proud curve and his head was out the driver’s side window, and there was a pretty young woman there, a vaguely exotic-looking brunette with long straight hair cut in bangs. She was rubbing LeeRoy under the chin and scratching behind his ears and whispering to him while he made contented dog noises. She looked up at my approach.

“Your dog?”

“Yes.”

“What is he?”

“A boarding-kennel accident. Rottweiler and Golden retriever.”

“What a wonderful combination! What’s his name?”

“LeeRoy.”

“How appropriate.” She laughed. “You probably wonder what I’m doing here talking with your dog. We’re friends. We know each other ‘cause he came down to see us a couple of months ago. We have a female black lab we were planning on breeding but LeeRoy got there first. Her name is Sasha. We had her in a double kennel – two six-foot dogwire fences – but Sasha started digging on the inside and LeeRoy started digging on the outside and they dug an escape tunnel. They dug under both fences and met in the middle, and when the kids got up in the morning, it was ‘Mom, Dad, come look’ and there the dogs were in the front yard, Sasha and LeeRoy, stuck together.” She laughed again, lightly and seemingly with genuine amusement.

Even so, I felt I should apologize. “God, I’m so sorry,” I said. “LeeRoy slipped away from me up in the mountains and I had no idea where he went. It never occurred to me he might go looking for a girl friend because we were miles away from anywhere.”

“No, it’s all right. I managed to get some pictures of LeeRoy so I could show people what the daddy looks like. He stayed with us for five days and we were going to adopt him because he’s such a great dog. We have a son and a daughter and he was wonderful with both of them. But then one morning he was just gone.” She grinned, wrinkling her nose. “Like a traveling man.”

“What are you going to do with the pups?”

“Oh, they’re already spoken for. As soon as our friends saw LeeRoy’s picture.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, where do you live?”

She named the community: LeeRoy had not only traveled a minimum of 40-odd miles, he had swum at least one wide treacherously swift snow-melt-swollen river, two if he had bypassed the two-lane highway and its bridge.

I told her precisely where we had been when LeeRoy vanished, told her also of the curious way by which I found him a week later. The woman said she was not surprised – that like many dog owners she had long ago concluded canines are telepaths.

Given the distance from Sasha’s house, LeeRoy had already loped nearly a third of the way to the abandoned sand pit when I met him on the gravel road. If I had not answered his telepathic summons – and I believe that is exactly what it was – I have no doubt he would have braved the rivers and then the mountain again, bears, wolves, cougars, snowpack and all, and eventually he would have found his way home.

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Since this is a dog-story day – a welcome, necessary and hopefully cleansing break from politics – there are two more worthwhile dog stories here and here. In fact it was reading of the Texas dog’s adventures that prompted me to tell this LeeRoy story, one of dozens that maybe now I will preserve in writing.

Posted by Loren at October 27, 2004 05:18 PM