by Ted Kerasote
Allison, who was highly attuned to both dogs' and humans' feelings, decided to make up for how she had diverted my affections from him. She bought him an L. L. Bean dog bed, one of those plush, green, round, top-of-the-line ones, with his name inscribed in gold script along its edge: Merle. No more folded blankets for him or moving his rather thin, bottom-of-the-line L. L. Bean bed from the car. She brought the new bed over from her home and presented it to him, and he gave it an exploratory sniff before lying down upon it with several appreciative thwacks of his tail and a sidelong glance at me that put me on notice: "See, this woman knows how to treat a dog."
The round bed became Merle's favorite, and no one else could use it—not Brower, and especially not Gray Cat, both of whom Merle now looked upon with a certain amount of distrust since they had become fast friends upon their very first meeting, an event that I believe astounded them as much as it surprised Allison, Merle, and me.
Brower had come into the great room, and Gray Cat had raised his back up to his full height while hissing a warning. Brower, who was quite fearless, had leaned close and wagged his tail vigorously. Gray Cat gave him an experienced once-over—he had seen every manner of dog and could size them up in an instant. He deflated himself and allowed the young dog to approach. Gently, they touched noses. Whatever was communicated in that first sniff was enough. Gray Cat turned and bounded away playfully, instigating a chase. Brower leapt after him. Sprinting, Gray Cat suddenly did a forward somersault, coming up under Brower's belly and clawing wildly at him. Brower stood with a happy grin on his face, as if this violent scratching were just what he needed. Then he fell on Gray Cat, who squirted out sideways, but not in panic. Instead, he lay on his side and allowed Brower to catch him in his jaws. Going limp, Gray Cat half closed his eyes in ecstasy as Brower chewed him gently.
This became their little dance. Every time Brower came over to our house, and Gray Cat happened to be there, they touched noses and began their chase. Over and over, they'd dash across the great room, Gray Cat somersaulting forward to come up under Brower's belly, claws bared. In the meantime, Merle watched from his couch, one brow going up, the other down, with a look of deep concern that said, "Brower, you will never know, my friend, until it's too late, if that cat can really be trusted."
Despite his misgivings about Gray Cat, Merle nonetheless slept with him on the dedicated quadruped couch. But that was as far as he would go. Once, when he found Gray Cat on his green bed, he lay down a few feet off and stared at him, as if the force of his gaze would wake him. And within a few moments, it did. Gray Cat opened one eye, saw Merle, and with studied indifference got up, stretched, and appeared to remember something he had to do. Walking by Merle without looking at him, he padded down the stairs. Merle rose and went directly to his bed, sniffing it all over before lying down with several snorts, as if to clear his nostrils of cat smell.
The only other member of the household whom he'd allow on his bed was me. I'd lay down behind him, and he'd thump his tail and wriggle his back against my chest, asking for a scratch.
Sometimes we'd sleep hours together in this way, waking up to see the stars in the skylight or ravens walking over it in the dawn. Once, a flock of trumpeter swans flashed by in the sunrise, brilliantly white and honking.
Most nights, though, I slept in my bed and he on his. He now actually preferred sleeping on it, for if I'd extend a hand to my bed he'd give it an appraising look before discounting it and walking to his own. There he would begin a conscientious manicure of his fur, removing any mud or dirt. When he was done, and I was done reading, I'd ask, "Time for sleep?" And he'd beat his tail in reply.
I'd reach for the light and say, "Good night, my bonnie boy, and may flights of elk sing thee to thy rest."
Thwack-thwack-thwack went his tail: "You, too."
And the last thing each of us saw, as the light went out, was each other's eyes.
On the weekends, when Allison didn't have to go to work and the roads were closed because of drifted snow, we'd lie abed in the morning. The dogs, having let themselves out for a pee, had returned, and each slept in his corner of the bedroom, the snow melting on his fur, filling the room with damp dog smell.
With their sleeping breaths in the background, we'd lie in each other's arms and I'd listen to Allison talk about becoming a psychotherapist. It was the calling that had finally beckoned to her, a natural extension, she said, of her interest in why some families were happy and others weren't, and why some people moved through life with optimism and others faltered and fell. I would talk about my writing, about whether a piece was working, and sometimes I'd read her passages from it and she'd point out flaws I hadn't seen. Then we'd discuss our friends' lives—who among them had strong marriages and who weak, and why; who was foolish and who wise, and how they might improve their lot—laughing until our stomachs ached and we had tears in our eyes, as only a couple can laugh when, in the privacy of their bedroom, they allow themselves the liberty of believing they have a handle on things.
We called this sort of discussion our "A & C"—analysis and commentary—and we would always extend it to our own relationship, whose major rough spot was our differing views on intimacy. I wanted more closeness; she wanted more space. Finally, we managed to reach an accord: She would keep her house and I mine, and if we had children they'd commute between our two places by a breezeway across the field. It was our standing joke, our way of dealing with the fact that she wasn't ready to commit, even though many of her close friends had married and were starting families. But her reluctance, I finally realized, was deep-seated and might never go away. I was an older, self-made man, and she was a young princess. In the language of dogs, I was a mongrel, and she was holding out for a pup with papers.
On some mornings, though, as the stove crackled and the snow fell, our different backgrounds and what we looked like together when we stood side by side—the tall woman, the short man—vanished, as did my pursuit of her and her retreat. Then there was only the warmth of the house, and Merle and Brower yipping in their dreams, and she and I under the covers, while the mountains loomed close and held us tight.
Chapter 11
The Problem of Me
I always wondered what Brower and Merle thought as they lay in our bedroom, listening to Ali and me talk: whether they had the same emotional regard for us as we had for them; whether they could plan and reason; and whether they had that ultimate test of consciousness—the sense that one's unique combination of physical body and beliefs equals this being called me.
As far as I could tell, neither dog paid much attention to these enduring questions concerning the differences between the animal and human mind. Rather, each of them dealt—in quite different ways—with the more vexing issue of Allison and me leaving Kelly without warning. For long periods of time, we'd do exciting things with them, treat them with great affection, and then we'd disappear, not to come back into their lives for days and sometimes weeks at a time.
Since I never saw Brower in the places Allison left him when she traveled—the kennel and doggy camp, the latter allowing him to run and play with other dogs—I can't say what his reaction was to being separated from her. I think it was much like the one he displayed when she left him with Merle and me. By all appearances, he had a fun-filled time skiing, hiking, and camping with us, as well as being Merle's sidekick in Kelly. As Allison observed, "When he's with the guys he forgets all about me." And there was some truth to this statement. When he was with us, he didn't go back to his place to see if Allison had returned.
Merle, on the other hand, was a more attached and anxious soul, always ruminating on the problem of me—the man who had rescued him from his hardscrabble life in the desert but periodically deserted him. If I left him at the Landales', he would walk the five miles down to Kelly, looking for me. If I tried to leave him home when I left on an assignment, he would follow me—but in a way that demonstrated that he could draw logical inferences about how best to foil my departure.
We were still at the trailer when I first noticed his ability to reason in this way. I had packed my laptop, camera, and duffel as Merle watched with growing concern. When I put these articles together—and made no move to fill a Ziploc bag with his kibble—it was an almost certain sign that he was to be left at home. His suspicions were confirmed when I knelt and said, "I'm going to be gone for only two nights. Scott will come down this afternoon and pick you up so you can spend a couple of days with Tessa. That'll be fun."
He hung his head in misery.
After refilling his water bowl, I left him on the porch, his tail at half mast, wagging a slow dirge.
To get out of Kelly from the trailer, I had to drive east on our potholed lane, whereupon reaching the Gros Ventre River I turned left on the main road through the village. Coming to the Grand Teton National Park road, I turned again, now heading west, and eventually passed the tiny one-room post office that stood on the edge of Kelly proper. Although I had driven a mile from where I had started, I was only three hundred yards from the trailer, having executed three sides of a quadrilateral around Kelly's central field.
And there was Merle—sitting on the shoulder of the road, looking directly at me as I drove toward him, his tail wagging hopefully.
Slowing the car, I reflected on how he had figured out a way to intercept me. Several times each week, he and I walked from the trailer to the post office to get the mail, and he had driven out of Kelly with me hundreds of times in the car. But from his perspective, two feet off the ground, the route he needed to travel so as to meet me on the park road couldn't be seen. Sagebrush higher than his head, cottonwood trees, and scattered homes interrupted his line of sight. Consequently, he must have inferred where I was going, and where I would end up, and correlated this information with all the possible choices open to him. In other words, he must have created a mental map of the landscape upon which he had plotted our trajectories. Instead of giving chase to the car (as he did after I had driven off and he belatedly came to my whistle), he had taken the short side of the quadrilateral. His reasoning seemed to be that my leaving him behind showed not an unwillingness to take him along, but a temporary failure of eyesight. Surely, if I saw him on the road in front of me as I left Kelly, I would change my mind. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option. I was flying.
I got out of the car, knelt, and put my arms around him. "You are quite the clever dog," I told him.
Wag-wag-wag went his tail, but not too robustly, since my tone of voice wasn't promising.
I kissed him on the head and rubbed his ears. He groaned in pleasure. "I'm sorry," I said. "I love you, but I'm getting on a plane, and I'll be in a city for two days. I assure you, you will have a better time with Tessa, Scott, and April at the ranch."
He put his head against my chest: "I won't have a better time with them than with you."
"Okay, my lad, I have to go."
I kissed him again and left him on the shoulder of the road, looking forlornly at the rear end of the car as I drove away.
Merle, I suspect, had no idea that he had acted cleverly in cutting me off at the pass. He was simply using the same navigational skills that wolves and many other wild animals use when, after having explored their home range, they can strike out from any point and make a beeline home.
Many preliterate hunting-gathering cultures not only saw this kind of pragmatic behavior exhibited by animals on a daily basis, they also noticed that animals displayed a rich array of human emotions. These observations led them to believe that animal consciousness and human consciousness were so alike that, as one Arctic culture put it, "In the very earliest time when both people and animals lived on earth a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference."
This smooth interchangeability was steadily eroded, however, as an increasing number of people began to make their living by herding and farming. Wildlife became an enemy, killing livestock and eating crops, and humans began to erect fences to protect their property from the wild. Some of these fences were actual ones, like corrals, and some were symbolic, like the Jewish faith's sanctioning human dominion over all of Earth's creatures, and, later, the Christian faith's decreeing that humans had souls but animals didn't.
The rationalists of the seventeenth century, spearheaded by the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, increased the separation between people and animals when they described animals as mere machines that were incapable of feeling. As one of Descartes's disciples, Nicolas de Malebranche, wrote:
[I]n animals, there is neither intelligence nor souls as ordinarily meant. They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing: and if they act in a manner that demonstrates intelligence, it is because God, having made them in order to preserve them, made their bodies in such a way that they mechanically avoid what is capable of destroying them.
Such sentiments made animals the targets of vivisectionists who wanted to study their internal workings. As a result, countless dogs met pitiless ends on dissecting tables, and some scholars and scientists raised their voices in protest. The Cambridge philosopher Henry More, for example, called Descartes's view of animals an "utterly destructive and murderous idea." The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that "no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men." And Charles Darwin, as I've noted, passionately believed that animals had much the same emotional and mental complement as people.
Their voices, and others, led to the animal protection movement in the 1800s and the creation of animal protection societies in Europe and North America, the first being the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in London in 1824. But bettering the lives of "dumb animals," as they were called even by those who were trying to protect them, didn't necessarily translate into the belief that animals and people shared the same consciousness. By the middle of the twentieth century the views of men like Hume and Darwin had been eclipsed by a tide of experimental evidence that seemed to show that animals were, at best, trial-and-error learners who were incapable of reasoning. The man most responsible for setting this trend in motion was the late-nineteenth-century British psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan, who happened to be very fond of dogs.
One of the classic problems Morgan analyzed was nearly the same one I describe above—in which Merle, wanting to go with me, used reason to cut me off at the pass. But Morgan, looking at the same evidence, came to a different conclusion. In his illustration, a dog chases a rabbit along some curved shrubbery each morning only to see the rabbit disappear into a drain. After a few days of such unsuccessful chase, the dog starts the rabbit but, instead of pursuing it along the curve of the shrubbery, goes directly to the drain and catches the bunny.
According to Morgan, the dog's success didn't mean that it had reasoned, "If I take the shorter route"—in effect the chord of a circle—"I'll beat the rabbit to its hole." Not at all. The dog had simply associated the rabbit with the drain by what Morgan called "sense-experience." He went on to caution that "in no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale."
This maxim, which is known as Morgan's Canon, has profoundly influenced how scientists, and eventually modern dog trainers, have viewed the minds of animals. At its heart is the concept of Occam's razor or the law of parsimony, which states that when two theories compete to explain an unknown phenomenon we should err on the side of the simpler explanation.
Yet Merle refused to act simply. If I blocked his dog door because it was below zero outside, he wouldn't stand outside it, waiting to be let in. He'd come to the sliding glass doors of my office and pant, "Hey there, open the door." If he came home from his rounds and found that I was gone but the car was
still in the drive, he wouldn't stay home, waiting for me. Canvassing Kelly, he'd find me, appearing as surely as if I had left him a note as to where I was. And I knew that he did this because I could read his tracks in the newly fallen snow—entering his dog door, leaving melted pawprints in my office and our upstairs bedroom, then exiting the house to head across the village. I began to think that he was acting like many self-actualized members of a human partnership: He cherished his independence, but he also loved his partner. And he began to show me this in a surprising way.
When I'd awake, I'd find a bone by my bedside, always placed between my bed and the bathroom door so I couldn't miss stepping over it as I made my way to the john. And it was not any bone, but always and without fail a large beef bone, with the meat and gristle still on it, and sometimes a bit of dirt, as if it had been freshly dug up. Merle would be standing by the bedroom door, looking at me with bright and expectant eyes, his head cocked, as if to say, "See what I brought you."
I never discovered who in Kelly gave Merle these bones, though I asked around. What I did find curious was that the bones, other than being coated with his saliva, were quite untouched. The other curious factor to be considered was that he never brought me elk, deer, or antelope bones, all of which he found around Kelly and two of which, elk and antelope bones, I gave him regularly. Only beef bones.
What did this mean? Did he view beef bones as special because he got them infrequently? Did he understand that I owned lots of elk and antelope bones and was thus rich in them? Was bringing me a beef bone his way of saying, "I could have eaten this special treat myself, but I saved it for you because I love you, and you might like it"?