Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  Surgery was one of the recommended treatments, but I wasn't convinced that this was the best course of action to take, especially because he was otherwise healthy. I elected to see what would happen if I didn't push him so hard uphill. I began to leave him home when I thought the chances of finding an elk were high and I would need to move quickly and quietly. As I had expected, there were some heart-rending scenes at the car, his tail wagging lower and lower and finally stopping in mute disappointment when it became obvious that I wasn't going to take him. The crushed look on his face said it all: "I can't believe you would do this to me."

  "Do you want to eat elk?" I'd ask him quietly. "We're not going to get an elk if they hear us coming. If I get one, I'll come right back for you."

  He'd meet me at the car when I'd return, his mayoral rounds suspended for the morning, and immediately smell my boots. If they bore no sign of elk, the introspective look on his face would turn to one of faint remonstrance: "See, this is what comes of leaving me behind." On the other hand, if my boots were smeared with blood, he'd begin to cavort in ecstasy, dancing his paws up and down while he woofed congratulations at me: "You did it! You got one! Let's go!" And he'd leap into the car and rush up the trail ahead of me, panting heroically and coming upon the carcass with eager looks in every direction. Running his nose over the elk and breathing in her scent, he'd lick her neck and spine before scribing larger and larger circles around her, his nose to the duff as he pieced together what had happened.

  "Oh, yes, they walked from over there." Sniff, sniff, sniff. "And here is where you came from." Sniff, sniff, sniff. "Then she fell by that log, ran to this side of the clearing, and the rest of the elk ran off that way." He'd look up happily, reliving the morning, his tail wagging in steady approbation: "Well done!" I have seen wolves, lagging behind in the hunt, give their successful pack mates who have pulled down the elk a similar greeting.

  His eyesight, too, remained as sharp as ever. Walking along a high ridge in the summer, he'd stop suddenly and gaze into the distance. At these moments, the very tips of his golden hairs took on a vibratory quality, the rims of his nostrils dilating, his ears pricking forward in minute attentive contractions. I could see his heart beating in the blood vessel that wrapped over his Achilles' tendon, his entire focus captured in those taut, poised lines of hind legs, haunches, and pulled-in stomach. Raising my binoculars, I'd see an elk three-quarters of a mile off.

  "Good spot!" I'd exclaim.

  "Ha!" he'd exhale and wag his tail hard: "You bet."

  Sometimes at the end of one of these days, after we had made a large loop across several ridges and valleys, we'd find ourselves descending a hanging drainage that neither of us had been in before. Since we hadn't walked up the drainage, there was no scent to lead him back to where we had started; since we were below tree line, we had no glimpse of the mountains to orient us. Yet, as if he had a GPS in his head, he'd take the right direction home.

  Watching him move so confidently through the country, I couldn't help but think of a story Barry Lopez recounts in Of Wolves and Men. "An old Nunamiut man was asked," writes Lopez, "who, at the end of his life, knew more about the mountains and foothills of the Brooks Range near Anaktuvuk, an old man or an old wolf? Where and when to hunt, how to survive a blizzard or a year when the caribou didn't come? After a pause the man said, 'The same. They know the same.'"

  That's how I felt about Merle and me in our corner of Wyoming. We knew the same, the same. About some things—what animals crossed the village at night, the life of its dogs, and the routine of some of its people—he knew far more than I.

  When Merle and I had seen Erick Egger in Colorado, one of the last things I had asked him was "How long might Merle live?" He cast a glance at Merle, as if he might be taking stock of everything he knew about his physical condition and the life expectancy of certain breeds of dogs. "I bet you get six more years out of him," he said.

  Merle was eight when Erick gave us this estimate, and I, thinking that fourteen was a long ways off, tucked this information into the farthest corner of my mind, like a balloon payment that I had no desire to reflect on. For three years I didn't. Then, jumping into the front seat of Scott Landale's pickup truck, Merle missed his footing, fell backward onto his butt, and broke his tail. I was away on an assignment, and for the first time in my life I had an inkling of what it feels like when you leave your child in the care of the best of friends, and she or he is hurt. Not that the Landales could have done anything to prevent the accident, nor would I have done anything different had it been my truck. Merle had always made the leap from the ground to the front seat of a pickup truck handily. This time he missed. He was eleven.

  Merle's tail now had a crook in it, near its base, and it took a long time to heal. To speed his recovery, I massaged him twice a day and he'd groan more deeply than usual, giving his tail not the old, hard, steady thump-thump-thump but a more measured one—thump-pause, thump-pause, thump-pause. And instead of closing his eyes in sleepy pleasure during his massage, he'd hold my gaze with a look of studied feedback: "Oh, you're getting close to the spot that hurts. Yow!" His eyes would start. "You sure found it. Yes, yes, do exactly what you're doing."

  Then, just when I thought he was getting better, he began to wet his bed. Getting up on that fateful morning, he looked at the wet spot with dismal perplexity, his shoulders hunched, his tail drooping, as if he had let himself down.

  "Not to worry," I said, kneeling by him, with an arm over his back, though I was worried myself, "we'll just pop that in the washing machine."

  I called Marybeth, who stopped by in the afternoon and examined him, getting him to wince as she ran her fingers over his back.

  "I don't think the incontinence is from old age," she said. "The nerves to his bladder may have been affected when he fell on his sacrum."

  This ever-lengthening chain of medical problems left me feeling low. It seemed that Merle and I had both just been forty-eight years old, not even middle-aged by my lights, and in the ensuing three years, given the more rapid aging of dogs, he had become sixty, or even seventy-one, if one accepted the data of the more recent study, and was now showing it. At least he was an athletic senior, I thought, who was compliant in doing what was necessary to restore his health.

  Marybeth gave him several acupuncture treatments over the course of the next two weeks and prescribed two Chinese herb formulas designed to help his kidneys and immune system. Each morning he was now taking eight different vitamins, supplements, and prescription meds, and, true to his being a very particular dog, he quite suddenly no longer wanted his pills dabbed in butter. In fact, he would spit them out. I was at a loss for a substitute, a convenient spread to make the pills palatable, but he solved the problem for me. As I fixed my toast one morning, he came into the kitchen and stood by my side while wagging his tail with interest. I had smeared tahini—roasted sesame butter—on the bread and was licking my fingers. By his steady gaze, I could tell he wanted a taste. I held out a finger to him and he cleaned it avidly. Though I had been using tahini for years, he had never expressed the slightest interest in it. Dipping one of his pills in the jar, I offered it to him. Slurp. It was gone. And so butter was out and tahini in.

  I also took him to an Idaho chiropractor and homeopath, Jim Davis, who accepted dogs as patients. He adjusted Merle's sacrum and lumbar spine, and after only one visit Merle was walking with less stiffness. A repeat visit gave him even more relief.

  As I stretched the following morning on the throw rug next to my bed, working on my own stiff back, I could hear him coming rapidly up the stairs. Spying me on the floor, he grinned—he always took great pleasure in seeing me at his level—and came over to touch noses with me. I reached up and rubbed his ruff, saying, "You took those stairs like you were a pup."

  He beat his tail in steady agreement. His bed-wetting had tapered off with the acupuncture treatments, and the only lingering effects of his fall seemed to be the fall of his tail. He could no long
er hold it perfectly erect, arched high over his back—his flag and symbol of authority. Instead, it stuck out at about a fifty-degree angle, and I could tell by the subtle expression on his face—mild confusion mixed with annoyance—that his inability to use his tail to signal his status bothered him. He soon devised a way to compensate for the loss, however. Instead of marching right by dogs he considered his subordinates, as he used to do, with his tail high and softly waving, he now paused and gave them a chance to smell his lips, redolent of elk and antelope. I had always thought that size and demeanor alone had given him status, but I now realized that it was also how he smelled, his very being giving off the scent of canine wealth: fresh meat and bones. However, allowing these dogs to carefully inspect his mouth caused some of them to respond in the time-honored fashion of have-nots. They would immediately turn and head for our land in hopes of grabbing the bone Merle had just been chewing.

  "Ah, Sir," I said, turning and kneeling before him, "isn't this getting old a bitch?" Then, realizing what I'd said, I added, "Maybe that'd be just right for you."

  Rocking back, he put his paws on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. I placed my index fingers in his ears and softly rubbed their interiors in gentle circles, a massage that never failed to make him go limp with contentment. His lower jaw sagged and his soft, deep pants made his lips flutter like the wings of a butterfly. Bringing my hands to his shoulders, I gave him a squeeze and said, "Oh, you are still a handsome dude."

  "Ha-ha-ha," he panted, lifting his head to grin at me, one brow going up, the other down, though now their motion was not so visible since his face had grown so white.

  The alchemy of aging knows no favorites. Just as Merle recovered from his injury, a mass appeared on Brower's upper jaw, under his right lip and near his nose. When it didn't go away, Allison had it biopsied, and it turned out to be a malignant fibrosarcoma, a cancerous tumor that is often fatal if it shows up in a dog's mouth. Brower was six.

  The tumor continued to grow rapidly, presenting Allison with two choices: Let the tumor grow until it prevented Brower from eating or try surgery to remove it. Unfortunately, because of the tumor's tentacle-like formation, the surgery would entail removing half of Brower's snout.

  She told me all this as we sat on the deck one evening, Merle and Brower off in the sagebrush beyond the three prayer flags, the tall white banners just moving in the breeze. I had brought them home from Nepal, where such banners can be seen outside Buddhist monasteries, the homes of Sherpas, and on high mountain passes. Imprinted with blessings, the flags cast their good tidings downwind, in this case toward the house.

  Only the dogs' tails were visible in the sagebrush, Brower's tail high, Merle's a little lower, the two courtiers still.

  "What would you do?" she asked me.

  Watching our dogs, she had stopped crying. I watched them a moment longer, touched that she had come to ask my advice as well as by the unexpected course of things. So long ago, I had wanted a bird dog, and I had found Merle. So long ago, I had wanted a wife, and I had found this friend.

  I watched the dogs a moment longer before saying, "I think I'd do the surgery. Brower's not going to care what he looks like, and it might save his life."

  She began to cry again, the sort of tears that go far beyond the subject at hand. "He is such a beautiful dog," she said.

  "He is," I agreed, but I knew what she meant—that even though Brower wouldn't care what he looked like, she would, a beautiful woman who took such pride in how things looked.

  A few seconds later, I knew I had been right, for she fixed her eyes on him, bounding through the sage, and said, "This seems like a test just made for me."

  After doing more research and consulting another specialist, she came to a decision. She brought Brower over to the house to take some photographs of him and me playing on the deck—the last photographs of the two of us when he still had his face. The growth on his upper jaw had begun to disfigure his lip into a painful-looking snarl. When Allison drove away toward Colorado for his surgery, I stood on the deck with Merle and watched her car go down the park road. She had her arm extended out her window, reaching aloft as she waved good-bye. In the rear window, Brower stood, laughing at us, his ears flapping in the wind.

  A few weeks later, he burst through the dog doors, leapt into my arms, and put his paws on my shoulders. "Ted, man!" he panted. "It's great to see you! I can't tell you what I've been through!" And for the first time in his life he looked intimidated, not without reason.

  The results of his surgery were horrific. The top half of his snout was gone, cut off cleanly in front of his eyes, his two lower canines sticking into empty space around his tongue, the twin holes of his nasal passages opening and closing within a wall of pink flesh as he breathed.

  Though I had internally gasped, I hugged his shoulders and gave him a kiss on the side of the head. "Browse!" I cried. "It is so good to see you too!"

  Tearing my eyes from his amputation, I saw that the rest of him was still whole, the perfect Golden Retriever, slim with feathery ears and tail, his brown eyes now turning merrier as he saw Merle coming over to take a perfunctory sniff of his nose. The expression on Merle's face remained absolutely matter-of-fact: "Hmm, Brower's missing half his snout. Let's head down to the creek."

  Out the dog door they flew, and that was that. Brower did not hide or spiral into depression. He did not stop hiking, skiing, and tearing off branches from fallen trees. He continued to mount any uncut dogs he could find. Despite the loss of half his snout, he didn't change his behavior or his optimistic outlook on the world. He was a lesson for all of us.

  As was the Gray Cat, who went missing shortly before Brower came home. Months before, he had begun to limp and pick at his food. When he didn't come around in a few days, I took him to the vet, who ran some tests and diagnosed him with diabetes. We put him on a low-calorie diet and I would call him twice a day to the refrigerator, where I kept his insulin. "Chat Gris, viens ici, s'il te plaît, pour ta médecine." He'd stand calmly at my feet while I slipped the needle into a fold of skin between his shoulders. "Ah, comme ton ami, Merle, tu es un patient très accommodant." Like your friend, Merle, you are a very compliant patient. And indeed he was except when it came to his new diet, which he settled into grudgingly.

  "I'm sorry," I'd say as he sniffed his food and left it untouched. "You are of an age, Sir, that you can no longer be choosy."

  But when he regained his mobility, he chose to be choosy, slipping out the two cat doors—slap-slap—and heading into the dusky sagebrush, green eyes wide as he searched for rodents. He brought back a mouse tail in the morning, and I told him, "Gray Cat, you're not as fast as you once were. Are you sure you want to go out there at night?"

  That night, when he discovered that I had blocked his door, he told me that he did. He came to my bed and caterwauled in my face: "Ted! Open the door. Oh, Ted! Open the door." I turned away from him and he stomped over my shoulders. Putting a paw on my face, he cried again: "Did you hear me? Open the door."

  Merle—who wasn't happy either to have found the door plugged—looked up from his bed with a sour expression: "That insufferable cat."

  And so I let Gray Cat out, and we had peace. One day a few months later, he didn't come back. In the morning I searched in wider and wider circles around the house, finding no evidence of any struggle, which led me to believe that he had been grabbed on the fly by a coyote and carried off. Over the next few weeks, when I'd hear a coyote yip into song, I'd think of Gray Cat and console myself with the fact that he would have had it no other way, that for eleven years he had been a night hunter just like the coyotes, Great Horned Owls, and mountain lions among whom he slipped so fearlessly.

  One day, though, as the afternoon sunlight fell on my desk, his going the way he wanted to—off by himself, an outdoor cat—did not buoy my spirits. I missed his soft gray sprawl on my lap and his putting a paw on my fingers as I typed. Getting up, I walked into the great room and said to Merle
, "Don't you miss Gray Cat?"

  Lounging across the entire length of the dedicated quadruped couch, his chin comfortably on its arm, he didn't appear to be giving much thought to our old buddy. Up went one white brow, down went the other. He glanced around. "Gray Cat? I haven't seen him for quite a while."

  "You are a hard-hearted soul," I told him.

  He blew out a breath: "Phoooo."

  Although Gray Cat's disappearance left him indifferent, it did serve to increase his affection toward me. Coming through his door, he'd spy me lying on the human couch, reading. In the past, there would have been a good chance that Gray Cat would be curled on my belly, and Merle would have sent him a jaundiced stare before going to the opposite couch, reserved for the four-legged members of the household. Now, he would immediately come to me, put his chin on my hip, nosing me hard as he wagged his tail: "Oh, this is so nice! Just the two of us." Then he'd go to his couch, lie down, and stare at me with the utmost contentment: "This is the best. You and me."

  His obvious pleasure in having me all to himself made me think of the question that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas poses in her book The Hidden Life of Dogs: "What do dogs want?"

  She answers that "they want each other," going on to say that "human beings are merely a cynomorphic substitute" and that "dogs who live in each other's company are calm and pragmatic" without the desperate, even hysterical need to communicate their feelings and observations to humans.

  Thomas is certainly right about some dogs. But in thirteen years of living with Merle, I saw another aspect of dog behavior. When I was working at my desk, for instance, Merle spent most of his time outside with other dogs and also with a large cross section of our human neighbors. Even when I went to town, he would often choose to stay in Kelly and conduct his own affairs. Discounting his longstanding issues with shotguns and firecrackers, and his understandable dislike of having his paws or tail stepped on, he was as calm and pragmatic a dog as one could wish for. Nonetheless, he would become instantly and boundlessly excited if he saw me getting ready to go elk hunting or powder skiing. This wasn't hysteria. It was the passion of someone who knew what he liked. At these moments there wasn't a dog on the planet who could quell his enthusiasm for being with me. Yet take away these two activities—hunting big, tasty animals and floating down through the winter landscape—would Merle have liked me so much? I doubt it.