Chaser (8 page)

The puppy was a long way from any referential understanding of these words. But after all my experiences with animals in and out of the lab, these signs indicated that she had enormous potential for learning. That gave me goose bumps.

Sally came out of the bedroom and I looked up to see her smiling at the puppy and me.

“You're up early,” I said.

“I'm excited about our puppy,” she said. “What have I missed while you've been up and about? You must have been doing something to tire this little dynamo out.”

Sally knelt down and stroked the puppy. She stirred and stretched herself awake at Sally's touch, and then clambered into her lap and arms just as she'd done at Wayne West's farm the day before. After our years without a dog, it filled my heart with joy to see a puppy basking in Sally's nurturing glow again.

I told Sally about the morning so far. She approved of everything except my concern over the feral cat's apparent interest in the puppy. “Don't worry yourself about that,” she said. “That cat's not going to get a chance to hurt our puppy.”

But I wasn't convinced. “That cat's twice her size,” I said, “and you yourself said a few days ago that it was wreaking havoc among the songbirds and squirrels.”

“Hush, John. The birds and squirrels are tiny compared to the puppy.” She held the puppy close to her face and said, “And you're gonna get big fast, aren't you?”

“I don't know,” I said.

Sally kissed the puppy and put her down on the floor, then turned to me and said, “What about a nice breakfast on this special day?”

When I first met Sally she was a student nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital and I was a seminary student doing a counseling tutorial with one of the hospital chaplains. I was immediately captivated by her petite beauty, her oval face framed by short brown hair under the double-frill cap that Philadelphia General nurses wore, but also by the way she was joshing with a patient. This was in the psychiatric ward, and it moved me to see how Sally was giving an obviously very troubled man a few moments of relaxed fun. Her hair has turned white, but as throughout our marriage she can still josh me out of a troubled state of mind with her radiant brown eyes, her loving smile, and her unfailing common sense.

While Sally made scrambled eggs and I saw to toast, coffee, and orange juice, the puppy wandered around the first floor. The door to the basement stairs was closed as usual, and the stairs up to the loft area where guests stayed and I had my desk and files were a little too high for her. When she brought a toy over to one of us, she got a warm welcome and praise. Intermittently I verbalized actions she was making—“Take toy,” etc.—to continue reinforcing the associations she was quickly forming with the sounds of those words.

When we sat down to breakfast, we gave the puppy her morning kibble. We wanted to build the habit of having her eat her meals when we did: breakfast, lunch, and dinner while she was a puppy, and then two meals a day, morning and evening, when she was fully grown. Sally and I grinned at seeing the puppy wolf down her food with gusto.

After we cleared the table I figured it was time for a little formal obedience training. If we couldn't reliably get the puppy to come to us when we called, it would never be safe to let her off the leash near a road and it would be hard to extend her learning in any dimension. So that would be her first lesson.

Teaching the puppy to come to the sound of “Here!” also had the virtue of being an easy lesson. I cut up some little pieces of cheese to use as lures and rewards. Even after a good breakfast, the smell of savory cheese got her attention. Then I knelt down in front of the puppy and held a piece of cheese a mere two inches from her nose while I softly said, “Here! Here!” She moved forward to take the cheese in her mouth and gobble it up, and I praised and petted her as she did.

Any complex behavior is a chain of simpler behaviors. In teaching the complex behavior it often works best to teach the chain of smaller actions in reverse and train from the end to the beginning. That way the learner, who could just as easily be a human student as a canine one, can progress through the chain of actions with increasing confidence, always secure in what the final desired result is. The idea of training from the end lay behind Wayne West's suggestion that a farmer with a young Border collie should let the dog out of the truck to follow its instinct and run around behind livestock after they'd been attracted by some hay. I used the same principle many times in experiments with rats, pigeons, and dogs in my lab at Wofford.

Step by step I began the process of getting the puppy to come to me and the cheese from farther away. From two inches we moved to four inches, eight inches, a foot, and then a few feet apart.

Five minutes of that was enough. I didn't want either of us to lose focus, and too much food at once would satiate her and lose its value for training.

Off and on through the rest of the day, we alternated training the puppy to come on hearing Sally or me say “Here!” with play with toys, exploratory sessions in the yard, and a couple of good naps. By the middle of the afternoon, the puppy came eagerly to “Here!” even when I was out of sight around a corner. Although she was delighted to get food treats, both yummy little biscuits and cheese, it excited me to see that praise and pets seemed to lift her spirits and please her even more than the food. That had something to do with both her individual temperament and her working Border collie lineage, I felt sure. In any case, it was another very promising sign for her long-term training. The food was an external motivation, and external motivations are never as strong and reliable as internal, instinctual ones.

Around four o'clock there was a knock at the door. It was our friend Nora, a smile lighting up her face under her short, spiky blond hair. The puppy was enormously excited to meet another person. Ears up and tail wagging furiously, she lay down in front of Nora and looked at her expectantly. The puppy was so worked up that she wet herself and a small spot appeared and spread on the floor as Nora bent down to pet her and coo at her. A flower child with a country twang who was born and raised on a farm and had a dog and a cat of her own, Nora didn't bat an eye. We didn't make any fuss ourselves, lest we reinforce the urinating behavior. We knew this was a behavior that was likely to disappear as the puppy grew more accustomed to her surroundings and to meeting new people. Instead we just got a wet cloth to wipe the moisture off the puppy's fur and clean up the little puddle of pee on the floor.

Nora said, “I could have called, but I couldn't wait to meet your beautiful puppy. Do you think she's ready for a late-afternoon walk with the Ya-Yas?”

“I don't see why not,” Sally said. “The usual time?”

“Yes, but don't you come by for us. We'll come around to you, so all the dogs can meet at once and we can get any hullabaloo over with.”

Sally and a few of her women friends in the neighborhood loved the book and movie
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
. They dubbed themselves the Ya-Ya Winos and made that the tagline for their evening get-togethers, during which they imbibe a bit of wine and good Southern bourbon. The closest thing to a gang our neighborhood will likely ever see, Sally and the other original Ya-Ya Winos had first met years earlier while walking their respective pets. Based on their mutual love of dogs (to be fair, some members of the group have also had cats, like Nora's big fluffy orange cat, Slick), these crusty, savvy seniors—ninety-year-old Miss Lucy was the oldest, followed by Sally, Theresa, Nora, Marie, and Marge—soon developed a ritual of daily walks and twice-a-month get-togethers at one another's houses.

About an hour after Nora's visit, I looked out the window and saw her and two other members of the Ya-Yas, Marie and Theresa, approaching the house with their dogs. Nora had her Heinz 57 variety, Annie, a sweet swaybacked mutt with a penchant for eating dirt. Marie, a laid-back California transplant with light gray hair falling just below her chin, had her handsome golden retriever, Fafner. And Theresa had her miniature schnauzer, Holly. Tall with strawberry blond hair and porcelain skin, Theresa is a true Southern belle, and she was elegantly dressed for the walk as she is for every occasion. Sally put the puppy on the leash, and I went out with them to say hello to the ladies.

Marie said, “You should have gotten another dog ages ago.”

I said, “Yes, we were just waiting for the right one.”

“She's adorable,” Theresa said.

“I told you all she was,” Nora said.

Marie asked, “What are you going to call her?”

Sally said, “Nothing's struck us as fitting her just yet. Let us know if you have any suggestions. In the meantime, her name is Puppy.”

Fafner, Holly, and Annie were milling around sniffing at the puppy. She sniffed back, but as with the dogs at the back fence she stood quite still and showed little interest in them. Nothing in her body language indicated fear or distress. Her ears and tail weren't down. But she was plainly much more interested in the people.

Introductions over, the walk began. The puppy didn't want to leave our yard. Sally beckoned to the puppy, gave a slight tug on the leash, and said, “C'mon, Puppy.” But she didn't want to go. Sally wasn't about to put up with that, but she was too wise to engage in a contest of wills. I watched from our front porch as Sally scooped the puppy up. The puppy instantly relaxed in the cradle of her arms.

As Sally carried the puppy into the street I noticed the feral cat stalking toward them. Before I could say anything a car turned onto our block and the cat darted away. Sally turned back to the house and waved at me as she waited for the car to go by, and then the Ya-Yas trooped away on their constitutional.

At dinner Sally told me that she had carried the puppy most of the time. But on the last little stretch, the puppy had walked along on the leash very nicely.

“I'm still worried about that feral cat,” I told her.

“That cat's doing anything to the puppy is unlikely, if you ask me.”

“Well, I'm going to talk to the neighbors about not putting out food and water for it. Let it move on to some other neighborhood.”

“John, you're really overreacting.”

My voice rising sharply, I said, “Well, if you don't want me talking to the neighbors about the cat, maybe I'll have to call animal control about it.”

Sally's voice rose to match mine as she snapped, “That's ridiculous!”

I was about to launch into a vehement reply when Sally said, “Where's Puppy gone to?”

The puppy had been lying quietly on the living room rug after eating her dinner. But now she was nowhere to be seen. Sally and I got up from the table and both called, “Here! Here, Puppy! Here, girl!”

She didn't come to us. A moment later we found her in the bedroom, lying at the far end of her crate. My heart sank at the distress our raised voices had caused the puppy, and at the thought that in one rash moment I might have undone the learning to come to “Here” that she'd achieved earlier.

Sally and I spoke softly to the puppy: “Here, Puppy; here, girl. Everything's all right. The storm has passed. Here, girl.” A little hesitantly, she came out of the crate to be petted and praised.

“Gosh, Sally, I'm so sorry I spoke the way I did.”

“I'm sorry about how I spoke too.”

We both vowed to be more careful if we disagreed about something in the puppy's presence. Half an hour later, when we were all settled comfortably in the living room, I got a few treats and tried the “Here” exercise with the puppy again. Her first responses were a fraction slower than before the argument. But she was soon coming to find me eagerly, even if I was out of sight, when I said “Here!” in an encouraging tone. Fortunately no damage had been done, and I marveled at the puppy's extreme sensitivity to sound and tone of voice. That was a boon to training if I respected and capitalized on it, and a potential disaster if I ignored it.

A little later I got into bed mulling over the day's experiences. All in all it was a great day. We seemed to have a puppy as bright and quick to learn as she was loving. The Lobster King had bestowed bountiful gifts on her, and it was up to Sally and me to make the best or the worst of them. With luck, we would make the best of them.

But that feral cat still preyed on my mind.

5

T
HE PUPPY'S OBEDIENCE
training took on new urgency a month later during a visit from our young friend Allyson Gibson, a 2003 Wofford College graduate. Thank God Allyson came to see us that day. She ended up saving our puppy's life.

I met Allyson in her senior year during a January interim trip to the Everglades. Interims are a distinctive Wofford tradition. Between terms, students pick an intense month-long study that can have little or nothing to do with their major. Interim is a wonderful learning opportunity that is largely experience based, designed to get students out of their comfort zones and show them new ways of looking at the world.

Since I retired, Alliston Reid has invited me to help lead several interim trips. Alliston and I began traveling together on kayak trips and interims when he was an undergraduate, and it's been wonderful for me as a professor emeritus to join him and current Wofford students on interims in Florida and the Caribbean. It was on the second such interim in Florida that I met Allyson.

We were in the Everglades, off the grid, without the distraction of electronic devices. That provided ample time to get to know Allyson, who told me fascinating stories about spending her junior year abroad as that year's Wofford Presidential International Scholar. Studying the impact of globalization on world music traditions had taken her to India and other developing countries in Africa and South America. The experience had left her wondering if she should dedicate her life to being a medical missionary rather than pursue her passion for physics.