by Ted Kerasote
At least I thought this was what he was hollering until a day when he demonstrated that he could be quite independent of me when he wanted to—that he was hardly a beta dog following his alpha human around.
I was with a couple of friends from Kelly and as we left the parking lot on the west side of Teton Pass we ran into Davie Agnew, a mutual friend from Idaho. A crusty, barrel-chested Scot and a renowned backcountry skier, Davie suggested that we join him and his companions for a tour to one of his secret spots. This was an invitation from a pioneer of skiing on the pass, and we agreed immediately, following him up to a ridge above Mail Cabin Creek and then down a series of undulating hogbacks that fell toward the Idaho state line. Each time we passed a bowl of untracked snow, I thought that Davie would surely stop and ski it. But he continued down the spine of the ridge, bypassing several magnificent high basins. Each time I paused at a bowl, Merle gazed at me with a quizzical expression: "Aren't we going to ski this? It looks great."
At the fourth basin, after Davie and the rest of the group had continued down the ridge, I gave Merle a shrug and said, "I guess not. Let's go."
I turned and skied off, expecting him to follow. But I heard no running paws. I stopped and looked back. He was staring into the bowl, his head cocked, an expression of longing on his face. Noticing that I had stopped, he looked at me and wagged his tail encouragingly. When I didn't move, he returned his gaze to the bowl. A moment later, without giving me another glance, he leapt off the ridgetop and began to ski the bowl himself—front legs extended, rear legs trailing behind him, turning left, then right, as he carved turns to the bottom of the valley. I watched, astounded.
Finally, several hundred feet down, the gradient leveled off and Merle came to a stop. Shaking himself, he turned and looked up at me with a panting grin and a whipping tail. "It's outrageous! You don't know what you're missing."
I slipped off the edge and figure-eighted my dog's turns.
"You know good snow, Señor!" I cried, coming up to him.
His tail beat so hard it slapped his ribs.
"And I won't believe you again, if you cry when I go out of sight." I shook my finger at him playfully. "You just want first tracks."
"Ha-ha-ha," he laughed.
"Sir, let me break trail up to the rim for you."
He fell in behind me. A half hour later, we caught the rest of the group, still making its way down through the forest. Davie never led us to his fabled cache of powder, so it was only Merle and I, thanks to him, who enjoyed decent turns that day.
Much as I loved skiing with Merle, I sometimes had to go without him. Dogs aren't allowed in the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park and sometimes I wanted to ski there—the peaks are higher than those on Teton Pass, the runs longer, there are fewer people, and it was closer to home. But just as Merle had figured out the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, so, too, had he learned to classify skis. Cross-country skis meant only a walk; skating skis meant a run on a groomed track; and alpine touring skis—wonders of wonders—meant powder skiing downhill.
Whenever I put these hefty skis in the car, his entire demeanor would change. Had he been a human, I'd have said that he'd drunk too many double espressos. His heart rate went up; he began to pant; his eyes became bright; his motions became rapid—head moving, paws going up and down. Let out of the car, he'd zoom along the snowbanks of the plowed-out parking lot, smelling urine spots, squirting them—pow, pow, pow—galloping back to me, and stamping his feet. "Not ready yet?"
"Not quite."
He'd throw himself onto the snow and rub his back before hurling himself upright. Shaking sinuously from nose to his tail, he'd pant, "Let's go! Let's go!"
"Are you finally ready?" I'd ask innocently.
He'd buck like a horse pricked by a burr. "Ready! I've been ready for hours!"
"Let's go, then!"
And up the trail he'd dash.
So whenever I put my alpine touring skis in the car, and then left him home, it was agony. His look would have caved the heart of a stone Buddha: shock, incredulity, disappointment. "I thought," his eyes would say as he stood on the porch, "that we were a team."
I would kneel by his side, put my arm around his shoulders, and say, "I'm sorry. I'm going to ski in the park. I love you, and I'll be back in a few hours. Then we can go for another ski."
My tone of voice only confused him: the familiar sounds of "I love you," full of sincerity, followed by my leaving him home.
"What is going on?" his somber look said as I drove away.
True to my word, I'd return in a few hours and we'd crosscountry ski down the river. He enjoyed this, but it never matched powder skiing on Teton Pass, where his entire body language exclaimed, "This is life itself!"
Soon, though, I learned that he wasn't quite as shattered as he let on. Often, he wasn't at the trailer when I returned. His tracks in the snow revealed that he'd been in and out of his dog door several times—sometimes accompanied by the pawprints of Zula. What had they been up to? Discussing the dog politics of Kelly? Tearing up the trailer? The latter was never the case. At most, some water would be splattered around his bowl where he and Zula had drunk.
An hour or so later, I'd see him trotting up the lane, tail held high. A moment later, the flap on the dog door would slap and in he'd come with a bound. There was no frenzied leaping or barking at my return, no desperation to be let out because his bladder was bursting, only a cheerful "Hey, good to see you." I'd rub his inner ears gently with my thumbs, and he'd groan in pleasure, his jowls nestled in my palms.
Occasionally, though, I wouldn't even have time to fetch my other skis from the shed and take him for the little ski jaunt I had promised. Slap! would go his dog door, and he'd be gone, down the lane and into the heart of the village. It became apparent that he simply had come back to say "Hi" before returning to what he was doing—visiting, exploring, playing, conducting his own life. It gave me a great sense of relief that I could leave him now and then.
Nonetheless, seeing how much he enjoyed powder skiing, I'd go out of my way to plan routes in the national forest rather than in the national park so that he could come along. Often, a day in the backcountry entailed hours of climbing uphill—three, four, five thousand vertical feet—and miles of skiing downhill. Naturally, I expected him to be tuckered out. I was, and I was on skis while he was on his paws. The first time I realized that he was made of tougher stuff, we had gotten home to Kelly on a Sunday night and I had stopped at the office so I could check my appointment book. I fed Merle—he had bowls and kibble at both the trailer and the cabin—and then, from my desk, I heard the slap of his dog door.
A half hour later, I looked outside. Snow was falling heavily. I gave a shout, my voice muted by the wind. No Merle. I wanted to go up to the cabin, shower, eat, and get to bed. A bit annoyed at his disappearance, I opened a book and read for another half hour, finally giving up. Fetching a sleeping bag from the shed, I ate an energy bar from my ski pack, lay on the living room floor, and, tired from the long day of skiing, was asleep within a few minutes.
Perhaps an hour later, I was awakened by the slap of the dog door and saw Merle, standing just inside it, sniffing the air in his three-stage intake of breath, testing whether I was still here. Though his outline was very dim, I could sense his body language: a little tense, a little distressed. Had I left him and gone up to the cabin? At the fourth sniff of breath, he relaxed: Yes, Ted was right there. He walked over to my sleeping bag and ran his nose over my hair just to make sure. He then gave a tiny whine, more a hum, as if saying "Thank you for still being here," and nudged my face with his wet nose. I put an arm around his neck and said, "It's too stormy to go up."
He lay down and put his head next to mine on the throw pillow. I lifted the sleeping bag and put it over him.
"Where you been?"
"Phoooo," he exhaled, his lips lifting.
Resting a hand lightly on his neck, I thought about how little I really knew of his in
terests and energy level. He had skied all day, eaten dinner, and then spent another two hours walking around Kelly in a snowstorm. What would be the human equivalent of this last activity? Reading a book? Surfing the Web? Making phone calls? He'd been doing much the same thing—perhaps going to see Zula and Jack, noting where the deer were bedded, and what the breeze was carrying down from the mountains. He had been relaxing with the books of his world, interacting with his social circle.
Anthropomorphism is often maligned for ascribing human characteristics to animals who can't possibly know what we know. And there is some truth to this. I doubt Merle thought of the Big Bang when he gazed at the starry heaven. But the reverse—not ascribing volition to creatures who repeatedly display it—is also inaccurate. It leads to what poor translation always does: misunderstanding between cultures. Wrapped up in my needs, I had forgotten his. At the same time, he couldn't do whatever he pleased without letting me know that he'd be gone for a couple of hours.
The solution—since he was unable to discuss his plans with me, and, in fact, "plans" wasn't the right word for his quite literally following his nose—was to have the house and office located in one place. In this way our schedules could be somewhat independent of each other's. I had wanted to build a house for some time, and, as I scratched his ears, I began to think of the blueprints I had drafted and how I might revise them. Merle rubbed his forehead against my chin and gave a great contented sigh, followed by a sleepy yawn. And thus, like many mates, each in our own thoughts, only touching, and in silence, we ended the day.
Chapter 6
Growing Into Himself
Merle was almost two years old now—in human terms a teenager, and with many of the same characteristics. He could be full of himself one moment, frightened the next; his enthusiasm was high, his base of experience constantly expanding. He often surprised both of us by the ways in which he learned.
Take the day I first placed a pair of doggy panniers over his shoulders, thinking that he was now old enough to carry his own food. We were heading into the Wind River Mountains for the weekend, and the panniers contained four Ziploc bags, two of kibble and two of dog biscuits, divided equally so as to balance the load. He had watched me put gear and food into my own pack dozens of times before, so he certainly had a visual image of the process. And I had been careful to let him smell his food and the panniers before putting them on him. Yet, as I began to walk up the trail, he sat rooted to the spot, the look on his face clearly saying, "I am unable to follow you."
"Come on," I said. "Let's go."
"I told you," he whined plaintively, "I can't move."
I was perplexed. Dozens of experiments have been done with dogs who have watched other dogs do a variety of tasks—everything from finding narcotics to pulling sleds—and the results are conclusive: Dogs learn by observing other dogs, cutting the time it takes them to learn the same task not merely in half but by as much as fifteenfold. In one case, a group of seven-week-old puppies watched another group of dogs learn, by trial and error, to grasp a ribbon attached to a cart that was loaded with food. It took the demonstrators an average of eleven and a half minutes to figure out how to pull the food-laden cart into their cage. After five sessions, the observers were given a chance to do the same thing. They solved the problem in nine seconds. There's nothing surprising about this. Dogs have an inborn tendency to follow the lead of others in their group.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas recounts an instance of such behavior in her book The Social Lives of Dogs. Thomas's son lived in Boulder, Colorado, and all his dogs ate once a day, in the evening. For some reason, they had developed the habit of eating lying down in front of their bowls. When one of these dogs—an Australian Shepherd and Chow cross named Pearl—came to live in Thomas's household in New Hampshire, she immediately noticed that her two companions, Sundog and Misty, ate standing up. She did not join them. True to her own pack's traditions, two thousand miles away in Boulder, she ate lying down. But the next morning, at breakfast, Pearl again noticed that Sundog and Misty ate standing up. "The elders show the way, says the dog law," Thomas comments, "and Pearl obeyed." Standing in front of her bowl, she ate like her new family. However, when dinnertime rolled around, Pearl reverted to eating lying down. For many months, until the memory of her family in Boulder faded, she ate both ways—standing at breakfast and lying down at dinner.
In a similar fashion to Pearl's new dog family, Merle exerted a powerful influence on his friends: Zula, Jack, and close to a dozen neighboring and visiting dogs. They learned to use his dog door simply by observing him. There was no need for him to illustrate the door's efficacy. He went through; they followed.
But when it came to watching me put on packs, observational learning didn't seem to apply. Had there been another dog accompanying us, wearing panniers, it would have been instructive to see Merle's reaction. Lacking such a companion, I returned to him, took off my pack, put it on slowly in front of him, and walked up the trail. He still wouldn't follow, and his frustrated whine was perfectly comprehensible: "I told you. I am rooted to the earth."
Taking his leash from my pack, I went back to him and clipped it to his collar. Though he didn't wander, I continued to take the precaution of having him wear his collar, inscribed with his name and phone number, while we were in the backcountry. I gently tugged at him to follow. Uncertainly, his butt came off the ground and he began to walk. And what a walk it was! He took a few faltering steps, appearing that he might collapse under the weight of the panniers. Then, after a few moments, he discovered that the panniers weren't a crushing weight after all. His legs found their gait. He began to speed up. Suddenly, he dashed ahead, ripping the leash from my hand. Turning, he gave several woofs of incredulity: "I can walk! I can walk!"
"Of course you can walk."
A look of sheepishness crossed his face. He grasped that he had psyched himself out—that the seeming weight of the panniers had been in his head. His self-effacing grin was a marvel to behold.
I unclipped his leash, and up the trail he went, faster than usual, I thought, as if to escape his own embarrassment.
That afternoon we reached a tarn nestled among the granite walls of a high basin. I pitched my tent on a knoll, where a stand of whitebark pine made a windbreak, and watched Merle, his panniers and collar removed, roll on his back and scratch. A moment later, a marmot whistled, and Merle righted himself in an instant, scanning the grassy field and glacial boulders that ran down to the lake. His nose twitched, his ears perked, his tail stood erect.
The marmot whistled again, and Merle spotted him sitting on a grassy mound. At a gallop, he reached the hole into which the marmot had disappeared and began to dig furiously, dirt flying between his rear legs, dust rising in a cloud. On and on he went, looking up occasionally before resuming his furious excavation—to no avail. After perhaps fifteen minutes, he gave up, walking to a large boulder and climbing it from its sloping side. Then he stood on its summit, inspecting every inch of the cirque before lying down in a regal pose. Soon enough, another marmot whistled, and Merle dashed off the boulder and began to dig. He did this twice more—digging after a marmot, then lying on his rock—before returning to our camp, mouth, chest, and belly caked in dirt. He stood in front of me, tail beating proudly, his shoulders thrown back as if to say, "I am a dog in his kingdom!"
I had fetched a pot of water for dinner while he was occupied with the marmots. He ambled over to it and drank half of it down, leaving the remainder filled with dirt.
"Whoa, Señor!" I called out. "What's wrong with the lake?"
By way of an answer, he lay down with the pot between his legs and finished it.
On the San Juan, he had drunk directly from the river, as he had on all our other camping trips. Suddenly, on this trip, he had decided that he wanted to drink from the pot in which I cooked my food. Was this his way of expressing the time-honored sentiment of dogs the world over—that another dog's food or drink always tastes better? Whatever the case,
from then on he would only drink out of lakes and streams while we were hiking. Once we reached camp, even if there was water a short distance away, he'd wait to drink out of the pot. This was only the beginning of my watching him turn into a character.
Not long thereafter, we took another backpacking trip into the River of No Return Wilderness Area in central Idaho, accompanied by Benj and his then wife Deb. After several days of walking, we crossed the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and reached a grassy airstrip, cut out of the forest, where we met the bush plane that would carry us back to civilization. Even though Merle had never been near a plane, he walked directly to it, accepting that it was a different kind of car: It smelled of gas and oil; it was made of metal; it had doors, windows, and seats; and Benj, Deb, and I got inside it along with our gear. He clambered in behind us and lay on our piled backpacks, between Benj and Deb, while I sat next to the pilot. As we rolled down the runway, I looked back and saw him totally at ease, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his eyes pleasantly surveying left and right to the windows. His face wore the expression I had seen at the beginning of many a drive in the car: "Oh, how nice, we're off on another trip."
All this changed when the plane left the ground. Merle's lower jaw dropped and hung open. His head began to whip from side to side as he tried to look out each side of the aircraft simultaneously. His eyes became big and round, and he began to pant anxiously. He pushed his nose under Benj's hand and stared him in the face. I reached back and rested the palm of my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me fearfully, then, with a whine, back to the receding ground.
For the entire half-hour flight, he was on pins and needles, never taking his eyes from the windows, his body tense, saliva drooling from his tongue as he panted rapidly. And he wasn't a slobbery dog, and the cabin was anything but warm.
As we descended to Salmon and he watched the ground approach, his eyes filled with dread. When we rolled to a stop and the pilot opened the doors, he was out of the plane before any of us could move. The instant his paws touched the concrete, he put his nose to it and took a deep draught, as if to confirm what his eyes were telling him—that he was back on terra firma. Then he leapt into the air and barked at the top of his lungs. As Benj, Deb, and I exited the plane, he jumped at our faces, his feet barely touching the ground before he skipped into the air again, continuing to bark the whole time—not woofing or baying, but barking with joy: "We're alive! We're alive! We're on the ground and alive! We made it!"