Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  "Come on," I said, "we'll figure this out together." I stood up and clapped my hands. He yawned mightily—often a sign of anxiety—and off we went up the trail, the rifle hanging from its sling on my shoulder, which gave him some relief. It wasn't in the discharge position. Still, he was cautious. Instead of ranging ahead of me, he followed at my heels, making sure he could keep me in sight at every moment. I walked slowly, watching and listening.

  We crested the ridge on which we had found the grouse, continued down into Turpin Creek, and climbed the next mountainside. As the sky grew dusky, we began to stroll up a basin, its upper reaches hidden from sight by a knoll that rose before us.

  All of a sudden, Merle rushed around me, his head lifted, his mouth open, his nose chewing at the drift of evening air, a drift so slight I found it nonexistent until I took my lighter from my pocket and struck it. The flame bent toward us as the twilight's cooling thermals began to make their way down the valley.

  Merle looked as if he were going to sneeze as he sucked on whatever scent was coming to him. He half closed his eyes, then opened them wide and began to pant excitedly, pumping his front legs up and down. He twirled once, his eyes glowing in the twilight.

  "What do you smell?" I asked.

  He shook his head in a circle and began to run forward.

  "Merle," I called in a stage whisper. "Come."

  He gave me an impatient look. I caught up to him, put my finger to my lips, hunched my shoulders and lowered my body, whispering, "Shhh. Quiet."

  Imitating me, he sunk a little bit.

  "Let's go, very quietly."

  Side by side, we began to move forward. A few minutes later, my hand on his shoulders, we peeked over the top of the knoll.

  Two hundred yards in front of us, across the next meadow and at the very edge of the pine forest, stood a large bull elk, thrashing his antlers against a tree. We had walked only a couple of hours, this was the opening day of elk season, and there stood a year's supply of meat. Since I ate no domestic meat, and hadn't done so for nearly two decades, getting an elk was no small matter.

  I glanced at Merle. He was staring at the elk as if magnetized. I didn't know what to do. Should I watch the elk until he walked into the forest and come back tomorrow morning, alone? Or should I shoot and traumatize Merle again?

  I leaned over and put my mouth on his ear. "Stay," I said. Our eyes were but a few inches apart. He looked at me defiantly: "Not on your life."

  Returning my mouth to his ear, I repeated, "Stay." And I jabbed my index finger into the ground. "Stay."

  "Ha," he panted. "Okay."

  But he lied.

  As I began to crawl forward, I turned around and saw him creeping after me on his belly. I put out my palm in the "stay" gesture he was supposed to have learned and glowered at him. "Stay," I mouthed.

  Stretched out, he wagged his tail imploringly—"Oh, don't make me stay"—but this time he didn't move.

  With oozing slowness, I swiveled on my hip and faced the elk. I exhaled slightly, held my breath, and felt the rifle become quiet in my hands. In that moment, I sent an apology toward him. Then I shot. He fell in a heap, and I turned around quickly, hoping to catch sight of Merle before he disappeared.

  He was galloping away, but not in the direction I had expected. He was flying up the meadow toward the elk with a passion that made me spring to my feet. Racing after him, I saw him prancing around the elk and burying his nose in its mane. By the time I reached him, he had hold of the elk's neck and was shaking it up and down as if the great deer were a ground squirrel. He began to rip out mouthfuls of hair, trying to get at the meat underneath, all the while moaning and whining in a joyous frenzy.

  "What a good dog you are!" I shouted.

  He began to twirl in the air, jumping up toward my face and woofing—this from the dog who virtually never barked. Had he been a human, he'd have been saying, "Oh, my god. This is unbelievable. An elk. We did it! We did it!"

  I sat down and watched him bury his nose in the elk's mane, drinking in its enormous, wild, musky smell. I let him be and reached over to put my hand on the elk's head. Closing my eyes, I felt this place I'd loved so long—its grass, its water—made manifest in him. Thanking him for his gift of food, I sent his spirit on its way.

  Seeing my stillness, Merle suddenly became very quiet. He sat by the elk's head and watched me with intense concentration, one brow going up, the other down, as he gauged my emotions.

  "Elk," I said. "Elk. They're the best."

  His tail broomed the duff.

  "Okay," I told him. "Now the work begins."

  For the next two hours, by headlamp, I skinned and quartered the elk, Merle going into what could only be described as rapture of the meat. He nibbled at the intestinal fat. He slurped the blood. He picked scraps of backstrap off the vertebrae. I fed him pieces of rib meat and neck meat and flank meat. Finally, his belly round and full, he fell asleep nearby, sprawled in the pine needles as he muttered excited little yips, his paws running and his eyes blinking.

  The Milky Way arced above us as we hiked toward the roadhead—he trotting in front of me now, instead of walking behind, his tail held high and waving gently back and forth. Watching him, I tried to piece together what I had just witnessed.

  Here was a dog who had fled the blast of a shotgun, yet, three weeks later, had sat not six feet behind me while I had shot a high-powered rifle. The two acclimatization shots with the .22 had probably done nothing to bring about this end. If anything, they had likely made him even more fearful of firearms. How had he made this turnaround?

  The only thing I could think of was that somehow, in his calculus, he had come to the conclusion that getting an elk was worth the price of being close to a gun going off. And that he had been fully aware that I had been trying to get the elk standing in the distance seemed obvious. My body language as I stalked it was like his body language when he stalked ground squirrels. That I wasn't attributing false powers of reasoning to him became ever clearer over the next weeks, and in the following hunting seasons. Whenever I took the shotgun from the shed, he would give it a disgruntled look, walk back to the porch, sit down, and stare at me with an expression that said, "I just remembered—I have something else to do." Whenever I took out the rifle, he would be waiting at the car door with his tail beating happily. Sometimes I tried to fool him and would emerge from the shed with a cased firearm. At the roadhead, when I uncased it, and he saw the shotgun, he'd get back into the car. If he saw the rifle, he'd come to my side with his tail wagging.

  Over the years, as we walked nearly every valley in the Gros Ventre Mountains on the eastern side of Jackson Hole, I began to see why early peoples so valued their dogs. Many times, when I couldn't detect any breeze, not even with my lighter, Merle would come to a stop and step out from behind me. (It had become apparent that he preferred that I walk first in the backcountry—at least on the outward-bound leg. On the way home, he would lead.) Raising his head to scent the air, he'd open his mouth, curl his upper lip, and half close his eyes. Nostrils dilating, he'd begin to wag his tail, indicating, "Elk."

  What he was doing, particularly by opening his mouth and curling his upper lip, was facilitating the access of odors to his vomeronasal organ, which in dogs lies above the upper incisors. This type of behavior, called the Flehmen response, is seen in many ungulates, such as horses, wild sheep, and bison, as well as in members of the cat family. It helps them determine whether another individual is in estrus, or the physiological state of the animal, or how long ago it passed by. Some dogs exhibit the Flehmen response and some don't.

  Merle would also take several rapid sniffs as he diagnosed a batch of drifting air. Interspersed between his normal breathing, these sniffs would pass the air he was inhaling over a bony structure called the subethmoidal shelf and then across the lining of the nasal membranes. When Merle exhaled, these odor-packed molecules stayed in place, giving him an extra few moments to appraise their contents.

 
Humans don't have a subethmoidal shelf. We do have two tiny pits on both sides of our septums, just inside the opening of the nose, but whether the nerves running from this vomeronasal-like organ to the brain are functional or vestigial has yet to be determined. The Human Genome Project has found that the gene believed to be essential for vomeronasal sensory neuron function in other mammals is nonfunctional in us, as well as in our cousins, the apes, and other Old-World primates. The olfactory bulbs, to which the vomeronasal nerves normally run in dogs, have also not been identified in humans. Nonetheless, some scientists believe that the location and structure of our vomeronasal-like organ suggests that it might be responsive to airborne chemicals.

  With that in mind, I let Merle teach me how to smell. I began to throw my head back, open my mouth, and curl my upper lip, letting the wafts of air circulate through the intermingled passages of mouth and nose. Occasionally, I, too, would catch the evanescent drift of the big, musky deer.

  Merle's hearing was also better than mine. Often, he would turn his head to the side, concentrate on some far-off sound, and look at me with his bright golden eyes that said, "Elk." Cupping my hand behind my ear, I would occasionally hear their faraway bugles sounding faintly from what seemed another universe. Acoustically, it was another universe. The average young human can hear sounds up to 20,000 hertz. Dogs can hear sounds up to about 45,000 hertz, and I was no longer a young human while Merle was a young dog.

  In addition, Merle's brain could make an instantaneous calculation about the direction of the sound by relying not only on his movable ear flaps but also on the minute time lapse between the sound striking first his ear nearer to the sound, then the one farther away. The calculus itself was done in two time-sensitive bundles of neurons on each side of his brain stem called the superior olive, which can detect differences in stimulation of only one-millionth of a second. By cocking his head, Merle was providing his brain with ever-finer spatial information that was then triangulated into the sound's distance and position.

  Humans use these very same anatomical structures to locate the direction of a sound, and, in fact, our hearing is superior to that of dogs in this regard. We have a spatial acuity of less than 1 degree, whereas dogs can localize sounds only in a 4- to 8-degree range. For this kind of auditory discrimination, the hearing of dogs is far better than that of horses and cattle, not as good as that of cats, and not nearly as good as that of elephants and dolphins, both of whom are slightly better than we are at determining precisely where a sound is coming from.

  Why such different hearing abilities evolved in various mammals illustrates how our senses act synergistically, in this case the two senses being hearing and vision. Consider what we do when we hear an unexpected sound: We instantly orient our head and eyes to it. In fact, this reflex is faster and more accurate than the one that turns our head and eyes toward a brief flash of light. What is actually happening is that we're focusing the central area of our eyes—the portion of our retina which contains the maximum density of nerve cells and thus the highest visual acuity—directly at the sound. In humans, this area encompasses 1.5 degrees of the retina. In dogs, it's about 6 degrees. In ungulates, like horses and elk, it's 30 degrees.

  Our hearing localization must therefore be this precise—1.5 degrees—so as to point our best vision directly at what might be ready to spring upon us. On the other hand, if you're a dog, with a 6-degree area of visual acuity, your hearing localization only has to be that good to enable you to spot a saber-tooth tiger rustling in the brush or a tasty elk sneaking away.

  Taking his eyes from mine, Merle would stare into the distance—still listening to a sound I couldn't hear—and wag his tail for emphasis: "Yep, my friend, there are elk in them thar hills."

  Interestingly enough, Merle chose not to point out the presence of mule deer to me. When we'd come upon them, the wind blowing from them to us, so that I was certain he had smelled them, I'd look down at him, my eyes asking, "Didn't you know they were there?" And he'd look back at me, his eyes saying, "Of course I knew they were there." I suspected he made no fuss over deer because we rarely ate them.

  I saw him act similarly even when he'd encounter fresh deer spoor. He'd give a faint, dismissive snort: "Oh, just mule deer." If it was elk spoor, his interest would increase according to its degree of freshness. Old, dry pellets or tracks, he'd ignore. If the spoor was under a day old, he'd consider it reflectively. Fresh spoor, deposited within the hour, would electrify him. His tail would begin to lash; he'd look around; he'd gaze at me with gleaming eyes: "Yes, yes, elk ahead. Let's go."

  As the years went by, and he observed more of the animals among whom we lived, his body language—as he smelled their tracks and droppings—would display how he felt about them. Of coyote spoor, he remained forever disdainful. He'd prod the turd with his front paw—always the right one—then give it a quick shot of pee, a scrape, a grin, a rapid "ha-ha-ha" pant, and move on. Wolf scat, he'd take apart with the same poking motion of his paw that he used with coyote sign, but after a sniff, his face would fill with deep consideration. No grin, no pant, no pee. He'd give me a sidelong glance from under his brows: "Yes, the big dog has stood here."

  If he'd come across the ropy pies of grizzly bear, he'd take a deep, shuddering breath, finishing with a tremor at the bottom of the intake. A slow and steady look around the forest would follow—almost always we found grizzly scat in the forest—his eyes calm but very watchful. A small, respectful wag of the tail. "The great shambling one. Let's watch our step." With black bear, he'd give no more than several quick snorts, a little poke with his claws to reveal half-digested fruit, an off-handed grin. "The little bear. Maybe we'll see him. Not to worry. No trouble here."

  The round prints of mountain lion would send him into a cascade of frustrated breaths. It was the only animal whose spoor Merle smelled without having seen the animal itself—not that he was unobservant. In nearly forty years of walking through lion country, I've seen only five of the secretive cats, one of them with Merle by my side; but the cougar had been so far away that I had had to use a spotting scope to make it out. When we came upon lion spoor, I loved to watch him breathe in the cat scent, for surely he recognized that brand of odor from the domestic cats of Kelly. Yet there must have been orders of magnitude difference between the two. His concentration over lion scat or prints reminded me of a scholar poring over a fragile manuscript, written in a language barely discernible to him, the ancient roots of the words familiar, the grammar almost parsable, but the meaning—a physical shape for the animal—just beyond his grasp. He'd go down the trail with his brow furrowed, his nose returning again and again to the track.

  Pronghorn antelope excited him as much as elk, but in a different way. It was as if the antelope's speed gave Merle an extra burst of eagerness to be stalking, and, because pronghorn live in open country, he'd raise his head above the sage, looking far and wide. "Ah, there!" He'd fix his gaze upon them, cantering in the distance, and send me a quick look that said, "Have you spotted them, Ted?"

  Moose was the one ungulate who had chased us with determination, the one animal who seemed truly dangerous and unpredictable to Merle, barreling out of the snow, teeth clacking, hair on its hump erect, ears back, eyes blazing. When he'd encounter their big oblong pellets, he'd take several cautiously respectful inhalations, as if recollecting our close calls.

  Bison. A tremor ran along his fur, making it shimmer. A sigh escaped him. So much like cattle. A plaintive look at me. "If you would only let me chase them."

  Some of the people to whom I mentioned Merle's distinct reactions to different spoor suggested that I might be projecting my feelings about these animals onto my dog. However, I frequently observed Merle encounter sign when ranging far ahead of me. Stopping, he'd put his nose to ground and I'd see his body language change while I was still too far away to identify the spoor. He'd turn toward me, and the way he held himself, the concern or merriment in his eyes, the angle of his tail, and the noises he would
make would clearly indicate "Grizzly—heads up," or "The big dog has been watching us," or "Crazy moose around."

  This sort of response from a dog who spent so much of his life in the wild shouldn't surprise us. Our own body language changes when we see a group of schoolchildren, a nun, or a band of mercenaries armed with AK-47s. All of us who are versed in human culture have the ability to make these sorts of discriminations instantly and to communicate our feelings to others. Dogs simply do this with their noses and communicate their findings in nonverbal ways. The olfactory process, however, is similar to the visual one. In fact, in some respects, it's far more precise.

  Coming upon the middle of a track, for example, dogs can identify the direction in which the maker of the track has gone even when there are no visual clues. I often saw Merle do this when we'd come upon an elk track, so ill-defined on a rocky trail that it was impossible for me to ascertain which way the toes were pointing. Merle would zip up and down the tracks for a few feet and, inevitably, turn in the direction that the elk was traveling—something I could determine only when we came upon the elk's prints incised in softer ground.

  Dogs are able to "read" tracks in this fashion by gauging the minute differences between each subsequent print's olfactory strength. The ability to smell with this level of acuity may seem incomprehensible to us, relying as we do on our eyes. But as the veterinarian Linda Aronson points out, being able "to discriminate between the age of two footsteps left 30 minutes earlier by a person walking at one stride per second, is an acuity of one part in 1,800.... [H]uman visual acuity is this good, it's just a matter of what your senses are programmed to compute."

  To people who have been professionally trained to use their noses, these highly evolved canine olfactory skills aren't nearly as foreign as they appear to the rest of us. The French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, for instance, can tell from just one sniff of a jasmine essence the flower's country of origin and whether the machine that distilled it was made from stainless steel, aluminum, or steel. To Ellena, who has created scents for some of France's best-known perfume houses, a great perfume has a memorable sillage—a word that means "wake," "slipstream," or "vapor trail"—and is "the sense of a person being present in the room after she has left."