by Ted Kerasote
How he got to the road, I sometimes wondered. But he did—falling down, picking himself up, resting, going on. When he'd return, he'd ask for something to tide him over until dinnertime: a dog biscuit; his liver treats; occasionally I gave him an elk bone, and he'd work on it, holding it between his paws and gnawing on its end with his eyes closed in delight. I had learned that he had no use for plain yogurt, but loved the kind flavored with vanilla. Obviously, he still had his sweet tooth, and, remembering how he had loved wild berries, I bought him some organic blackberry sorbet. He could have finished cartons of it.
One evening, after he had eaten his dinner, he began to scrabble to his feet. I helped him up, but his back end immediately collapsed. His front end looked strong, though, so I put a towel under his waist and supported him as he set off on a tour of the house.
First he went to my office, turned a circle around it, and sniffed the rug on which he had lain for years. Then he proceeded into the guest room, where he rarely went, and gave it an inspection. Upon coming out, he looked at the stairs to our bedroom and decided against them. Instead, he walked through the great room, outside onto the deck, jumped off it, and towed me around the entire perimeter of the lawn, before coming back onto the deck and leading me into the house, where he lay directly before the great window, under the ridge log that we had cut together, equidistant from every corner of the room, in the very center of the house.
"Ha-ha-ha," he panted up at me. "I needed one last look around."
And, indeed, it was his last. He did not rise again. But this didn't mean we stayed at home. I carried him to the car, the Subaru becoming a traveling hospice. If I met someone for dinner, I chose an outdoor café, where I could sit at a table directly by our car and Merle could watch me through the open windows. Passersby who knew us would stop and, after chatting with me, they'd sit with Merle awhile, saying good-bye to him. Some brought their dogs, and Merle and the dogs would also have a last visit, his friends pressing their noses to him and appraising his changed state.
Back at home, I'd carry him inside and put him to bed. If he couldn't eat, I'd chop his elk in small pieces and hold it in my hand for him to lick it up. Sometimes he couldn't hold his head up to lap water from his bowl, so I'd syringe it into his mouth. Then, as I put away kitchen things, his eyes would follow me, saying, "Oh, it is so good to be seeing you!" And I'd walk back to him, lie down before him, nose to nose, and say, "Oh, it is so good to be seeing you. Simply the best!"
On a morning when the weather turned fine, I came downstairs to find that Merle had soiled himself as usual. I carried him to the front porch, washed him down with warm water, then laid him on the grass between the house and the spruce trees. As I went inside to put the towels in the washing machine, I heard him whimpering plaintively. He hadn't made a sound in days, and I hurried back outside.
Lying on his side, he was moving his paws as if trying to paddle himself across the grass. When he saw me, he whimpered more loudly. I knelt over him, and he held my eyes. The look in them said, "I don't want to be here." Instantly, I understood.
I picked him up and carried him through the house and out the south glass doors. As I stepped onto the deck, he began to wag his tail, the entire length of it, which amazed me, since he hadn't wagged it fully since before his seizures. His eyes were fixed on his clump of aspen trees.
"Ha-ha-ha!" he panted happily, in relief. "Yes, there. There is where I want to be."
I laid him on the grass under their shade, and his whole body—from nose to tail to toes—relaxed as he let out a long breath.
And that is where we passed the next eight days—he lying on his side, I sitting beside him. I wrote on my laptop, or tried to, and answered the phone, keeping my eyes on him as he kept his eyes on me. Every so often, I would lie down before him and say, "Do you know you're the pup of my dreams?" And then I'd sing his song—"I know a dog"—and he'd chatter his teeth and exhale "Ha!" when I reached his name. Then we'd just gaze at each other, our eyes saying, "You know, I just want to keep looking at you."
Often, he would stare at the snowcapped Tetons, rising above the sagebrush. And I'd say, "They sure are purtacious, aren't they?" It was the word we shared for when something or someone was remarkably pretty. And he'd turn his eyes back to me, acknowledging what I'd said, before returning his eyes to the mountains.
He had always liked to gaze into big spaces, and now, with so many directions to look—up, down, to the prayer flags, the aspens, or to me—he'd so often hang his eyes upon the mountains rising above the great sage prairie. His tranquil gaze made me think that he was still finding peace there—in those wide open spaces that had been his shelter.
During this week people visited and said good-bye to him, sitting on the grass by his side, leaning close, and speaking in soft voices. The Landales came and Benj and Allison, and the many neighbors who had been his ports of call. Two of his favorite people did not come. Donald Kent had died four years earlier, and Gladys had died a month before Merle had become gravely ill. When Donald had been deep in his Alzheimer's, I had visited him in the nursing home, and he had not recognized me or anything I had said until I had told him, "Merle says, 'Hi.' He misses you." Donald had raised his head and replied, "He is a good dog."
Among the many people who called from far away was my mother, checking in as she had been doing. This time she said that she had just blessed Merle's photo on her refrigerator with the themiato—the censer with which devout Greek Orthodox direct incense toward the people they wish to protect. Her gesture touched me. Though what she had done wasn't heresy, it did go beyond the canons of the Church, which with respect to animals are clear. Since animals don't have souls, one doesn't pray for their afterlife. And that my mother had been doing this became apparent a few moments later when she said, "Merle is such a good dog. Who knows where his's—" She stopped herself short, unable to use the "soul" word for him. "Who knows where Merle might end up."
A little later my neighbor David Shlim rang. An M.D. and a Buddhist scholar, he offered to give Merle some ngundrup—black particles the size of tiny seeds. Made from the relics of lamas, they contained centuries of sacred wisdom and would purify Merle's karma, helping him to find a higher reincarnation.
After fetching the ngundrup, I placed most of them inside Merle's mouth, and, for good measure, I ate several myself. The thought did cross my mind, however, that Merle might desire nothing more than to come back as the dog he had been, and I, certainly, couldn't imagine a finer reincarnation than repeating the life I had shared with him in Jackson Hole.
At last a morning came when he didn't want to eat or drink. His cheeks had grown hollow; he seemed to be departing himself. I called the Landales and they stopped by again. Scott, on his way to the office, came first. He knelt beside Merle and ran his fingers though his ruff. Then he looked into his eyes and said, "Hey, Merley, want to go find some elk? Do you want to go hunting?"
Merle didn't move. His brown eyes, their centers more purplish than ever, stared at Scott.
I walked out toward the prayer flags and heard Scott say, "Thank you for all those hunts, Merley." Leaning very close to Merle, he said some things I couldn't hear.
When he stood up, his face seemed to be coming apart in all directions, his eyes like two blue rain clouds. I followed him inside. At the door, he turned and clutched me hard. Then, without a word, he was gone.
I resumed my vigil beside Merle. His eyes grew more sunken, his breath softer. He seemed to go ever farther away.
A while later, April and the girls came by, and April and Eliza sat around Merle, their hands on him, as most everyone's hands had been on him, as if he were some sort of reference point, a headland that needed to be rounded.
Stoic, Tessa stood nearby. April had told me that when Tessa had put down the phone after my call, she had burst into tears.
"His fur is so soft," said Eliza, stroking his golden flank. "Will you bury him? We buried our rat at school."
I told
her that I had thought about leaving Merle high on the Sleeping Indian, because he had begun his life as a wild dog and that's how a wild dog would end his life. But that's not who Merle had become, and so I was going to bury him by the prayer flags, with some elk bones to send him on his way. Then we could always be close.
"That's a good idea," she said.
"He loved bones," Tessa interjected, stepping closer.
And they all began to recall Merle's love of food and how he would get into the kitchen trash when they left him alone in the house. When they'd return, he'd look off into the distance and instead of being guilty or afraid, he'd say, "Garbage? I don't know a thing about no garbage."
"Remember how he'd walk down to Kelly, looking for you when you were gone?" said Tessa.
"Yes," said April, "someone at the school would call me and say, 'Do you know this big red dog?'"
"He's not red," corrected Eliza.
"Oh, yes, he was red when he was a pup."
"I remember him when he was a puppy," said Eliza.
I laughed. "You weren't even born when he was a puppy."
She gave me her elfish smile.
Stepping still closer, Tessa chimed in, "He's lived a good life."
"He's ninety-eight," said April.
"Ninety-eight!" Tessa exclaimed.
"Or thereabouts," I added. "In fact, I think it was just his fourteenth birthday, or what I've made his birthday."
"He loved to sing 'Happy Birthday,'" said Tessa.
"We should sing him 'Happy Birthday,'" I said.
And so we put our hands on him and sang, at the top of our lungs, "Happy birthday, dear Merle. Happy birthday to you."
But the most he could muster was to blink his eyes.
I had to get up and blow my nose. Coming back, I said, "Historians will now calculate time as BM, DM, and AM—Before, During, and After Merle."
April laughed. "I don't know how good BM sounds."
"We've had plenty of those," I answered.
And we all laughed, as people do around the dying when they can no longer stay sad.
The girls had to get to school, and so they all leaned down to give Merle a last pet and kiss. April stood up with her eyes wet. "Hoo," she exclaimed, letting out a long breath. "You don't get this upset about some people."
I sat the rest of the morning with him, often lying nose to nose, my hand on the back of his head, as his eyes sank and rose, and he seemed to fall in and out of consciousness. "You fly on, Merle," I told him gently. "Chase those bison, find those elk. Thank you for being my dog."
At noon, he still lived, and light-headed from hunger—I hadn't eaten since the previous day—I went inside, fixed an antelope sandwich, and came back to the deck, sitting on its edge with my legs in the grass, my bare feet just touching his back.
As I brought the sandwich to my mouth, I saw his nose twitch. His right eye, the upper one, opened, and he stared directly at me. He looked suddenly perfectly lucid, and I knew that look as well as I knew his name.
Taking a piece of meat from the sandwich, I held it over his nose, and he reached up and snagged it. Swallowing, he looked very smug.
"You faker," I said. "People are weeping over you."
His eyes went from mine to the sandwich: "I could use another bite of that."
Going back inside, I cut the remaining antelope steak into slivers and fed it to him. He swallowed each piece voraciously, his filmy eyes brightening, his hollow cheeks seeming to fill out.
"Sir," I said. "You are a wonder."
One brow went up, the other down, and he turned his gaze to the mountains, watching them contentedly.
We continued to sit together through the afternoon, and there were no more river trips, no more powder days, no more cruising the high country for elk. There were no more mayoral rounds and staying in Kelly because what I was doing in town was too boring for a dog of his wide interests. There were no more assignments to take me away. There were no more conditions. There were only the two of us, touching and unable to take our eyes from each other.
At one point his eyes widened considerably. He reached out with his right paw and dug his nails into the grass as a worried and frightened look crossed his face. Something was going on inside of him, some physiological Rubicon, and he knew it. He looked at me. Lying next to him, I put one hand on his cheek and one on his flank, and said, "I'm right here. I'm right here."
And then whatever was happening stilled.
"How you doing with all this?" I asked gently. "Do you want to hang in there?"
He gazed directly at me, and his eyes were scared and also remarkably sad. I looked at him carefully, trying to see whether he was simply frightened and low from being so ill or if he knew that he was dying. I thought that he did know he had come to his end, and it didn't surprise me. From a pup, mortality had been his shadow. There had been that bullet behind his shoulder. There had been his having to kill his own food to survive. Then, hunting with me, he had seen the life go out of many big animals, animals who were just like us.
Once, we had even found a coyote on the Kelly road, struck dead by a car and perfectly intact except for her broken tail. At the sight of the coyote, Merle had shaken with excitement, but when I had let him out of the car, he had stopped in his rush toward her and raised a paw, expanding and contracting his nostrils like a bellows as he sucked in her scent. In an instant, his excited shivering—"let me at that coyote"—ceased and he became extraordinarily still. With great care, he leaned forward and put his nose a few inches from her belly. Then he eased his nostrils directly into her fur, breathing deeply. Pulling himself back, he looked at me with the sober expression I had seen him wear before.
"Dead," I agreed.
Gravely, he sat down, cocked his head, and stared at the coyote with the attention that people reserve for unprecedented occurrences. I wondered if this might be the first occasion that he had realized dogs could die.
Now he seemed to know that he was on the other side of that sober look he had given to so many of his fellow beings.
I kissed him on the nose, and held his head between my hands, and said, "I will go through this as long as you want." I tried to make my voice reassuring, but his eyes stayed sad and a little frightened and made mine fill with tears.
"I will miss you so much," I said, my voice breaking as I tried not to sob in front of him and make him sadder and more fearful for my grief. Swallowing my tears, I added softly, "Love you forever."
It wasn't my words; it was the tone behind them. His eyes calmed, and he sighed.
"Forever," I repeated.
And he sighed again, looking peaceful.
Some big cumulus clouds covered the sun, and I went upstairs to get a long-sleeve shirt. Glancing at his corner—now empty of his bed and soon, I knew, empty of him—I had a sudden vision of the house filled only with photographs and memories. Without warning, the thought broke me. My mouth shook violently; my body felt as if it were being ripped apart. I had known loss before, but never like this. Others had held the door ajar for me; Merle was the door through which I had passed, allowing my heart, so careful of giving completely, to fling wide open. I could no longer hold it together. Doubling over, I fell on my bed and bawled.
Paul Cuddon, Theo Schuff, and Marybeth Minter called later that day, within hours of each other, as if heeding some distant signal. They wanted to know how Merle was doing. I told them that I thought he was beyond medical help and thanked Paul in particular for giving us this extra month and a half together. Theo asked me what I wanted to do now and I said, "Just let Merle go on his own." There was a sigh of relief on the other end of the line, and Theo said, "That sounds like a good plan. I'd hate to be the one to put him down." Marybeth said the same thing, adding, "You're doing the right thing, letting the process happen. He's not in pain. It's what we see in dying that is uncomfortable to us."
He began to go in and out of sleep or consciousness—I couldn't translate which. His temperature went up; so
did his heart rate and his breathing; he began to shiver; I covered him with a light blanket. That night I slept by him, downstairs, putting my arms around him when he shook. A few moments later, he grew still and calm. I pressed my lips to his head and looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine.
"Hey, my lightfoot lad," I said, but all he could do was mince his eyes.
When we awoke, he was unable to eat. I held a piece of elk in front of his nose, and he looked at me with a soulful expression that said, "I wish I could, but I can't."
After days of clear weather, the sky had turned dark and the rain pounded. Stepping outside, I tossed the elk to the wind. Then I called the Landales, who stopped on their way to school and said good-bye once again.
During the day, Merle's eyes became dry and tracked back and forth. His breaths came in soft shallow puffs that lifted his lips. His pulse, once so strong—like a kettledrum—was light and fast, 150 beats per minute. I sang his song. Even in his condition, he managed to raise an eyebrow when he heard me sing his name, "Merle!"
It was so cold I built a fire. Lying by his side, I syringed many doses of water into his mouth, the water running down his tongue and out the lower side of his jaw, while his back legs jerked a little. His breath had begun to smell acidic and full of ketones. He swallowed the water and smiled again, that grateful smile, his eyes lighting happily. Then I lay with him, nose to nose, and we looked directly at each other. "You and me," I said. His eyes glowed warmly at the touch of my hands. "Wherever I am, you'll be there too." I tapped my index finger to the side of my head several times. "And here, always." I tapped my heart.
We stared at each other and time, unmarked by us, moved along. His eyes half closed, and I kissed his head. He sighed.
In the late afternoon, I called my friend Bill Liske in Colorado. Twenty years before, in the Hunku Valley of Nepal, he and I had met the Khyi together, the friendly Tibetan Mastiff whom I had carried over the Amphu Labtsa in my pack, Bill jumaring on the rope ahead of me. Since then, Bill and I had traveled around the world together, consoling each other during the deaths of our fathers and at the breakup of love. On two adventures, he and I had nearly died together.