Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  Merle, his nose lovingly caressing the invisible and airborne trails of elk, knew all about sillage.

  And finally there were bighorn sheep. He'd inhale a quick, almost wistful breath over their diminutive pellets and then immediately glance at the cliffs around us, for we always found sheep scat in precipitous terrain. A dreamy look would cross his face, mixed with a bit of slyness. Sheep were the only large wild animal I had seen him chase, and he had perfected his method with amazing duplicity. The road on which we ski-skated ran under a series of cliffs where the sheep wintered, and the sheep would periodically cross the road on their way to the river for a drink. Scenting them on the wind, Merle would speed up, vanish from my sight, and chase them down the steep banks of the river, but only so far. Rushing back to the road, he'd be waiting innocently for me. His tracks, though, told me what he had done.

  "You are a very bad dog," I'd say. Of course, it would do no good to try to punish him after the fact. He'd laugh: "Me? I've just been standing here waiting for you."

  On a couple of occasions, however, when the wind was blowing perpendicular to our line of travel, we crested the hill by the cliffs and found thirty bighorns crossing the road. Merle—forgetting the lesson of the choke collar and that I was right behind him on my skis—went from zero to sixty in an instant, heading directly for the flock.

  At the top of my lungs, I shouted, "Merle, no!" He piled up in the snow, literally slamming on the brakes with his front paws, his head going down between his legs in a show of utter disappointment. Bringing himself erect, he emitted a huge sigh and looked back at me with chagrin.

  "No!" I repeated.

  "Ha-ha-ha," he replied, his eyes twinkling. "Don't worry." And he gave his tail a barely apologetic wag, meaning, "I wasn't serious. I was just testing them."

  Why he would chase bighorn sheep and not other wildlife, I couldn't fathom. Around the house, when he wasn't aware I was watching him, he'd walk to within forty feet of mule deer and simply glance at them. Not so much as a flicker of interest in chasing them. Perhaps his abiding interest in bighorn sheep had been kindled when he was on his own in the desert. Like cattle, sheep might have helped him to survive. He might have caught a lamb on the cliffs of the San Juan River, and ever afterward bighorns were like a remembered ice-cream cone for an orphan—seeing or smelling one, even years later, evoking a memory of comfort during a dark time.

  This, then, was the olfactory world in which Merle lived, and in which I did as well, for I often got down on my knees and tried to smell what he was smelling, to appreciate, even faintly, what he knew. It's a world that has, by and large, vanished from the consciousness of most dogs and most humans, a world in which he and I reveled, for we were living in a one-to-one relationship between those animals we smelled and those we ate and those who might eat us. It made walking outside an intimate, mindful adventure.

  Occasionally, I would notice things Merle didn't, particularly animals standing still in the distance—a function of humans having more cone photoreceptors in their eyes than dogs. The cones let us see colors well, especially in bright light. Dogs, contrary to popular belief, can see colors, predominantly blues and yellows, but they can't differentiate between red, orange, and green objects. They probably see these colors as tints of yellow or blue. On the other hand, dogs have more rod photoreceptors than we do, and these allow them to see better in dim light.

  On the darkest night, Merle would walk through the forest as if it were lit by spotlights, while I would stumble along behind him. Finally I'd light my headlamp, and he'd turn around, his eyes yellow and lit like two ghoulish orbs. This striking phenomenon, seen in many crepuscular and nocturnal animals, is caused by the tapetum lucidum, a layer of cells located behind the animal's photoreceptors. It reflects light back through the retina, in essence giving the retinal photoreceptors a second opportunity to react to each quantum of light and promoting better low-light vision.

  Without uttering a sound, he'd give me and my headlamp an impatient look: "Do you really need that?"

  But I had my moments as well. I would often have to hold his head, pointing his eyes at some elk only two hundred yards off.

  "Elk," I'd say. He'd wag his tail tentatively. "Where?" Then they'd move, and he'd exclaim in several breathy gasps, "Of course, of course. Now I see them."

  At other times, his ability to see motion was uncanny. Dogs not only have more motion-sensitive rod photoreceptors than humans, but also possess a 250-degree field of view, 70 degrees wider than ours. Many a time, I'd see him suddenly fix his gaze to tree line a thousand yards off. Scanning with great attention, I'd finally spy several tiny dots moving into the forest. Raising my binoculars, I'd see elk.

  All in all, our individual strengths and weaknesses complemented each other. With contacts, I have 20/10 vision. Extensive behavioral tests reveal that most dogs have about 20/75 vision. My greater visual acuity was a result of my optic nerves having 1.2 million nerve fibers as compared to Merle's 167,000. On the other hand, he had 200 million scent receptors in his nasal folds compared to my five million. One might say, then, that my visual acuity for stationary objects was seven times better than his; but his nose, in all respects, was forty times better than mine.

  He was also constantly monitoring what was going on around him, rather than being distracted, as I often was, by assumptions, projections, and hopes. Once, for example, Merle, my friend Bob Ciulla, and I were sitting on a bald ridge. Bob and I were panning our binoculars across the valley to tree line where we believed some elk would emerge.

  Merle made the tiniest whine from behind me.

  "Shh," I whispered, "be quiet."

  A moment later, he whined again in an undertone, but more agitated.

  "Shh," I said. "Look over there." And I pointed across the valley.

  A few seconds later he nudged my shoulder with his snout and whined again. I turned and saw his eyes dancing with eagerness. Rotating his head, he pointed behind us with a leading motion of his nose.

  I followed his gaze and there were three elk, walking in a line into the forest. They had crossed not a hundred yards behind us, and I could have easily shot one. Merle turned to me with a look that said, "I was trying to tell you."

  There were many, many times he acted in this way, discreetly nudging me with his snout or alerting me with a tiny whine—the way a person would whisper—while I was intent upon searching in only one direction. I'd follow his gaze and see elk, or suddenly smell or hear them. And what always impressed me about his behavior, especially when he'd lope back through the forest to fetch me, was his absolute sense that we were a team—that it was only through me and the rifle that he'd fulfill one of his greatest desires: to eat an animal as big as an elk.

  This suite of skills—his keen senses and his unflagging passion for hunting elk and antelope—led me to conclude that it was the newly domesticated wolves who were the initiators of the dog–human hunting partnership. They were the ones who scented and heard game first. They led the way toward it. They reaped the immediate benefits as the animals were field dressed. Subsequently, it was the humans who realized, just as I did, that these were pretty handy friends to have around.

  On some mornings, when Merle and I had found nothing, though we'd been walking since dawn, we'd stop on a high vantage point and have a snack in the warm sun: a bit of elk jerky, dog biscuits, a cup of tea, a muffin. Merle would eat everything I had. Occasionally, if I ran out of food, I'd eat one of his dog biscuits—dry, but edible. He would then hang his paws over the edge of the precipice on which we'd stopped and gaze out across the valleys and mountains, sweeping his eyes over the country with what appeared to be both appreciation and an intent reconnaissance for game. I saw him do this virtually every time we were out, even when we had set up camp in the trees. He would lie on the edge of a grand prospect, paws hanging over the edge, gazing from valley to ridge crest to mountain peak. It seemed important to him to be able to watch over big distances.

  After
a while, our morning snack done, I'd lie with my head on my pack and pull my cap over my eyes. Before long I'd hear Merle get up from his perch, come to my side, lie down next to me, and put his head on my chest. I'd put an arm around his shoulders, and we'd sleep that way for a half hour or so. Waking—his warm fur under my hand, his ribs rising and falling—I'd have the sense that time had disappeared. There was no such thing as the twentieth or twenty-first centuries—no cars, no rifles—only him and me in a place that seemed as familiar as our own skins.

  This sense of utter familiarity with a place that was more of a home than the one I had grown up in often piqued my curiosity. It was a feeling that friends of mine—who hadn't grown up in the Rockies but had lived here a long time, as I had—sometimes spoke about: this sense of walking old ground. From where, I wondered, did this feeling come?

  Then I heard of the Oxford University geneticist Bryan Sykes and his work tracing our ancestry through the use of mitochondrial DNA. Sykes became well known when he examined the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old corpse that had been found in 1991, well preserved, in the melting ice of an Italian glacier. In the course of his mtDNA analysis, Sykes discovered that the Iceman had the same mtDNA as one of the women who worked in his lab, Marie Moseley, whose mtDNA scan happened to be on file in the lab's records.

  Overnight, Moseley became an international celebrity—the living relative of one of the most ancient humans ever found. She also developed, as Sykes reported, a warm connection to the Iceman. She began to think of him as a real person, a relative who, with his ancient ice ax, had lost his way and perished in the Alps.

  This inspired the dreamer in Sykes. "It began to dawn on me," he wrote, "that if Marie could be genetically linked to someone long dead, thousands of years before any records were kept, then so could everyone else." With that in mind, he set out to map the mtDNA of modern people so as to give the fossil record a richer context. "The past," he wrote, "is within us all."

  Within the next decade, Sykes applied mtDNA analysis to several long-standing controversies: the origins of Polynesians (he confirmed that they came from Asia, not South America as was once thought); the authenticity of one of the claimants to the Romanov throne (the claimant, he found, was not related); whether Neanderthals were our direct ancestors (they were not, the mtDNA evidence showed); and whether Europeans were the descendants of hunter-gatherers who had first reached Europe fifty thousand years ago or farmers and pastoralists who had walked into Europe relatively recently, from the Middle East, only ten thousand years before the present.

  This last question was of keen interest to me, because my ancestors were originally from Greece and had not been known to have the slightest interest in wildlife except how to keep it from eating their crops. Some of my ancestors had also been fishermen. How had I become fascinated with great, alpine mountains, with elk and grizzly bears, and with a dog whose idea of hearth and home was to hang his paws over two thousand feet of empty space and gaze into glacial distances? What unlikely pull had this place exerted upon me?

  At the time Sykes was doing his research, most genetic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence had corroborated the theory that it was the farmers who had overwhelmed the hunter-gatherers in Europe and thence passed their genes on to those of us who are of European ancestry. Sykes, however, remained unswayed by his scientific colleagues in other disciplines. He believed that his evidence was correct—that mitochondrial DNA matches between people today and those of the past, going back far beyond ten thousand years, was "the genetic echo of the hunter-gatherers."

  An answer finally came from "Cheddar Man," a skeleton excavated in 1903 from the Cheddar Gorge near Bath, England. The remains had been dated to nine thousand years before the present, at least three thousand years before farming had reached the British Isles. Sykes extracted some DNA from one of Cheddar Man's teeth and the sequence of his nucleotide bases—the four key components of DNA, known as adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—were unequivocal. Their exact arrangement lay at the heart of the largest of the seven mtDNA clusters that Sykes had found in modern Europeans. "The Upper Paleolithic gene pool," Sykes wrote with undisguised glee, "had not been fatally diluted by the Middle Eastern farmers. There was more of the hunter in us than anyone had thought."

  I wondered, though, where I had come from. Given my Greek ancestry, and the long history of agricultural and seafaring life in my family, wasn't it probable that I was related to Sykes's seventh and last cluster—those nouveaux arrivés farmers who had first settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Fertile Crescent before moving to Europe relatively recently? But why, then, did I feel that "echo" coming from cold, northern mountains, that sense in my fingers, as I stroked Merle's fur, that he and I had lived this hunting life before?

  I had nothing to lose but my illusions. I sent a DNA sample to Sykes's lab in Oxford, a saliva swab from the inside of my cheeks. Six weeks later, I found a thick envelope in my post office box. Not since I was a child at Christmas had I opened a package with more excitement.

  And there it was: My great-great-great-great-going-back-20,000-years grandmother was a woman Sykes named Helena. She had lived at a time when the last ice age was at its peak. Her family fished and gathered shellfish during the winter along the south coast of France and migrated each spring up to the Massif Central to hunt big game.

  Her DNA is my DNA, just as it is the DNA of about 45 percent of Europeans presently alive, for she had many descendents. She spent a considerable portion of her life at the foot of glaciers, relying on red deer for her sustenance. And what Europeans call red deer, North Americans call elk. It is the same circumpolar species, Cervus elaphus, and the relationship between the two—elk and humans—has gone on for more than fifty thousand years, according to M. R. Jarman, a scholar of Paleolithic and Neolithic European deer economies. "Broadly speaking," he writes, "the same individual human populations and their descendants exploited continually the same individual red deer populations and their descendants....This in itself implies that a mutually favorable relationship was achieved between the two species; it is not likely that so successful and so well-balanced a relationship could survive for such long periods if it were simply a case of a parasitic predator exploiting a prey population to the latter's detriment."

  My fingers deep in Merle's reddish-gold fur, I thought of his 30,000-year-old wolfish ancestor, walking from someplace in Eurasia, as my long-gone great-grandparents walked by his side. I saw them resting on an escarpment, looking to the west, and seeing below them the great herds of red deer who fed them along the way.

  I stretched and sat up. Merle also got up and did a doggy bow, bending his neck upward in muscular delight. It was an invitation I accepted. I went into the yoga pose called the downward-facing dog, modifying it so I rested on my forearms. Raising my face so I was nose to nose with him, I wagged my butt. He batted me playfully on the shoulder with his paw.

  Then he came erect and lifted his snout sharply, opening his mouth, curling his lip, and sucking in the air. His tail began to beat strongly; he looked me in the eye: "I smell elk."

  Picking up my pack, I said, "Lead on."

  And tail high, he began to lope into the breeze. I followed at his heels, forgetting and remembering who we were as we slid back and forth through time.

  Chapter 5

  Building the Door

  We became inseparable. Which isn't to say he dogged my heels. I'd go to work; he'd do his rounds through Kelly. When he'd return to the trailer, he'd stand by the screen door and make a lisping sound, clucking his tongue on the roof of his mouth, indicating, "Hello, could you please let me in?" Sometimes he would substitute a glottal stop, a sound akin to the pause between the two syllables in the interjection "uh-oh" or in the paused inflection native speakers give to the word "Hawaii."

  It astonished me that he didn't bark or whine or scratch as most domestic dogs would. When and where had he learned the merits of silence? Perhaps it had been during his da
ys wandering the desert, stalking ground squirrels and cattle, and avoiding coyotes, rattlesnakes, and Navajo herders with guns. In this respect—moving quietly through the world—Merle wasn't that unusual.

  Charles Darwin paid particular note to the atavism of domestic dogs who became feral and quickly stopped barking, opting, instead, for the silence of their wild cousins. Wolves, for example, though great howlers, will often give no more than a "woof" when they're startled or protecting their den or territory. Occasionally, they'll intersperse these woofs with a howl and sometimes even a growl, but compared to domestic dogs, wolves are practically mute.

  Coyotes, too, lead relatively quiet lives. Despite their taxonomic name, Canis latrans, which means "the barking dog," they never resort to that mind-numbing "rau, rau, rau, rau, rau, rau, rau" that characterizes domestic dogs the world over. In fact, a coyote's bark is often a prelude to a howl song, in the pattern of "yip-yip-howl, yip-yip-howl." When coyotes do bark without howling, they vary their tones and keep it short. And jackals—the small, omnipresent wild dog of Africa and Asia—are even less vocal than coyotes.

  Yet wild dogs are impressionable, as the ethologist Desmond Morris points out. Kept near domestic dogs, they can lose their silent ways and pick up the habit of barking. Why, then, didn't Merle learn to bark when he moved to Kelly from the San Juan River?

  The answer to the mystery had to do with both his breed and his surroundings. The latter was easier to unravel—he simply had no tutors. Bucking a planet-wide trend, the dogs of Kelly rarely barked. This curious phenomenon was, I believe, the result of the village's lack of fences, a custom fostered by a couple in their seventies, Donald and Gladys Kent.