The Four O'Clock Stare

Here is Bisou, giving me the four o'clock stare, which often begins at 3:45 and continues unabated until 4:23, when I can't stand it any longer and give in and feed her (her official dinner time is 5:00).

As parents, my spouse and I believed that consistency was important, and that giving in to unjustified demands that contradicted standing rules was misguided. We applied this same principle to our many dogs in the course of fifty years, with excellent results. Until Bisou came along.

With all my dogs before her, mostly Shepherds and Setters, I had to work hard on eye contact. It became almost a reflex, before letting a dog out the door, or feeding it, or inviting it into the car, to stop and ask for a sit, and eye contact. The sit came easily enough, but the eye contact often took years to achieve. So I was charmed and amazed when Bisou, at nine weeks, came to us with perfect built-in eye contact.

I must have showered her with praise--it's always good to praise a puppy, right?--because she kept up the eye contact, and eventually honed it into a fearsome weapon that none of us can resist. Here is an example. My spouse is a benevolent but mostly uninvolved dog owner. The dogs have always been my delight and my responsibility, but he is glad to help out when I ask. Recently, getting ready to leave for the afternoon, I prepared Bisou's dinner, stowed it in the microwave, and asked my husband to feed her around 4:30. But my plans were cut short and I got home at 2:00--and found Bisou's empty bowl on the kitchen floor.

I ran into the living room, brandishing the bowl. "What is this?" I asked my husband. "You didn't feed her already, did you?"

"Well," he answered, "she stared at me and stared at me, and I figured that you must have made a mistake when you said not to feed her until 4:30."

That lesson, among others, was not lost on Bisou, who is now in her eleventh year of polishing the power of the stare. Did I mention that she's also going a bit deaf? This means that if she's busy sniffing outside and I call and she doesn't come right away, I can't get mad at her because, poor thing, she may not have heard me. So I call again, and again (exactly what I'm NOT supposed to do) until she looks up, all innocence, and says "Oh, it's you!" and trots over and fixes me with her lustrous carnelian orbs. And I praise her for finally coming, and for making eye contact...and she stores it all in her excellent dog memory for future use.

A Dog Remembers...

I did not have it in me, when I got back from Lexi's euthanasia, to dispose of her ancient leather collar and leash.  Instead, I hung them on the usual peg in the garage and told myself I'd get rid of them another day.

Today was that day.  I rolled up the collar and the leash in my hand, and was crossing the kitchen on my way to the trash bin when Wolfie intercepted me.  He stuck his big muzzle in my hand, sniffed, put his ears back and slowly wagged his tail.  The look on his face was one of gentle happiness, undiluted, as far as I could tell, by grief or regret.  He stood there a long time, sniffing and wagging his tail.  Bisou also came over and stood on her hind legs to sniff and lick,  jumping the way she used to jump to reach Lexi's muzzle in the eternal puppy greeting.

As I watched them, I remembered Lexi doing something very similar years ago.  My younger daughter, whom she adored, had visited and then gone back home to Montana.  She then mailed me something in one of those padded envelopes--probably a book.  I left the opened envelope on the stairs and later found Lexi with her nose inside it, ears back, tail wagging slowly, and that same gentle, ecstatic look on her face.
I myself was grieving my daughter's departure at the time, and if I had found, say, a sweater that she had left behind, I would have felt sadness, pure and simple, instead of Lexi's smiling reminiscence.

And it was sadness that I was feeling holding Lexi's leash this morning, sadness and the desire to dispose of it quickly so I wouldn't have to feel sad anymore.  Not so my two dogs.  They were remembering Lexi, their stern but kindly mentor, who inexplicably left one day and did not come back.  And they, unlike me, were wholly glad that she had for a moment been with us in the kitchen again.

In Memoriam: The Grand Fiasco

After Lexi's wild behavior in agility class, we never tried agility again, despite her obvious talents for it, as demonstrated by her walks on the perilous pier.  But I kept taking her to obedience, in hopes that she would settle down.

Lexi made a friend in that class, Balder, a Black Lab.  His owner had trained many dogs before, and one day, having watched Lexi do one of her fabulous distance recalls, he said to me, “She's so good you really should go for a CD (a Companion Dog degree) with her.”  He added that there were “fun matches” often held in the area.  These were practice trials to allow people and their dogs to prepare for the real thing.  “I'm taking Balder to one this weekend," he said.  "Why don't you sign Lexi up too?”  he said.

The minute those words left his mouth, it became my sacred duty to pursue the highest degree of obedience that Lexi was capable of.  After all, this was no mere pet.  She was an intelligent, extremely driven member of a working breed, who needed mental stimulation as much as I did.  If I couldn't give her a flock of sheep to herd, at least I could put her through the series of trials that would result in an obedience title.  Besides, taking tests was simple:  you put in a certain amount of work;  you took the test;  you got a good grade. 

What I found out at that first fun match, however, was that taking tests in partnership with a dog was quite different from taking tests in school.  Suddenly I, who from first grade had been a relatively  unruffled test-taker, became utterly stressed.  Lexi did not help.  She did everything I asked, but she did it with such intensity, with such barely-controlled excitement, that I feared that at any moment she might explode, which made me feel like I was about to explode. 

During the group down-stays, the dogs are supposed to lie in a row, with the owners twenty feet away, for four minutes. Lexi never moved, but her ears were pricked so high and her muzzle somehow became so pointy and arrow-like and her eyes were so intensely focused on mine that she looked like she was about to levitate.  By the time the judge said “return to your dogs!” I was shaking.

After a couple of these fun matches, which to me were anything but, but which she passed with points to spare, we were ready for a real AKC-sponsored trial. When the day came, I asked my husband to stay inside the car in the parking lot, out of sight of the ring.  I was afraid that if Lexi caught a glimpse of him during the test she would lose all self control.  Despite my nerves and her excitement, she got through the group stays just fine.  When it came time for our solo exercises, she performed better than ever.  Tail high and eyes shining, she heeled sweetly by my side, not rushing ahead, not lagging behind, sitting neatly whenever I stopped.  She was a beautiful young dog, alert and excited but, for the moment, completely controlled.  I heard appreciative murmurs from the crowd as we worked.

I was looking forward to the last part, the distance recall, because Lexi had always done it perfectly.  This is how it works:  you tell your dog to sit and stay, then you walk thirty feet away, turn to to face her, and call her.  The dog is supposed to come straight to you, and sit in front of you.

At the judge's instruction, I asked Lexi to sit and stay.  I walked away from her and turned around.  She stared at me, trembling with eagerness.  "Lexi, co-ome!" I caroled.  And she catapulted towards me.  Then, when she was about ten feet away, she gave a big grin, did a play bow, turned right, and leaped out of the ring.

A groan went up from the spectators as Lexi made the rounds, greeting man and dog, then disappeared into the crowd.  Would she take off for the hills?  Would I ever see her again? 

"Lexi, COME!"  I shrieked.  From wherever she was, she heard me and she came running.  She leaped back into the ring and sat neatly before me, wagging her tail, showing off her perfect recall. 

Never have I received so much sympathy from so many strangers.  The judge came towards me with an apologetic smile.  “I hate to do this, because she was so perfect,” she said.  “But leaving the ring is a disqualifying error.”  I assured her that I understood.

We made our way to the parking lot--Lexi triumphant, me holding back tears--where my husband had witnessed the disaster. “Please take me home,” I said.  And that was the end of Lexi's obedience career.

Years later, when  I was taking Wolfie to obedience classes, I thought that nine-year-old Lexi might enjoy it if I signed her up as well.  I used to do each exercise with Wolfie first, and then put Lexi through her paces.  I hadn't seen her so happy in a long time.  She pranced and strutted and demonstrated her mastery of everything.  I could see her thinking, "I'll show these benighted fools a thing or two..."

After class the instructor, who did not bestow praise idly, called me aside.  "You know," she said, "you could put Lexi in a show tomorrow, and she'd come in first."  For once in my life wisdom prevailed.  "Thanks, but I don't think so," I said.  "We're in this just for the fun of it."

Last Day

I knew last night that today would be her last day.  I made the call first thing in the morning, to get it over with.  I showered and dressed and didn't dry my hair.  My spouse unfolded the ramp for the last time, and I put on her old leather leash and the collar with the "canine good citizen" tag and led her up the ramp into the back of the station wagon for the last time.

At the vet's they'd worked us in from sheer kindness, and we had to wait in the parking lot a while.  Every few minutes I'd look in the rear-view mirror hoping that she'd fallen asleep, but I could see her German Shepherd ears still sticking straight up, like the bell-towers of Chartres. 

I'd not had time for my morning meditation at home, so sitting behind the wheel I put my hands on my knees, breathed, and watched my thoughts and my heart twist and swirl with sadness, fear for what was soon to come to Lexi and eventually to me and to my loved ones, guilt that I was doing this, more sadness.  Then I tried to visualize a kind of golden glow inside the car, enveloping both Lexi and me.  (Here I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have worked to bring Buddhist meditation to this  frantic land.) What can I say?  It kept me sane.

My dogs never will expire peacefully at home.  For the last four, I have had to make the decision, the appointment, the drive.  I have held them to the last, stayed with them to offer the last comfort I could, but also to expiate my guilt.  Why should I feel guilty about putting an end to the misery of a terminally ill dog?  Because of the immense relief that comes as a result of this action.  Nothing makes you feel free like getting rid of an old, sick dog.  No more calling in vain;  no more endless waiting at the door;  no more struggling to brush coat and file nails;  no more cleaning  up the rug....

The vet came out shivering--it was sleeting--with a needle in her hand.  "I'll give her a sedative first.  It usually takes about ten minutes to work.  Then I'll be back."  I held Lexi while she got the shot.  Then I crawled into the back seat and reached over and rubbed her third eye the way my husband used to rub our babies to put them to sleep.  She kept sitting up, looking more and more crumpled, and I thought maybe I would have to help her lie down.  But she finally did it by herself, and I kept rubbing and stroking and not talking because I didn't want to make myself cry.

When the vet and her assistant returned, I held Lexi's head, and she never felt the needle going into the vein.  Over the next few minutes, very gently, she subsided.   The vet listened to her heart and said, "she's gone."  I closed her eyes and we slipped a pink blanket under Lexi and carried her inside.

You'd be surprised what an empty space a dog leaves who's been mostly asleep for the last three years.  Wolfie--who learned from her how to be a good dog, who never once tried to mount her but kept all other males away from her, who used to wait by the door for her to return from her aimless wanderings in the yard--has been staring out the back door a lot.  When time came for the afternoon feeding ritual, I didn't quite know where to place the two remaining bowls.

Old Ladies

One is ninety-four.  The other will soon be fourteen.  One is my mother;  the other, my dog Lexi.

Every time I step over Lexi's recumbent form on my way to or from the kitchen, I think of my mother.  And often, as I worry about and mourn my  mother, my thoughts return to Lexi, lying on her spot in the middle of the kitchen.  Both my mother and my dog amaze their doctors and vets, respectively.  "Her vitals are better than mine!"  the nurse practitioner at the nursing home exclaims about my mother.  "I can't believe she's still walking around," the vet said the last time she saw Lexi.

Both, at their advanced age, look forward to their next meal, and instead of shrinking are putting on weight.  For a long time I kept Lexi skinny because of her arthritic hips, but for the last several months I've let her have (almost) all the food she wants.  Why deprive her of her one remaining pleasure?  Since her bout of encephalitis almost two years ago, my mother has been immobile.  Lexi too is practically immobile, though she does still manage to get to her outdoor bathroom.  I used to think that lying down for months on end spelled doom for man and beast.  But apparently there are exceptions.

Their minds are fading, along with their sight and hearing.  For a while this meant that they gradually and gently withdrew from reality, my mother into a place that held her long-dead husband and parents, with whom she would have long chats, and Lexi into wherever old dogs go to remember.   For a long while, things were peaceful in our kitchen and in the room in the nursing home in Mobile, Alabama.  But that has changed.  Now we give Lexi Valium at night, so that she won't spend it in anguished, wheezy, endless barking.  My mother has become aggressive towards the people who take care of her, and is having to be sedated.

Sedatives seem to take the edge off mental misery.  They also keep my  mother's caretakers safe from her teeth and, I hope, more disposed to treat her kindly.  But sedatives are not good for the body, and the pace of her deterioration is increasing.  Are we, her family, by condoning the use of these drugs allowing a kind of gradual euthanasia?   If Lexi's dementia were to take an aggressive turn there would be no doubt as to the next step:  we would take her to the vet who would gently and quickly put an end to her distress.  But there is no such clarity where humans are concerned.

Through all this, some shreds of their former selves still cling to my mother and my dog.  In the last photo of my mother, her mouth looks oddly crooked, and I worried that she'd had a stroke.  "No, no," my sister, who took the picture, said.  "She told me that she didn't want to smile because she was afraid she had food between her teeth." 

On her part, Lexi still reigns over an invisible territory that the other dogs dare not cross.  If I call them and they don't immediately appear, or I hear them whining in the kitchen, I know that it's because they're stuck behind Lexi, and I have to go liberate them.  "Lexi, I'm watching you," I say, and they sprint past her.

But lately her domain has been shrinking, and Wolfie and Bisou can get past her almost any time they choose.

Calling Lexi

It's 8:30 in the evening, and Bisou, who knows that she will get a treat when she comes in from her last outing of the day, starts agitating to go outside.  She jumps off my lap, plants herself at my feet and gives me a meaningful stare.  She wags her tail.  She gives her signature sound--half moan, half whine--which is next to impossible to ignore.  But I'm familiar with her tricks, and do.  So she goes over to my spouse and repeats the  sit, the stare, the wag, the imperious moan/whine.

"I think she really needs to go out," he says.

"No she doesn't.  She just wants to get a you-know-what," I respond.

Sit, stare, wiggle.  She adds a tremolo to the moan/whine.  The spouse caves, "I don't think we should ignore her signals," he says.

By now it's ten til nine, so I take a breath preparatory to standing up and the three dogs go out of their minds, as if they hadn't been out in a month.  In his excitement, Wolfie bumps Lexi, whose hind legs buckle, but she recovers and they're off!  into the outer darkness where I hope no bear or coyote has wandered inside the confines of the electric fence or, if so, that Wolfie will defend Bisou, who is right at his heels.  Lexi, meanwhile, has disappeared into the woods.

I go into the kitchen to get three treats out of the treat jar by the stove.  Bisou is already at the back door, putting nose prints on the glass.  I let her in, throw her a treat.  Wolfie comes careening around the raised beds, gets his treat.  But the third treat is still in my hand.

"Lexi co-ome!" I carol into the dark.

"Lexi, treat!" enticingly.

"Lexi, komm!" in my lowest growl.

 I put the treat between my teeth and clap.  I replace the treat with the dog whistle and blow.  Then I click the  yard light on and off, on and off (the spouse swears that this never fails).

But it fails with me.  I hear Lexi behind the trees, barking her wheezy, half-hearted, old-dog bark: woof...woof.  Does she know I'm calling her?  Does she care?

I close the door, replace the treat in the jar.  I return to the spouse, shrug my shoulders, sit down.  Bisou, at peace now, curls into my lap with a final moan.  But Wolfie is still at the back door, ears straight up, eyes piercing the outer darkness, waiting for Lexi.

"Woof, woof," she barks in the woods.  "Could you try to get her in?" I say to the man who never wanted a dog in the first place.  He goes to the door, claps his hands.  Lexi comes inside.

At close to fourteen years, she has become an enigma.  Can she hear?  Sometimes.  Can she see?  Not well.  Has her enfeebled brain forgotten what "come" means?  Possibly.  Or is she, sensing our reluctance to discipline her now that she's old and pathetic, making up for all those years when she thought she had to obey?

She's a good dog, but also a clever one.  I wouldn't put it past her to take full advantage of this chink in our armor.

I will not pretend that I don't find her failure to come when called extremely irritating.  It is a real pain to have all those years of patient training washed away by age, or by an old dog's wiliness.  But my irritation is tinged with sadness, because I know that before too long there will be no need at all for me to stand at the back door, shouting "Lexi, come!"

Of A Midnight Ambulance Ride, A Skid Off The Road In A Blizzard, And A Trek To Safety With Three Dogs

There's a limit to the amount of narrative suspense I'm willing to inflict on my readers, so I'll say right now that we're fine:  spouse, self, and the three dogs.  The hens are fine too, but then, they never go anywhere.

I was reading Trollope in bed three nights ago when my husband announced that he was having severe chest pains.  911 is an easy number to remember, even in the midst of panic.  I made the call and rushed to get dressed and put away the dogs so they wouldn't jump all over the EMTs as they attempted to save my husband's life.

I needn't have rushed.  It was the night of the full moon, and the nearest rescue team was busy saving other people.  Forty-five minutes later, I followed the ambulance down our driveway for the forty-five minute drive to the hospital.  I don't much like driving at night, and doing 75 mph was almost as scary as imagining what might be going on inside that ambulance.

In the emergency room, nurses attached my suffering husband to various monitors, administered nitroglycerin, which didn't work, then morphine, which didn't work either.  When asked to rate his pain on a scale of 0 to 10 he said "nine,"  then took a breath and said "ten!"  Not just every breath, but every heart beat increased the pain.

We were left alone for a long time while x-rays and tests were being analyzed.  Then an angel in the form of a (seemingly) teenage Indian doctor shimmered in and said that the test results and my husband's response to various proddings indicated that he was not having a "cardiac event."  But he would have to be admitted, and monitored, and seen by a cardiologist the next day.

At four in the morning I arrived home and went to bed.  Bisou jumped in and curled herself into a little bean shape against my stomach, and we both went to sleep.

When I awoke, the news continued to be good (less pain, more negative test results).   Before I left for the hospital, not knowing how long I'd be gone, I asked my friend who runs the canine B&B to pick up the dogs and take them home with her.

That evening, having been assured by the cardiologist that my husband's circulatory system was in perfect health (the severe pain was due to a virus-caused inflammation of the membranes surrounding the heart), limp with gratitude and relief, we both returned home.

Ah, life without dogs!  Do some people actually live that way?  What do they do with themselves all day?

The next morning, after a luxurious lie-in--nobody to let out, let back in, or feed--I set out in the station wagon to pick up the dogs.  The weather report predicted mixed precipitation, but in Vermont you can be basking in the sun at home while your neighbor down the road is being blinded by a blizzard.

A few minutes into the drive, it started sleeting.  I passed several snow plows scattering sand, then noticed that there were no other cars on the road.  The wind was howling, but I was in an optimistic mood.  Hadn't I just driven at 75 mph behind an ambulance, in the dark?  "I'm tired of being a scaredy-cat flatlander!" I muttered.  Vivaldi was playing on the radio, and I hummed along, feeling invulnerable.

At the intersection of the highway and the dirt road leading to the B&B, the road curves steeply upward.  I saw that its surface was covered in several inches of wind-blown--and therefore dry and slippery--snow, and wondered what the return trip would be like.

As I loaded the dogs into the car, I felt like a figure in a snow globe, one being shaken by a crazed six-year-old.  We got underway, Bisou in her crate on the back seat, Wolfie and Lexi in the cargo space.  More nice music was playing on the radio.  We made it up a hill, then down.  We were crawling along a flat stretch when the car hit a deep rut and was flung into a spin.  I saw the white trunk of a well-grown birch tree advancing towards us, and then we were in a ditch.

I squeezed out over the passenger seat, freed a screaming Bisou from her upturned crate, then went to let the big dogs out the back, but there was a tree in the way, and I couldn't open the hatch.  Wolfie promptly dove onto the back seat and out of the car.  "Stay with me," I told him while I put Lexi's collar on and tugged, then tried to help her raise her front legs high enough to get over the back of the seat.  But she laid her ears back and said apologetically, "Sorry, I can't."

What to do?  I couldn't leave her in the car:  she was scared, and the car was tilted at a perilous angle.  I couldn't call for help because there is no cell-phone reception in that particular spot.  And besides, nobody could have gotten to us in those conditions. 

It's difficult to think clearly when howling gusts are flinging snow into your face and you can't see and your heart is pumping hard because of the birch tree.  But it seemed that there was nothing for it but to walk back to the B&B, if I could only get Lexi out of the car.  I went around to the back again and the obstructing tree (sapling, really) agreed to be pushed away just enough that I could open the hatch.

I lifted Lexi out and we headed back down the road, the three dogs on their leashes, and me trying to keep from spraining an ankle on the snow-covered ruts.  Lexi was glued to my side, doing the best heeling of her entire 13 1/2 years.  Wolfie was out front, looking out for malefactors.  Bisou was having a great time, but every once in a while a gust would blow her back behind me and she'd tangle her leash around my legs.

I had no idea how far we'd have to walk.  On one of the hills I felt a pull behind me--Lexi's arthritic hips were giving way.  Would I need to carry her the rest of the way?  But she managed to keep walking, and, after letting Wolfie (for once!) pull me up my friend's driveway, we reached our destination.

Then it was comforting words, strong hot coffee and phone calls.  My husband dealt with the insurance and the towing.  Because of the road conditions, it took two different trucks before the car was finally rescued.  And so were we--after the town truck plowed the road--by my fully-recovered spouse.

In the early winter twilight, doubly limp with relief and gratitude, we arrived home, where there was barely a sprinkling of snow on the ground.

In His Prime

Wolfie turned five last week.  In human years, he seems to me to be about forty.  Fully mature in mind and body, poised on the brink of the long, slow, inevitable descent.

Physically, the descent has already begun.  I can't document this, but I'm sure he can't run as fast or as fast as he did when he was two.  And there have been other changes:  in the last year his neck has thickened, which makes his head seem even bigger than before.  And a sprinkling of white hairs has appeared on his black chin.

With regard to his personality, a new gravitas has come over him.  He is definitely in charge of Lexi and Bisou.  If it's dark outside and Lexi ignores my calls to come in, Wolfie sits looking out the back door until she returns. When, because she can no longer hear the warning beeps, she wanders beyond the perimeter of the invisible fence, I tell Wolfie "find Lexi!" and he always does.  He's not at ease unless there are three dogs inside the house. 

Wolfie's desire to have everyone present and accounted for applies to humans as well as dogs.  Out walking with his herding teacher and her dog the other day, she asked me to go ahead with the dogs while she made sure that some deer hadn't gotten stuck inside her fenced-in pasture.  Her dog, who is young and playful, came with me happily.  Wolfie, however, couldn't stand it that now there were three of us on the path, instead of four.  He kept trotting back to retrieve his teacher, despite my calls to stay with me.  At one point he ran off altogether and returned triumphant, teacher in tow.

With a younger dog, he holds his head high with dignity, and tends to boss the juvenile around, which only makes the juvenile adore him more.  His relationship with Bisou is more nuanced.  He lets her take bones away from him, but at ball-throwing time, even though she runs as far and as fast as he does, she knows not to touch the ball.  He still hasn't given up hope of having children with Bisou, and he periodically gives it a try, despite the discomfort to his hind legs that crouching low must cause.  She is good natured about this, but eventually slithers out of his embrace.

Of late his demonstrations of affection for human visitors have become less exuberant, and he obeys, albeit reluctantly, the "enough!" command.  (None of this applies to his special beloveds--you know who you are--who encourage him with high-pitched voices and fond caresses.)  The one thing time hasn't improved is his tail, and the devastation it wreaks.  It is long and he wags it strongly (it has been known to knock small children to the ground), and is capable of clearing the coffee table of wine glasses in a single swoop.

Sometimes I take a look at Wolfie's baby pictures:  the ones where he was fat and blue-eyed and stuck his little tail straight up, like a kitten;  the ones where he's toddling in the snow after Lexi, the idol of his youth.  And I wonder how it happened that I, who have long attained the age of reason, never once thought about the consequences of getting a puppy that would grow into a big, strong, take-charge dog.  A dog whom I would not be able physically to control, since dogs are proportionately much stronger than people, and even a fifty-pound mutt can be a challenge for a well-muscled human.

But I believed in the effects of training on a sound temperament, and in Wolfie's case I was lucky. Still, when he was an adolescent, a single lunge on the lead inflicted damage on my shoulder that took months to stop hurting.  In reality, Wolfie doesn't have to do anything I tell him.  But he does, even when it involves hard stuff like waiting at the door before charging out to meet a playmate.  It is a miracle to me that an animal will control an urgent desire for my sake, not out of fear of punishment, but maybe  because he regards me as his alpha, or perhaps, even, because he loves me.

Or maybe because he has figured out that this serious loyalty, this kindly acquiescence, is the surest way to keep me bonded to him.

I Put A Log In The Stove

Days are short now, and chilly, and lighting the wood stove in the evening feels more like a luxury than a chore.  I sit on the sofa, my feet on the coffee table, rereading the tragic story of Tristan and Iseult.  Just as they drink the magic philter and their passion flares high, the flames in the stove dwindle.  It's time to add another log.

There are, between me and my goal, three dogs.  The first one, Bisou, is sprawled across my lap.  I have to dislodge her before I can get up, but have you ever tried to un-lap a dog bred for over four-hundred years for the exclusive purpose of lap-sprawling?  The minute she feels my hands under her body she becomes a dead weight, and it's all I can do, while murmuring apologies, to shift her 19.5 lbs to the side.

Now my lap is free, but I cannot put my feet on the floor.  That is because Wolfie, who despite his East German sheepherding father is a lapdog at heart if not in looks, has laid his long black body in the narrow space between the sofa and the coffee table, leaving no place for me to put my feet.  I hate to disturb him--I feel sorry for him because he cannot ever sit on anybody's lap--so I stretch my legs as far from his head as possible, heave myself up with my hands on the sofa cushions, and teeter to a standing position.

In front of the stove lies Dog Number Three, Lexi, the dowager queen.  My guilt towards Bisou and Wolfie fades to insignificance compared to my guilt towards deafish, blindish, lameish, 13 1/2 year-old-Lexi.  A few pages ago, as Tristan and Iseult first laid eyes on each other, I watched Lexi waddle over to the stove.  She stood, head lowered and hind legs a-tremble, thinking things over, then slowly lowered herself onto the hearth.  Positioned as she is, there is no way I can open the stove doors, much less put a log in.

"Lexi, move," I say.  Then, more loudly, "Lexi, move!"  She lifts her milky eyes towards me and gives me a reproachful look, but stays her ground.  "Dammit, Lexi...."  She sighs, heaves herself up, and waddles off into the kitchen, where I hear her plop down on the floor like a sack of potatoes.  I put the log in the stove.

Straddling Wolfie's bulk, I reclaim my spot on the sofa.  Bisou wakes up and snuggles back on my lap.  I pick up my book.  And in the guilt of Tristan and Iseult vis-a-vis the betrayed King Marc, I find an echo of what I feel towards my old dog, who is lying alone on the cold kitchen floor.

Attack In The Night

Something bit a chunk off Lexi's ear last night.  My dowager German Shepherd, Lexi, is long of tooth, hard of ear and dim of eye, but she can still outrun me.

Around eight yesterday evening, the dogs began agitating to be let out.  I normally make them wait until nine, but this time I relented.  It wasn't until a while after I'd let them back inside that I noticed Lexi's ear, which was missing a half-inch-long, u-shaped piece right next to the tip.

I checked her over, but she seemed fine, and was busy licking the drops of blood that spattered the floor and walls every time she moved.  I cleaned the wound with a wet paper towel, set up one of the big dog crates and put her in it, to contain the bleeding.  I did my best to ignore the hurt looks she was giving me (she had house-trained herself as a puppy, and after her first week with us, thirteen years ago, I never crated her again) while I tried to reconstruct what had happened.

True, the dogs had seemed eager to go out earlier than usual, but they often do this, since they know that I will give them a treat when they come back.  Also, the weather had turned windy and brisk, which always makes them jumpy.  They usually run barking out of the house and across the grass and disappear into the woods, until they hear the warning beep of the invisible fence.  Had they barked longer or more furiously this time, I would have noticed.  Even allowing for the ear  being less sensitive than other parts of the anatomy, you'd think Lexi would have yelped when whatever it was bit her, and I would have heard it.  And so would Wolfie and Bisou.

And if they had, surely they would have gone over to investigate, and there would have been a confrontation with the critter.  If there was a critter.

Other than rabbits in winter, turtles in spring, and the black bear who made a historic visit several years ago, nothing much comes out of the woods and into our yard.  The deer, turkeys and foxes stick to the front field, where they know the dogs aren't likely to be.

We did once glimpse a fisher running parallel to the house, just inside the woods, and the fisher is my prime suspect.  A coyote or a fox would have taken a bigger chunk.  But even if Lexi had gone after the fisher, he could have outrun her.  Perhaps she accidentally bumped into him.  But you'd think she would have smelled him--or does a dog's sense of smell also fade as she ages?

A friend thinks that maybe it was a shrew--a tiny but fierce animal with (depending on the species) a poisonous bite capable of killing a mouse and cause pain to a larger animal.  Again, though, shrews are supposed to be quite musky, so you'd think that might have warned Lexi off.

At bedtime, not wanting Wolfie and Bisou to encounter the mystery attacker, I went outside with them, kept them close, and quickly brought them inside.  As for Lexi, I knew that if I let her out she would disappear into the woods and wouldn't hear me calling, so I didn't let her out.  I trusted that her excellent sense of house hygiene would hold through the night, and it did.

Things get dicey when a dog who is still relatively fleet of foot goes almost blind and mostly deaf.  Right now it's dark outside.  I let the dogs out a few minutes ago, and Wolfie and Bisou came back when I called them.  As for Lexi, she's still out there, staying away from shrews and fishers, I hope.  Wolfie is keeping vigil by the back door, looking out for her.

Last winter, to keep her safe, I tried attaching Lexi to a light chain that ran on a line suspended above the yard.  But she was miserable.  One of her few remaining pleasures, aside from eating, consists of ambling  around on her own outside, sniffing stuff and thinking old-dog thoughts.
 
A gerontologist told me recently that, in nursing homes, the policy has shifted from safety at all costs to one that tolerates a certain degree of risk in favor of allowing the very old to retain some feeling of self-determination.  That is how I hope to be treated some day, and it's how I'm treating my old dog right now.

Young Dog, Old Dog

Bisou had another play date with her brother Bear this afternoon.  On these occasions, they wrestle and growl and roll on the ground and wrestle some more and you'd think they're killing each other.  This continues unabated until the humans say "O.k., we've had enough;  let's go home."  The minute we got home, Bisou went for a walk with my husband and the big dogs, and did her usual maniacal running over the fields, just as if she'd spent the day reclining on the sofa.  Now, at last, she's snoozing next to me, digesting her dinner.  She's eighteen months young.

 Lexi will be thirteen in July, and she's old.  I can watch her aging by the day, sort of the way a nine-week-old puppy becomes a completely different being at twelve weeks.  Regular chiropractic adjustments and acupuncture treatments--and my dedication to keeping her slim--have kept her remarkably mobile despite galloping arthritis.  But I can see that every day the world makes less sense to her. 

It's not that she's blind or deaf.  It's more like she doesn't know what to do with what her eyes and ears tell her.  Sometimes I have to signal her twice when I give the o.k. for my always-ravenous dogs to eat their food.  Her eye/mouth coordination, when catching treats, used to be perfect.  In the last couple of weeks, it's dropped to a depressing 80%.

Her love for treats is undiminished, however, and she will gallop uphill for a bit of cheese.  Often, though, when we're in the woods and I call "Dogs, come!"  and Wolfie and Bisou come charging through the undergrowth and leaping over logs to get their treat, Lexi will stay a few feet away, her nose in a mound of leaves, oblivious to the call and the promise of cheese.

Worst of all, she wanders off.  At first I thought it was "selective hearing loss," whereby, having sensed my suspicion that her hearing might be going, she decided to exploit it for her own purposes.  Lexi always has been rather clever that way.  But now I think it's a combination of wanting to do her own thing and truly not knowing what the right thing to do is.

In the house, she's fading into the background, only coming to life at mealtime.  Like the aging Louis XIV, however, her authority over the other dogs is strong as ever.  They still won't cross her invisible boundaries, and though they covet her cozy bed in the TV room, they do not dare to lie in it.

But her end, though it may  not be near, is ever in my sights.  What will bring her down, and when, and how?  She's only twelve and a half, a mere child in human terms....

This makes me think of the children who, until the mid-twentieth century, routinely died in their parents' arms.  We have all wondered how people dealt with the death of one child after another.  We have all speculated that, in order to survive emotionally, parents must have invested less in a child, and that modern parenting as we know it arose as a correlate of the advances in medicine and sanitation that greatly increased the child's chance of survival.  But we will never know for sure.

What I do know for sure is that our emotional investment in dogs has expanded immeasurably in the last few decades.  At some point--was it because of more cars on the roads or more women at work?--we stopped chaining our dogs to a tree in the yard or letting them run loose in the streets. We brought them into the house, into our bedroom, into our life.  We read books about them, took them to obedience and agility and tracking classes.  We reflected on their inner lives, and on the food we fed them. Our relationship with them changed completely.

In this case, however, the relationship changed before science did.  Our dogs still wither and die before reaching--in human terms--adolescence.  One after another, over a human lifetime, we watch them perish. 

When my husband and I were first married, his grandfather's Pekinese, Chang, died.  We thought a new puppy would be just the thing, but the old man wouldn't hear of it.  "I'm through," he said, shaking his head.  "I can't do this anymore."  I am beginning to understand what he meant.

Lexi At Eleven And A Half

It seems like only yesterday that we got her from the Humane Society, a crazed, big-eared four-month-old, fond of digging holes and scared of anything on wheels.

In those days we lived near a mall (imagine!), and I would take her there and walk her up to the big idling trucks and make her sit and stay, and walk her up to people of all ages and colors and let her meet them. Except that she house-trained herself quickly and perfectly, she was like a wild animal, forever pulling on the leash, whining, driving me nuts. A couple of times, on our expeditions to the mall she wrapped the leash around my legs and knocked me down to the ground. In obedience class, she whined non-stop for the six weeks that the course lasted.

But I signed her up again, and again. We went to obedience classes for almost two years. It helped, but it didn't take away her intensity. She became a good dog...just too much of one. When she turned six, she began to settle down a little.

And now, suddenly, she's old. She's withdrawing: she doesn't get up to greet us when we come home, leaving that task to the younger dogs. She doesn't come upstairs to sleep in our bedroom at night. She's slowly fading into the background of our lives.

At mealtimes, however, she's right there, jumping with eagerness. And when we go out into the field, she runs to look for deer poop (that's what country dogs do, fervently, all the time. I think it must have survival value). And then she takes off. If I call her, she pretends not to hear. (She might be going deaf, but if so, how come she can hear the slightest touch of my hand on the food bowls?) She takes off in the direction of the neighbor's compost pile and is gone for an hour. Then she comes back, looking three years younger, tail high and proud of herself.

I know that this going AWOL is dangerous for her. She could go out on the highway and get run over, she could get lost, she could be attacked by coyotes, she could slip and fall and make her arthritic knees and elbows and hips even worse than they already are. To avoid these dangers, I could confine her to our roomy back yard. I could walk her on a leash. But she wouldn't think it was the same.

I find myself in a similar situation to that of people with an elderly relative who insists on staying in the house where she has lived for years. She could fall at any minute and not be able to get help. She could have a stroke in her sleep. She could do any number of things that would shorten her life. She would be much safer in an assisted living facility, where she would be watched day and night. But it wouldn't be the same.

At the end of her life, there is still in Lexi that wild independence she had as a pup. I realize that it may cut her days short, but every once in a while I err on the side of risk.

Lexi's Tail

I was driving up to the house the other day, and as I crested the hill I saw a white tail bounding across the horizon. I went into alarm mode. What was Lexi doing out? And why was she running like that?

It wasn't Lexi. It was one of the nine deer who take refuge on our land now that hunting season has started. Lexi, alas, doesn't bound like she used to. And the white, woolly underside of her tail—which for most of her life she has carried proudly curled over her back—is not visible as often as it used to be.

From the front, eleven-year-old Lexi looks like a German Shepherd. From the back, with her high hind quarters and her curly tail, she looks either like a German Shepherd with bad conformation or a German Shepherd with a Husky grandparent. Since we adopted her at four months from the Humane Society, we never did find out the reason for that curly tail.

My husband and I used to disagree about Lexi's tail. I thought it was a pity—if she would only let it hang low she could pass for purebred. He thought it looked happy and brave. The years have declared me the winner: these days Lexi's tail mostly hangs down between her withered hind legs. She is old, our feisty girl, and her back, her hips and her knees hurt no matter how we try to help.

The most intense, driven dog I've ever known now spends her days lying on a rug, looking out at the back yard. She doesn't get up to greet us when we come home. She doesn't come upstairs to sleep in our bedroom. Put your hand on her back and there's no cushion between skin and skeleton. The hair on her tail looks sparse, and feels dry and stiff to the touch. Her muzzle is white. Lexi's moon is on the wane.

But not completely. At night, when I let the dogs out before bedtime, Lexi still flies out like a bat out of hell, ready to do battle with whatever fiend is lurking in the woods behind the house. Barking with all her might, she dives into the darkness as fast as her stiff legs will carry her, and the last thing I see is the white underside of her tail, curled high over her back in outrage and delight.

Old Dog, New Trick

When we adopted Lexi at four months, she had only two bad habits: she liked to dig holes, and she disliked having her feet touched. She got over the first habit in short order. The second turned into a decade-long saga.

Determined that Lexi would become the perfect dog, I worked hard and long to get her to let me cut her nails, and eventually she did. This golden era lasted about three minutes, until I nicked the quick of one nail. There was much bleeding and yowling on her part and apologizing and propitiating with treats on mine.

After that, she didn't even want to see the clippers, much less let me near her with them. But long nails can lead to foot deformities, not to mention deformed floors, so I had to train her all over again. It took me weeks, but one day she let me clip her nails. And yes, I nicked her again. This time there was blood everywhere—me, the walls, the floor. I had to put her in her crate to contain the flood. When the bleeding finally stopped, Lexi and I were still shaking.

After that I couldn't stand the sight of the clippers any more than she could. I went to the hardware store and bought a wall scraper—a flat contraption with a handle onto which you snap a piece of sandpaper. And that is what I used to file Lexi's nails for the next ten years.

The process was fraught with anxiety for her and irritation for me. It was slow and tedious, and left me covered in nail dust and sand. She wiggled and squirmed and complained and I praised and scolded and offered treats. We both hated it, so it didn't get done as often as it should have.

When Wolfie came along I realized that life is too short to file 36 dog nails every couple of weeks, so from earliest puppyhood I clipped a tiny bit off his nails every week. As a result, he is quite mellow about the process, and his attitude has helped Lexi loosen up about the filing.

A couple of weeks ago, I had finished clipping Wolfie's nails and had Lexi in filing position. I was thinking about something else, and before I knew it I had clipped one of her nails! When she realized what I had done she let out an ex post facto yelp, and I had to use the file on the other 17 toes, but the germ of an idea had formed in my mind.

Today was nail day again. I did Wolfie first, then Lexi rolled over for me and I gave her a treat and while she was munching I clipped one nail. She protested, but I clipped another one, and gave her another treat. I had meant to end things on a high note and almost reached for the file, but something made me continue. Two more nails and one paw was done. Another treat. Did I dare do the other paw? Clip, clip, clip, clip, and it was finished. But I knew she would never let me do her delicate, her sensitive, her impossible back feet. I handed her a biscuit and grabbed a back foot. Clip, clip, clip...could this be happening? I grabbed the other foot--clip, clip—and then there were no more nails to clip. It had all taken less than two minutes!

Now I'm wondering, has she been putting me on all these years, exploiting my guilt and my nervousness? Or was she truly terrified of the clippers, and if so, what happened to change her mind? Was it the brand of biscuits I gave her today? They weren't anything special, but I had just opened a new box....

Who can fathom Lexi's mind? This is not the only trick she has “learned” in her old age. For years I thought she couldn't retrieve, wasn't of a retrieving breed, shouldn't be expected to retrieve. And then we got Wolfie, who loves to retrieve, and suddenly Lexi is a perfectly competent retriever. Does this mean that if I brought home a Border Collie Lexi would learn to herd sheep? If she was in competition with a Pointer, would she point? If she was jealous of a coon hound would she tree coons? I have no idea. But I won't be surprised if she still has a few tricks up her hairy old sleeve.