Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  Domestic dogs have also inherited this ability to read prey, predators, and the individuals in their pack. However, having lost the need both to catch food and to avoid becoming food, and rarely living in packs these days, dogs have transferred their body-reading skills to the most important figures in their lives—their people. Anyone who lives with a dog sees the skill employed daily. The dog knows when it will be walked, taken on a drive, or fed, even before its person makes a move toward leash, car, or fridge.

  Not surprisingly, Merle, who walked on his own at all times of the day and night, had little cause to get excited when I reached for his leash. In fact, since he viewed any lead as confinement, he'd look at me circumspectly if I took his leash from the basket by the door, his brows pumping up and down with worry. Could I possibly be thinking of leashing him in Kelly? There was only one sad occasion upon which this happened—when I tied him to the wellhead so I could hose him down after he had rolled in cow poop. He disliked these baths, not so much because of the cold water (after all, he loved to swim), but, if his plaintive expression and sighs were any indication, because of the loss of his carefully applied perfume. Thus, only when he saw his leash go into my fanny pack would he spring up to join me.

  As for tracking my motions toward the car, he was often already gone on his rounds when I'd leave for town. I'd whistle for him, and most of the time he'd appear within a few minutes. But sometimes he wouldn't, and I'd have to leave without him, only to see him angling toward me from some field, running full tilt. Sprinting up to my driver's-side window, he'd wear an anxious expression: "I heard you whistle! I did! Look down! I'm right here!"

  Not infrequently, there'd be no sign of him, and I'd leave without him. Upon my return, he would berate me with baying yelps—"rar, rar, awoo!"—his voice rising higher and higher with annoyance as he explained that he had been busy and would have appeared shortly if I had only waited.

  "He who snoozes loses," I'd reply. "I can't be at your beck and call. I waited for fifteen minutes and not only whistled but called you. I had an appointment to make."

  "Ha-oof," he'd counter.

  "Well, next time, I'll wait a little longer, and you can come a little quicker."

  I'd begin to rub his ears, and, with trailing-off grumbles, he'd consent to my display of affection.

  When it came to food, however, Merle left nothing to chance. Every day, at almost precisely 5:15 P.M., I'd hear the slap of his dog door. Instead of coming into my office to greet me and perhaps ask for a biscuit, as he did occasionally throughout the day, he'd lie down in the living room, within sight of both his bowls and me. If I hadn't fed him by 5:35 P.M., he'd walk directly to the corner of my desk and stand there, wagging his tail gently, right brow arched up, left down, indicating, "Sorry to bother you, but haven't you forgotten something?"

  I had. Hands on the keyboard or phone to my ear, I had been totally immersed in what I was doing and hadn't made the slightest motion toward the pantry. So how was he able to read my body language?

  Quite simply, he wasn't reading me. Unlike Clever Hans, or zebra and wildebeest, Merle had dispensed with observing my body language—at least in this case. Instead, like countless dogs the world over, he had created his own timekeeper.

  Sometimes called a "biological clock" or an "internal clock," this timekeeper lies within the dog's hypothalamus, an area of the brain directly above the place where the optic nerves cross. Composed of about 20,000 neurons, the timekeeper is known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It takes in variations in the ambient light from the retina, then transmits this information to the pineal gland. The transmission is accomplished by a complex procedure during which genes encode proteins that, in turn, regulate the functions of the pineal gland's cells. Thus prompted, these cells secrete the hormone melatonin into the bloodstream, where it peaks at night and ebbs during the day, regulating sleep and wakefulness.

  All told, these neurons, proteins, and hormones form a circadian system, one that is neither fully dependent on nor independent of the cycles of light and dark. In fact, animals can adjust their internal clocks to a new pattern regardless of when it occurs, so long as the pattern is sufficiently regular and, one might add, important to them. In the case of domestic dogs, it's the time kibble falls into their bowls. This may have been one of the reasons why Merle was so upset when I left him behind in Kelly. Since my departures were random, he couldn't set his clock.

  Dogs aren't unique in having an internal clock. Species as different as fruit flies, humans, and birds have circadian rhythms, which don't have to be strictly a day long. (In Latin, "circadian" means "approximately a day.") Domestic dogs come into heat twice a year, and human females experience menstrual cycles around a twenty-eight-day period. Five-thirty in the afternoon, I should note, was hardly the time I would have chosen for Merle to eat, since I liked to eat between seven and eight o'clock at night. It was his choice, a time he had decided upon independently of me during the first summer we were together. One day, he came to my desk as I was writing and stood with an imploring look and a wagging tail.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  He looked at me silently; he broke into an energetic pant; he walked to his bowl. Well, nothing could be clearer. The next day at 5:30 P.M., the same: the imploring look, the excited pant, the walk to his bowl. And so on during the following days—always at 5:30. I got the message about when he preferred to eat dinner.

  Some dog behaviorists might observe that it was Merle who had trained me, but this misses the point of how dogs and humans share a household in a give-and-take sort of way. As Brother Thomas, who began the German Shepherd breeding program at the New Skete monastery in upstate New York, once remarked, "We are to listen to a dog until we discover what is needed instead of imposing ourselves in the name of training."

  Yet when I tried to follow Brother Thomas's advice and gave Merle control of his eating schedule, we had a meltdown. Shortly after he began to come to me at 5:30 P.M., I filled his bowl with a great mound of kibble, enough to see him through the next four days.

  "There you go," I said. "It's up to you. Eat when you want and make it last."

  He finished the entire bowl in under two minutes, gobbling it down voraciously, then licking his lips in satisfaction.

  "That was supposed to last you four days," I said.

  He gave me an expectant expression: "You mean that's it?"

  Thinking that surely he would now spread out his eating, I refilled his bowl.

  He finished every last nugget.

  "I don't think this is going to work," I told him.

  He wagged his tail enthusiastically: "Let's try."

  "Maybe tomorrow," I replied.

  No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than the phone rang. The delayed Fed Ex plane had arrived and my package was in town.

  I picked up my car keys and said, "You want to come?"

  With a huge meal in his stomach, Merle had lain down and looked like he was going to have a digestive nap.

  He answered me with two thumps of the tail: "I don't think so. I am so comfortable here."

  When I returned two hours later, I found him lying on his spine, his rear legs splayed, his fronts paws hanging limply over his chest, his breath coming in shallow gasps. His stomach bulged like a python's after it has swallowed a pig.

  In an instant I saw what had happened. I had just opened a forty-pound bag of kibble and had given him two big bowls of it. Forgetting to empty the rest of the bag's contents into the plastic garbage pail where I stored his food, I had left the bag against the wall. Worse still, I had left it open. Merle had stuck his head in and eaten.

  The bag was more than a quarter empty. Marveling at Merle's capacity to stuff himself, I put the bag on a scale. It weighed twenty-eight pounds. Merle had eaten twelve pounds of kibble over the space of three hours.

  He now looked as if he were going to die. He didn't look in the least regretful, though. In fact, he wore a blissful smile.

&nbs
p; "Merle." I leaned close to his ear, putting a hand gently on his belly. It was as tight as a drum.

  He groaned painfully and opened his eyes. They were glassy. Faintly, he flopped his tail back and forth: "Let me die in peace."

  A few moments later, he rolled onto his side and lay there panting. Then, he ponderously stood and squeezed through his dog door, his belly scraping its lower edge. He clumped across the porch and onto the grass, but he didn't get far. Heaving several times, he vomited up an enormous pile of kibble. Sniffing it, he wagged his tail appreciatively and glanced back at me. A bigger wag of his tail: "That was so good." Then he headed over the bridge toward Zula's yurt, perhaps to tell her that he had at last fulfilled his life's dream: He had finally eaten as much as he wanted.

  Clearly, self-feeding was not going to work with Merle, an individual who had a history of starvation and the tendency of many Labrador Retrievers to be chowhounds. It's a trait some interpreters of dog behavior ascribe to the Labrador's early history, when it was bred to retrieve fish in icy Canadian waters and subsist on whatever came its way. However, gorging preceded the breeding of Labs and even the domestication of dogs. Wolves have been seen to consume up to twenty-two pounds of meat at a feeding, and the behavior is entirely practical. If you don't know when your next meal might appear, it pays to eat as much as you can.

  With this in mind, I thought about feeding Merle every four days, but if his reaction the following day could be trusted, there'd be no peace for me. At 5:30 P.M., he showed up at my desk, wagging his tail with its syncopated beat of entreaty: "Oh, please, it's dinnertime! Oh, please, it's dinnertime!"

  "You ate enough for two weeks yesterday," I said.

  My tone of voice told him everything. His face fell.

  He put his chin on my leg and stared up at me, his tail now wagging so vigorously that his entire body shimmied.

  "Sorry," I replied, "no dinner today. You want to eat like a wolf, you can act like a wolf."

  Looking crushed, he turned and lay down halfway between my desk and his bowl.

  Ten minutes later, he tried again, placing his chin on my thigh. I told him to go lie down.

  He asked to be fed at least a dozen times before we headed up to the cabin, and even there he continued to plead. Finally, he turned in, disgruntled, nose under tail, staring at me suspiciously, trying to understand our falling-out.

  He didn't ask to be fed again until five-thirty the next day, and I relented. After all, he looked his old trim self. He inhaled his usual three-cup ration of food, and from then on we went back to a daily feeding schedule. In the meantime, I had discovered that Merle had oriented his internal clock to another reward, and that it had nothing to do with food.

  From early on—in fact, from that first day on the San Juan River when he had answered his own echo—I knew that this was a dog who liked to sing. In Kelly, I quickly learned that it was impossible for anyone to play a guitar or a banjo around Merle without his sitting up, throwing his head back, shaping his mouth into a trumpet, and accompanying the musician with a litany of howls. He chimed in at weddings, at barbecues, and at impromptu jam sessions. He particularly reveled in birthday parties. At the very first note of "Happy Birthday," he would begin to yodel away, tail beating in happiness. He was often escorted outside, where he'd continue to sing by the door or an open window.

  Thwarted in his attempts to sing along to live music, he turned his attention to the radio, but only certain tunes. One was the theme music for "All Things Considered," the National Public Radio news show. After a day of writing, I often did errands in town, and so we'd be in the car at 5:00 P.M., when the show comes on. As soon as Merle heard the first strains of the theme music, he'd throw back his head and begin to bay.

  Soon I only had to reach toward the radio at 5:00 P.M. and he'd stand in the back of the car, wag his tail in anticipation, and burst into song as the first notes sounded in the car. Not long afterward, I noticed that he would get to his feet a couple of minutes before five and eagerly look from me to the dashboard. If I neglected to turn on the radio, he'd step forward and stare directly into my eyes. Up went one brow, down went the other, his head tilting significantly in a way that I had now been trained to interpret as "Excuse me, haven't you forgotten something?" I'd turn on the radio. Eyes bright with anticipation, he'd listen to the announcer recite the Wyoming Public Radio call letters, "This is KUWR Laramie-Cheyenne, 91.9, and KUWJ Jackson, 90.3." Then, the instant the first notes of "All Things Considered" sounded, he'd break into song. He had set another part of his internal clock to NPR.

  After a while, he expanded his radio sing-alongs to Saturdays at noon, when "Riders Radio Theater" was broadcast. He learned the sequence of shows that preceded it: "Car Talk" and "The Ranch Breakfast Show," which we often listened to while driving the roads of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, looking for wildlife. When the latter show was drawing to a close, Merle would get to his feet and wait for the singing cowboy quartet, Riders in the Sky, to begin their opening theme—an unforgettable "Ow-ow-ow, ow-ow-ow" imitation of a coyote. As the first "Ow" sounded in the car, Merle would toss back his head, like an opera singer in the throes of an aria, and howl along.

  Naturally, my observations weren't made under controlled scientific conditions. In some way I could have been subconsciously feeding Merle information that cued him as to when "Riders Radio Theater" was about to begin, just as Wilhelm von Osten did for Clever Hans. However, another observer corroborated my own sense—that it was the sequence of radio shows rather than what I was doing that gave Merle his cues. We were driving in Yellowstone National Park at the time, and my friend Kim Fadiman and I were excitedly discussing a bighorn lamb we had watched being born late the previous evening.

  Suddenly Kim remarked, "Why is Merle standing and wagging his tail?"

  I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Merle looking to the dashboard.

  "Oh," I said, "one of his favorite radio shows is about to begin."

  I turned up the volume, which had been barely audible, and within a half minute came the "ow-ow-ow" of "Riders Radio Theater." Merle threw back his head and sang. Perhaps I had made some microscopic movement of my head or body while talking with Kim, and this had indicated to Merle that he should get ready to howl. Whatever the case, after several months of listening to "Riders Radio Theater," Merle didn't need the preceding shows or seemingly any cue from me to know when the show was about to begin. If we were in the car on Saturday morning, he'd look at the radio as the noon hour approached and wag his tail at me. I'd turn on the radio and out would come the singing cowboys and their coyote howls. Merle had set his singing clock on a weekly basis as well.

  But no radio rendition of coyotes, no guitar or banjo music, not even a dozen human voices singing "Happy Birthday" could compare to what became Merle's enduringly favorite piece of music. The first time he heard it he was lying by the Christmas tree. As its opening bars sounded, he threw himself to his feet, eyes stunned with wonder and disbelief. Tossing back his head in the most energetic demonstration I had yet to see of his musical passion, he caroled along to the "Hallelujah Chorus" of Handel's Messiah, his mouth nearly coming unhinged. He did not stop: "King of kings, and lord of lords." "Yow, yow, yawoooo."

  He accompanied every "And he shall reign forever and ever," every "Hallelujah," until the monumental final chords when—voice cracking and tail lashing so hard that I feared it might break off—he looked up at me with an angelic and spent expression, as if to say, "That is the most sublime music I have ever heard."

  Some who have written on the subject of why dogs howl to music would note that Merle couldn't possibly have had a special affinity for the Messiah. Instead, they would say, dogs, like wolves, are merely howling along with their pack, and that the reason they often sound so dissonant is that, like wolves, they're modulating their voices to be slightly off-pitch from the voices around them. This may be true, but, if so, why then did Merle learn to sing on tune?

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sp; That he had learned to do so became apparent the first Christmas we joined the Kelly Carolers, an informal group of about thirty people who met for appetizers at one home, strolled around the village singing, and ended at another house for dinner. Dressed in big snow boots, bundled in down parkas, pulling children in sleds, and accompanied by a variety of the village's dogs, we stood at our neighbors' front doors and caroled.

  Merle, I noticed, didn't immediately throw back his head and sing in his usual exuberant way. Instead, he kept his head lowered, directing his voice downward. His previous banishments must have made an impression upon him. Instead of howling raucously, he now picked up the first note of a carol, holding it in a low croon, like a shy bass singer unsure of his voice and coasting along in the background. When he'd run out of breath, he'd pick up whatever note the group was singing. Reinforced—no one escorted him away—he kept going.

  It was enlightening to see the looks other dogs gave him. One was curious, wagging her tail questioningly as if to say, "What are you doing?" One looked highly suspicious and skittered off. A third seemed aghast and bumped his shoulder into Merle, repeatedly trying to get him to stop. Merle ignored him. Only the first dog joined him, taking his lead and remaining low-key. No group howl ensued. The dogs seemed to be in agreement that this was a human songfest.

  The dog who had started to howl tapered off. Intermittently, Merle kept caroling, going house to house with us, never raising his voice or lifting his muzzle to the sky. At home, only hours before, he had been bellowing out the "Hallelujah Chorus," but here, among a group of people, he was singing in moderation, even to our robust renditions of "Jingle Bells" and "Deck the Halls." This gave me pause for thought. If dogs are so hardwired, I wondered, why had he decided to modify his behavior? If dogs think that howling to music is no more than howling along with a pack of dogs, how had he come to accommodate the notion that different human groups had varying tolerances for dogs who wanted to sing with them? How had he come to think outside of the box?