A Small Furry Prayer (24 page)

For a while we tried to bridge that gap. If she passed close by, we would reach down for a quick pet. But for a dog that could barely walk, she could certainly spin her head around with alacrity. Normally, with biting, we have a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule, but Foghat used those up her first afternoon. Euthanizing her immediately felt like adding insult to injury, so we broke our rule. Plus, Foghat had starved on the street for so long that when food appeared before her—and
appeared
is the right word, as we learned to stand across the room and slide her food dish to her like a shuffleboard puck—she was deliriously happy. We figured this was the first time she'd had this particular feeling, and why not let her have it for a little while longer.

At least, that's what we figured out loud. No dogs had died since the previous winter, and Joy was worried about what would happen to me when the next one did. She wasn't alone in this concern. Everything I'd been doing in the interim had only increased my empathy for our dogs, which only made me that much more susceptible to heartbreak. I had become a better rescuer, perhaps, maybe kinder, more patient, but definitely not tougher. Coming to terms with the dogs dying felt like my last hurdle. “The closer you get to the gate, the fiercer the lions,” say the Buddhists, and seriously, it's a little annoying how often these guys are right.

Foghat lasted longer than we guessed. The betting pool hovered around six weeks, but after eight she was still around. Around the ninth week, the phone lines went out again, and because I was on deadline, Joy and I switched offices—I started working up at the house, she moved down to the goat shack. I have always been a morning person, but living in the country has made it a sickness. Most days I'm up around four. A wonderful time. The universe is quiet, the dogs are quiet—or usually quiet.

One morning I got to my desk a little early, dead-of-night time. But no sooner had I arrived than something brushed against my leg. I looked down and saw Foghat looking up. I yanked my leg away as fast as I could, certain she was about to bite me. She didn't bite me. Instead, she took a few steps forward and brushed against my leg a second time. I remember very clearly thinking, It's too early and Joy's not going to like having to drive me to the emergency room if this goes bad, but it sure seemed like Foghat wanted to be petted. I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then put my hand on her back and hoped for the best. Instead of attacking, she leaned into me, putting her full weight against my fingers. I kept scratching. She kept leaning. After ten minutes she walked away, but came back the next morning for more. By the third day she was in my lap. By the fourth, she was there most of the day. On the fifth, she climbed up to lick my nose; even with our burgeoning relationship, having her teeth inches from my eyes was more than a little alarming, but again she'd come in peace. Foghat licked me for a few moments, then laid back down and started purring. She purred for two hours straight and only stopped when her organs began to fail.

Foghat died in my lap later that day. We buried her not long after. Her grave is beside Vinnie's; who knows, maybe they can snuggle if it gets cold. After the funeral, Joy and I walked back to the house in silence. On the porch she gave me a hug, and this time she did say, “Don't worry, everything will be better in the morning.” In this, as in so much else, she was absolutely correct.

The great Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore once said: “Through the rise and fall of empires … through the creation of vast bodies of symbols that give shape to his dreams and aspirations … ; through his forging of magic keys with which to unlock the mysteries of creation … through it all man is marching from epoch to epoch towards the fullest realisation of his soul. … Yes, they are coming, the pilgrims, one and all—coming to their true inheritance of the world; they are ever broadening their consciousness, ever seeking a higher and higher unity.” More and more, I was coming around to his opinion.

So whether animals are aware they're going to die and whether they are willing to do something about it are no longer things I wonder about. While I can offer no counter to Descartes's idea that dogs have no soul, it does appear that they have all the right equipment to have the same spiritual experiences as we do and that they actively seek out such experiences. I guess we could go back and forth about whether they believe in God, but one thing is certain: if you're looking for similarities as a reason to make moral decisions about animal welfare, there's one in particular that should give you pause, and that is that dogs, humans, and possibly a great many other species all consider the exact same things holy.

47

The last time I ran Coyote's Line was the day Igor died. It was April 2009, almost our three-year anniversary in Chimayo, but this story starts over a year earlier, in February 2008, on the occasion of a different marker: the one year anniversary of Ahab's death. I had wanted to do something in his memory. Almost everything I've learned and done and become began when he showed up on my friend's doorstep. He'd been my best friend and the reason I first jumped into this infinite game in the first place. I wanted to say thank you.

I decided to take the dogs to the Thumb. This was another destination I'd been staring at for a while, always wanting to get closer, always afraid of what I might find. Wind and weather had shaped sandstone into a massive fist with an extended thumb, technically called a “fairy chimney,” “tent rock,” or “hoodoo,” but none of those terms quite captured its size. The Thumb is colossal, three hundred feet of red rock sitting atop another two hundred feet of rubble. When viewed from a distance, it appears the last vestige of some gargantuan hitchhiker looking for a cosmic ride out of this place. But I wanted a closer look.

It was cold and clear and Sunday morning. I had Bella, Bucket, Igor, and Poppycock—a shepherd stray who'd showed up around Christmas and never left—with me. The first hour was spent crossing wide plains on wide trails. By the second hour, we'd moved into a slender arroyo that narrowed into a slot canyon that soon became a maze. There were side slots and dead ends and it took a long while to find our way through. The exit was at the top of a steep hill, where we got our first good look at the Thumb—but no sooner did we sight it than it vanished.

Flurries had been drifting down for a while, but suddenly it was dumping. Visibility became ten feet at best. The wind was blasting through the canyons. I rounded a corner and found myself standing at the mouth of a wide arroyo as the entire riverbed sprang to life. It might have only been wind-swirled snow, but it didn't look like that. The image that stayed in my head afterward was of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang's Terracotta Army, eight thousand clay soldiers all waking up from a long nap, donning armor, gathering weapons, preparing for some great battle. But there was no battle. Just as quickly, the wind calmed, the ghosts vanished, and a great silence returned. The real voice of the desert. The whisper that's always there, the message just below all others, not really audible, but someday, perhaps, we'll learn how to listen.

We didn't listen that day—and we should have. Instead, we just kept clomping forward, post-holing through ever deepening drifts. It took another hour to get to the bottom of the rubble pile, and, just as oddly, the moment we arrived, the storm abated. The sun poked through the clouds and I got my first good look at another grand mystery. Up close, I knew immediately, this place wasn't my business. It was ominous, precarious, the whole balancing act impossible. I stood beneath it with my neck craned back, all that rock, all that deep time, a bad feeling starting to rise in my stomach. I felt like I was trespassing, violating some covenant written eons ago, another promise somebody had forgotten to keep.

I ignored the promise, just like I'd ignored the blizzard. I had come this far and would not be denied. So up we all went. The escarpment was steep and crumbly and it took ten more minutes to scramble to the top. As we reached the Thumb, at the eerily exact moment my young flesh touched its old stone, the storm returned. Biting cold, howling wind, dumping snow. Visibility vanished. I could barely see the dogs beside me. Somewhere in front, I knew, the whole of the valley floor unfurled. I wanted to take in the good view and didn't want to try climbing down in a blizzard, so hunkered down to wait out the blow.

I chose a tiny ledge, tucked just out of the wind, but no sooner did I sit down than the bad feeling in my stomach got worse. At first I thought adrenaline, maybe a touch of vertigo caused by so much looming mass above me. Then the feeling became a stronger vibration, which soon became a hard quaking—like someone was slapping a conga beat on my belly. I was getting queasy. Whatever this place was, I wasn't sure I wanted anything more to do with it. And neither were the dogs.

What usually happens if I sit down anywhere in the backcountry is that the dogs run over, give my hand a lick—their way of establishing connection to their secure base—and head off exploring. Maybe they're back in five minutes, usually about ten. That day, as soon as I sat, the dogs didn't just lick me, they crashed into me. First Poppycock clipped my back with her hips as she ran past in a tizzy. I decided this was because she was new to the pack. Then Bella did the same thing, only harder, and after Truchas Peak she'd been extremely careful whenever heights and ledges were involved. Bucket didn't smash into me; instead began whimpering and trying to hide under my legs. Igor, the only one who'd gone off to look around, returned two minutes later, looking seriously demented—and moving at a full gallop.

I had a moment to wonder what had spooked him so badly, but only a moment. The next second, Igor tried to dive into my lap. Seventy pounds moving at twenty miles an hour was more than enough to rip me off my perch. Bucket and Igor ripped with me. I'm not sure what happened to them, but I spun sideways into the air and landed backward on the ground. My shoulder hit rock, my neck and head next. I backflipped down the slope. It was only the fresh snow that kept bones from breaking. For the next couple of weeks there would be a bruise down my left side that looked as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the rings of Saturn. Right then, there wasn't time for the pain.

Bucket and Igor had crash-landed on either side of me and all of us were now tumbling down the slope. We kept tumbling for a little while too, though eventually got our feet back under us. As I popped upright I saw Bella and Poppy beside me, also running full tilt. There was now no turning back. We all went boing-boing and pell-mell and straight down. We bottomed out and kept going across an arroyo, and that's when I noticed Igor was missing. He had been beside me only a moment ago, but how long ago was that moment? Two seconds? Ten seconds? A minute? I stopped and called and waited and called and ran up and down the canyon and then did it again and still no Igor. I tried to backtrack using paw prints, but the snow was coming down too hard and there was no trail left. Igor had gotten lost before once and headed home. Maybe, I hoped, it had happened again.

But he wasn't at home. So Joy and I hiked back to the Thumb. The storm grew worse. By morning there'd be twenty inches of fresh snow, but for the moment we were hunting a white dog in a whiteout. It took another two hours to retrace the route, but there was no sign. We went back home, then struck out once more, getting nervous. Bull terriers are badly adapted to the cold. Their coats are too thin to protect them, and their pain tolerance high enough that they often don't notice themselves freezing to death until too late. We hunted all day and into the evening, the temperature dropped below zero. We never found him.

It was a bad night: the uncertainty, the helplessness, the sense that perhaps I'd been given fair warning but chose to ignore it. We had promised the dogs that their last memories would be of love. I had visions of Igor dying alone, scared and cold and missing his family—the exact opposite of my vow. Joy found me the next morning sitting at my desk in the goat shack, though I didn't remember even walking out there. It didn't matter. She had come down to tell me we needed to put up flyers around the neighborhood.

“You're kidding—this neighborhood? Our last hope is a community that doesn't give a fuck about dogs?”

And that's where I was wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. Everywhere we went people cared about dogs. Strangers helped tack up flyers. Gang bangers came out of their houses to lend us a hand. Some went back inside to call their friends and ask them to keep a lookout. Others told us stories about times their pets had gotten lost and returned weeks later unscathed. Even the heroin dealers sent our search parties. I was looking for a miracle. Igor hadn't shown up yet, but it certainly seemed like we'd found one.

And then we found Igor.

When we got home from putting up flyers there was a message on our machine from a guy who lived about five miles down the road. The message said Igor was standing on a cliff across from his front door. We jumped in the truck and flew over there. Almost immediately we spotted him on that cliff. I pulled the truck over and jumped out. Igor saw me then, but didn't move. Instead, he shook his head back and forth, lowered his gaze, and started trembling. I wasn't sure what to do, so dropped down to my knees. He stared at me for a long time, then finally came over, his head still low, his tail tucked deep. He looked like he had done something very wrong and was very sorry. He might have been sorry, but he was never the same.

Igor had frostbite on his paws and slashes across his belly and back. He was also exhausted, needing about three days to sleep it all off. But when he awoke he was a different dog. At first, whenever we walked into the backcountry, he'd wander off, find a high perch, and gaze at the Thumb. It was spooky, perhaps, but understandable. Pretty soon he was just wandering off. He'd started losing interest in the pack, and in me. I tried to lure him back by running cliffs, hoping for a repeat of the Stilts experience. It didn't work. Whatever had happened to him out there was too much for simple neurochemistry to cure.

Then the change crept into his home life. Bucket was his best friend and they liked to wrestle, but somewhere Igor had misplaced his self-control. He was hurting Bucket, throwing him around too much, biting him way too hard. Then he bit me. I was walking down to the goat shack one day and Igor ran up behind me and took a chunk out of my thigh. It didn't seem playful; he broke skin and did damage. It seemed intentional.

It happened again later that week—and this time there was no accident involved. I was sitting in my rocking chair, and stood up and took a step toward the house. Igor came out of nowhere and snapped at my arm, catching my fingers, doing even more damage. The following day, I tried to climb into bed with Joy—Igor and some other dogs were lying next to her at the time—and he attacked. Joy grabbed his collar before he made contact, but it was the first time in a long time I'd been scared by a dog.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what had happened. I told a couple of people the story, and they both said the same thing—that it's a different world in the badlands, and maybe we'd met something out by the Thumb.

“Met something?”

“You know—
something
.”

And I did know. But what that something could be was not a question I could answer. Maybe my shaman could. So I called Ken Robinson back and told him the story.

“Well,” he said afterward, “you met a land spirit.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Absolutely. I met a land spirit.”

He thought an offering of good tobacco would smooth over the situation. I didn't even hesitate. I tried the tobacco. I would have tried anything.

Joy and I both have favorite dogs. It's not intentional, but it's useful. When all the other dogs are making us crazy, on days the couch has been ripped open, the garbage upended, the shit piles strewn across the house, when our nerves are frayed and tether ends reached, these are the dogs we head toward. These favorites help us remember why we're in this game. Ahab was always my guiding light, but once he died, it was Bucket who replaced him. Once Otis was gone, Smash took that top spot for Joy. And it was Smash whom Igor attacked next.

We'd all been hanging out in the living room when a friend stopped by the house. I went out to the gate to greet him, leaving Joy alone with the dogs. By the time I returned, she was crying, Smash was shaking, and there was blood all over the place. In my absence, Igor had jumped to his feet and leaped on Smash. He'd bitten his face, punching incisors through cheek, going for the bone beneath. Bull terriers have incredibly powerful necks to go along with their incredibly powerful jaws. Igor used both to lift Smash straight up in the air and start whipping him back and forth, trying to snap his neck. Two more seconds, maybe five, and he would have succeeded. Joy got them apart before that happened, but it was the beginning of the end.

Because of the inbreeding required to produce all-white bull terriers, they're prone to epilepsy, and because of the epilepsy, they're prone to rage syndrome—which is like an epileptic fit, only with a berserker rage instead of the shakes. Whatever had happened to Igor on the Thumb had flipped that switch. There was no way to flip it back, no treatment for rage syndrome. The disease is progressive. Fits last longer, violence escalates. In Mexico, Joy once lost half of her face to this same escalation. So no, the good tobacco did not smooth over the situation.

We called our vet, scheduled euthanasia for the next morning, and had another very bad night. I got up early to take Igor for one last Five-Dog Workout—the very game I'd invented for him in the first place. I brought Poppycock and Bella and Bucket. We ran Coyote's Line again that day. I wanted it to be magical, I wanted it to change everything. Igor and I leaped the cornice and landed and bounded down and together and for those few seconds of primordial reenactment—just a man and a dog at play—everything did change, the way it always has. But then the moment was gone. There was no magic out there that day, only disappointment.

By the time we got to the bottom I was too sad and my heart wasn't in it. I slowed to a walk. I couldn't even look at Igor. Then I couldn't even walk. I just sat down in the dirt and buried my head in my hands. When I glanced up again, Poppycock was gone. She'd never run away before. I called and called and searched and searched, but it was getting late and the vet would be at our house any minute. I knew it was a bigger danger having Igor around the other dogs than it was having Poppycock lost in the badlands—but what kind of decision was that? Should I stay and hunt? Should I go keep Igor's appointment with death? Maybe Singer had it right—try to do the greatest good for the greatest number regardless of species—but some days, there's just no good to be done.