by Ted Kerasote
I had reached a point in my relationship with my dog from which there was no going back. I had come to admit that he had a life of his own. At least I couldn't go back easily, and, if I tried, I'd have to resort to the "just" phrase, the phrase every privileged class has used when trying to protect its interests while disregarding those of whom it considers its inferiors: He's just a slave; she's just a woman; it's just a dog. But after witnessing firsthand the breadth of Merle's personality, I'd then have to deal with what the psychologists call "cognitive dissonance." More bluntly, I'd have a hard time looking at myself in the mirror.
I got up and let him out.
The moose was standing twenty feet from the front door.
By how Merle reacted at that precise moment, I believed he wanted to relieve himself. He looked down the path past the moose, as if trying to figure out how to get away from the house and by the great beast without wading through the deep snow that surrounded the path.
Of course, he simply might have wanted to go on a midnight walkabout, which he loved to do; but he had eaten an unusually late dinner because of our ski, and his gestalt—that somewhat tense, ever so faintly clenched way he held himself—said, "I need to take a dump."
I saw Merle running the problem over in his mind—glancing at the deep snow to the side of the path, and then gazing at the moose, directly on the path and not giving any indication that he was about to leave. Vapor clouds poured from the moose's nostrils as he breathed, and his back was covered with frost that sparkled in the moonlight. He was magnificent. But I didn't think Merle was appreciating the moose's massive beauty.
Being an unfenced dog, Merle was quite fastidious in his toilet habits, as are all unfenced dogs. In this respect, domestic dogs who have a choice in the matter pattern their behavior after a long line of wolf ancestors who defecated away from their dens. It was these wolves, according to Bruce Fogle, the British veterinarian and animal behaviorist, who "were more likely to raise offspring that didn't suffer from heavy loads of intestinal parasites."
Merle would no more have left a turd near the cabin or the trailer than a human would have shat in his own living room. Nor was it necessary for him to mark with urine near either structure. After his very first anointing of the porch post of the trailer upon his arrival in Kelly, he had marked only the perimeter of the properties, letting other dogs know "This is where Merle lives."
I now figured that he was going through a double bind: He didn't want to soil his house, but he also didn't want the moose to trap him in the deep snow to the side of the path. Moose are famous for rearing back and striking dogs on the head with their sharp hooves, and most dogs don't survive the incident. In fact, in North America more humans are injured each year by moose than by bears. Merle certainly didn't know these figures, but he and I had been put to flight by enough angry moose while skiing for him to have an idea that this wasn't an animal to be toyed with.
Perhaps his bowels clouded his mind. Without any warning, he ran at the moose, making a soft plosive woof while simultaneously bouncing to a stop with his front paws, as if he were trying to shoo the great deer away. The moose, an easy twelve times larger than Merle, lowered his antlers and charged, which brought him off the path and into the cleared area in front of the cabin. Merle slipped left, dashing under the moose's pendulous nose, and fled down the empty path. A good forty feet away, he turned and woofed sharply at the moose: "Woof, woof, woof, woof," four times in an angry, wounded tone, as if to say, "I was just trying to get by you."
The moose didn't bother to give chase.
"Merle," I called from the front door, where I was standing naked. "Stay."
The moose turned, sized me up, and charged. Adrenaline kicked in—I stepped back—but not in time. Fortunately, architecture intervened. The cabin had a miniature porte cochere, a little peaked roof and two small walls that provided a bit of shelter over the entryway. The moose's antlers struck these two walls, arresting him in full stride, the cabin shaking from the blow. At the very same moment, I managed to slam the door in his face. It was a half-pane door, and the moose's nose creamed the window, leaving a round, wet smudge mark, the size of a salad plate, in its very center.
My heart was jackhammering against my ribs. The moose glared at me through the window, tried once again to come through the door, and was foiled by his tremendous antlers. Collecting himself, he stalked off. When I saw him enter the spruce on the other side of the small field in front of the house, I opened the door and called to Merle, who, after a minute or so, trotted back smartly, panting with exultation: "We showed that guy."
"You know, Sir," I told him, "if you want to die that way, you can, but don't take me with you."
"Ha-ha-ha," he replied, looking quite unperturbed about the whole affair. "Not even close."
Even after this near miss I didn't make the commitment to building my own house—one that, most certainly, would have a dog door. Unbeknownst to me, however, the cabin I was so fond of was pushing me away. A year or so after moving into it, I was constantly getting sick, mostly with a stuffed nose and congested lungs that hung on for days. I even developed exercise-induced asthma and had to use an inhaler so I could ski race.
The odd part about the whole syndrome was that when I'd leave on an assignment—giving Merle's care over to friends in Kelly who would come to the trailer and feed him, and take him for hikes and skis while I was gone—I'd get better. My stuffed nasal passages would clear, my lungs would become less twitchy, my chronic tiredness would disappear. I'd return to Wyoming, and within three days I'd be sick again.
The upshot was that I had developed an allergy to the cabin, specifically to the plicatic acid that its cedar logs were emitting, a characteristic of the wood which makes it a powerful natural insecticide. This same toxic property also makes it the bane of woodworkers in the Pacific Northwest, as well as thousands of puppies whose owners raise them on beds of cedar chips in the hopes of reducing fleas. The only solution for ailing woodworkers is to leave the industry; the wheezing puppies must be removed from their fragrant beds. Drugs are only palliatives. I, too, had no choice. I moved down to the trailer and once again began to draw up plans for a house—one that wouldn't contain a single plank of cedar.
By the early summer I had some floor plans and elevations drafted, and I began to help a friend fell some trees. A horse logger, he had found a stand of dead lodgepole pines south of Teton Pass, tall, magnificent trees, a foot in diameter and 130 years old. We dragged them from their mountainside with his team of draft horses and stacked them on the half acre of land Donald and Gladys Kent had sold me. A quarter of a mile across the field from the silver trailer, it had an unobstructed view of the entire Teton Range. Merle and I would sit on top of the neat, trapezoid-shaped pile of logs, eight feet high and sixty feet long, and watch the sun set over the mountains while I'd rearrange the layout of the house in my mind.
As darkness fell we'd make the four-hundred-yard walk across the field to the trailer, and I'd take out graph paper and a T-square and draw several new versions of the floor plan. The following morning, wearing a carpenter's tool belt loaded with hammer, nails, iron tent stakes, and a ball of orange surveyor cord, I'd walk back across the field to lay out the rooms. Sometimes Merle would start with me. Sometimes I'd begin the walk alone and halfway there I'd hear him come from wherever he'd been, crashing through the sage to join me.
After staking out one of the new floor plans, I'd erect mock windows that I nailed together from one-by-two-inch strips of lumber, placing them in the imaginary walls of the rooms and varying the size of their openings as we took in their views. Finally, I'd sit in the sage—amidst the tracks of bison, deer, moose, and coyotes, whose home it had been long before it had been mine—and visualize sitting in the great room, kitchen, or bedroom.
"What'dya think?" I asked Merle on just such a morning.
Lying next to me, he had his forelegs stretched out before him, his head erect, his reddish-gold coat shining
in the sun. He gave a tentative wag of his tail: "I don't know why we're sitting in the sage, but, if that's what you want to do, I'll sit here for a while longer."
A few minutes later, he gave a bored yawn, flopped on his side, and put a dramatic curve in his back as he stretched out his front and rear legs to the very tips of his toes. Yawning once again, he turned on his back and let his rear legs fall open, his front paws hanging limply over his chest. With his head thrown back in the grass, he opened his mouth as if drinking in the sun.
I watched him, my eyes running over his deep chest, the concave hollow between his last ribs, and the sparse golden hair on his stomach, its pinkish skin scattered with brown freckles the size of pinto beans. The golden hair resumed its fullness on the inside of his thighs and where his scrotum once was. In his supine position, I could also see the lovely fronds of creamy fur between each of his toe pads, giving them an exotic, wintry look even in June. The pads themselves were gray, rough, and striated—finely grooved—like rocks carved by glaciers. His nails and dewclaws were clear and glossy except where they entered his hair, and there each wore a mahogany-colored band, suggestive of a raptor's cere. His front paws were larger than his hind ones, and beneath his tail the hair was almost straw-colored, ash blond instead of gold, the color of ripe wheat when beat upon by the noonday sun. I couldn't take my eyes from him. Innocent, graceful, and completely finished, he didn't have a trace of self-consciousness.
Looking at me out of the corner of his eye, he now squirmed, rubbing his back on the grass. In a puppy, especially if accompanied by trembling, this sort of behavior would imply "I'm far beneath you in status; you have nothing to fear from me." Older dogs also engage in this maneuver if they're afraid of another dog or a person. In fact, they'll even sometimes piddle on themselves to get the message across: "I am just a little puppy and harmless." The posture almost always works—virtually no dog will attack another dog who's lying on its back in the defenseless position of a youngster.
Older dogs who are in an easygoing relationship with their human will frequently adopt a variant of this position, exposing their bellies to their person as a token of their feeling safe and content as well as inviting a belly rub. Subordinate wolves who have a friendly relationship toward an alpha wolf will also act this way toward the more dominant animal.
Merle's behavior, though, didn't make it clear that this was what he was saying to me—that he viewed himself as subordinate. In fact, he reached out a paw and touched my arm: "Excuse me, haven't you forgotten something?"
I began to rub his chest, and he breathed deeply, extending his head deeper into the grass. As my hand came up to his throat and lingered, he scrunched his neck, making several rapid movements against my fingers, indicating, "Scratch higher, please." I ran my nails over the bottom of his jaw and his entire body melted in utter contentment. He let out a groan. I stopped—to test him. A few seconds later, he touched my hand with his paw: "Don't stop." I worked my fingers to the very tip of his chin where the golden hair met his black lips, and he extended his neck and head in a stretch of supreme pleasure while pressing his chin hard against my fingers.
Michael Fox has pointed out how captive wolves will solicit grooming from one of their pack mates in a similar way, the one being solicited licking the other around the genitals as well as "besnuffling" the other, as he says, "around the ears, eyes, neck, shoulder, and corners of the mouth." Sometimes it was actually the alpha wolf whom Fox observed soliciting attention from a subordinate; sometimes it was wolves of equal rank who groomed each other.
I had also witnessed similar behavior taking place between Merle and his friends. Merle would let both Zula and Jack nuzzle his stomach. And Zula had become his equal and Jack his subordinate, their ranks clearly distinguished by Merle's willingness to share his food with Zula but giving Jack a sound smack on the side of the head with his eyetooth and a vicious growl when the younger dog tried to nose into his bowl.
So I continued to ask myself: Did Merle consider himself equal, subordinate, or dominant to me—or could he be all three? The answer came to me over several years, and what I saw changed my entire understanding of the dog–human relationship. In the meantime, when it came to his dog–dog relationships, an event was about to occur that showed me that not only did he have a highly refined sense of what it meant to be top dog, but that he could also employ an enviable degree of wile to keep himself in that position.
Clapping my hands, I said, "Enough of this lollygagging, let's get to work."
He leapt to his feet, shook briskly from nose to tail, then watched attentively as I began to rearrange the dimensions of the orange surveyor cord. We heard a noise and looked up. A woman in her twenties was rollerblading down the road past our land. Athletically trim, she had short brown hair and was dressed in cut-off shorts and a tank top. A large, white German Shepherd was towing her along on the end of one of those retractable leads that hadn't made their appearance in Kelly before the arrival of this woman, since no one walked their dog on a leash. But there was a good reason this woman kept her dog on a lead. In the few short weeks since she, her white dog, her boyfriend, and another, standard-colored German Shepherd had moved to Kelly, the white Shepherd had sent four of the village's dogs to the vet with lacerations—or so I had heard.
I hadn't actually spoken with any of the injured dogs' humans, and, like many of the stories filtering through the village, it was hard to tell how many people had added their two cents to the stories in retelling them. Merle's and my experience with the white Shepherd had been placid. When we had biked by the woman's house (I'll call her Ms. W. after her white dog), her two Shepherds had always been chained by the front door and seemed to be models of canine citizenship, not barking or making the slightest move toward us. Merle, however, had not gone to them in his usual friendly way. He had kept his distance, staring at them without breaking his stride.
How the white Shepherd could have inflicted all this damage while being chained and kept on a lead escaped me. We now discovered her method. The moment she saw Merle standing next to me in the sage, she changed direction, tore the lead from the woman's hand, and hurtled off the road toward us. Merle looked up, his tail erect and stiff.
Without a bark or growl—a sure indication that a dog means business—the Shepherd plowed into him and knocked him off his feet. They fell in a melee of biting and savage growling. I didn't hesitate. The white Shepherd had fifteen pounds on Merle, and had him pinned to the ground by his throat. I reared back and kicked her in the flank, the force of my kick sending her sprawling and yelping.
The woman started to scream, "Stop! You're killing my dog!"
I paid no attention to her. I had never seen a dog act so viciously. The white Shepherd displayed none of the ritualized fighting behavior that all the dogs I knew engaged in while taking each other on—slapping each other around the face with their eyeteeth and rising on their hind legs to grapple each other with their forelegs. This dog acted toward Merle the way Merle acted toward ground squirrels: Pin, bite, kill.
Taking no chances, I kicked her again before she could recover. Doubled over, she fled to the woman, who was still shouting at me that I was trying to kill her dog.
I knelt and put my arm protectively around Merle's shoulders, who was on his feet and bristling. His thick ruff had saved him, and, miraculously, he wasn't bleeding.
"You tried to kill my dog," the woman yelled again from the road.
"Your dog," I shouted back, "tried to kill my dog."
"Your dog," she shrieked, "isn't on a lead. That's against the law. No one here has their dogs on leashes. I don't understand it."
We were barking at each other like dogs.
"Excuse me," I said, trying to control my voice with sarcasm, though I was shaking with fear and rage. "My dog was on my property. He was standing by my side, when you lost control of your dog. She attacked him with no provocation and had him down on the ground by the throat. You want to make a case out of th
is?"
"Everyone here hates my dog," the woman shouted, and then she began to cry.
"She's beat up four dogs," I retorted. "Now five. You need to control her."
"I will, I will," the woman yelled at me. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Keeping the white Shepherd on a short lead, she skated off.
"Can you believe that?" I said to Merle.
He gave a halfhearted wag of his tail: "No, I can't."
As we went back to staking out the rooms, my mind was in turmoil. What, I asked myself, what was wrong with the white Shepherd? She had come into a peaceful hamlet where all the dogs got along and suddenly started beating them up. It was easy to say that she thought of herself as the top dog in Kelly, but relying on the timeworn notion of dominance to explain her problem didn't fully uncover what was going on. There are a lot of dominant dogs who don't rip other dogs apart, nor do most dominant wolves administer corporal punishment to subordinate pack members. It has even been shown that the longest-lived alpha wolves are benevolent leaders whose pack members cooperate harmoniously. In wolf society, a heavy paw—what might be called the Joseph Stalin approach to leadership—leads to acrimony, strife, and palace coups. Merle, who seemed to be well on his way to becoming the dominant dog in Kelly, never used such threats. His style was Bill Clinton's—an engaging aw-shucks, let's sit down and have some ribs and talk about this.
And although the white Shepherd seemed self-assured, she more than likely wasn't. In fact, the opposite was probably the case. The chances were good that her need to dominate others came not from being strong but from being weak—from being an underdog, a term that has come to be used with approbation in human sporting contests but in 1887 was coined to mean exactly what it says: the dog who found itself on the bottom during a dogfight, who, having been beaten, was helpless and on the ground.