The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Kelly didn’t seem fazed. The dog’s basic obedience seemed pretty good. Maybe it would help Merion most to get right to work on the pacing. Break it down into a set of steps to teach the dog. What should they teach Annie to recognize? When did normal walking become a pace? Merion had to think about that. She was sure there was some dividing line between normal behavior and aberrant. Merion realized that the journal her therapist kept suggesting she keep (and that she kept avoiding, for whatever reason) would now be a necessity. It was not enough to know she always felt doom approaching. It was not enough to say “I get anxious, I pace, I’m always worried about time.” Merion felt a half-sick thrill at the size of the job before all of them. She had to teach Annie to read her, which meant Merion had to learn that forbidden language too.

  Merion paced when she was chasing time. Merion paced when she was anxious about the safety of her school. Two simple concepts, but she says it took her a few weeks to really figure that out. It is always hard to be objective in the thick of things. At home, her pacing was worst when her schedule was at the mercy of others: when she was waiting for a UPS delivery or for her daughters to bring the grandkids. A half a day waiting for a repairman—especially if that repairman’s arrival fell outside the hell of that four-hour window—could render her pretty much useless. She chafed and paced when she could have been getting spontaneous things done. At school, where everything was marvelously structured to time (and now she wonders if her choice of profession had something to do with that), she paced when some uneasy something made her worry for her students. Some days were worse than others, and though it is still hard for her to use the term obsession, she has to. Merion is much less bound by her condition now, but she says she still thinks of it in the present tense. Even though her work with Annie has kept episodes at bay for almost a year, Merion says she’s probably healthier if she stays aware that her condition is out there. It was bad once; it could get bad again.

  For some people, she’s heard, the pacing makes them feel better. For Merion, it did not. She thinks it might even have made her feel worse, this loss of control, this useless waste of time.

  She was eager for Annie’s help. Working with Kelly, Merion decided that she would like the dog to interrupt her pacing any time she, Merion, made more than two circuits of the same area. She wasn’t eager for the dog to intervene when she returned for something forgotten, but in thinking over her own behavior, Merion recognized that she tended to pace without pauses, a course in any given place that might be repeated thirty times or fifty times or until the repairman or whoever finally arrived.

  After at least two rounds of the same space, Merion wanted Annie to block her—to literally stand in her way. When her therapist suggested that Merion might have better success with a redirection, an alternative behavior, Merion decided she would train Annie to block her and offer Merion Annie’s leash. Merion’s pacing would be the cue for Annie to block. Annie’s block would be the message to Merion that she was pacing. Annie’s leash would be the redirection to more productive behavior. A walk for Annie. A step into fresh air for them both. At first it seemed odd to redirect walking with more walking, but Merion says it wasn’t too difficult to see that a walk with a purpose was very different from the anxious back-and-forth.

  This meant teaching Annie to recognize the pace, interrupt the pace, pick up her leash, and bring it to Merion. The four tasks could have seemed huge, but they reminded Merion a bit of teaching preschoolers to square-dance. The little children learned the routine eventually without the calls, learned to recognize certain passages of music, then move a certain way, join hands here, turn there.

  Kelly thought Annie would be quick to learn her tasks. She said, “How many dogs do you know who hear the sound of their human’s car and run to the door, expecting something good to happen?” Merion didn’t know any, but Kelly laughed and said many, many dogs did this. So now it would just be a matter of teaching Annie what to expect and what to do next and demonstrating that something good would happen when she did it. First she would be given a treat for the block, and then a walk. Since Annie was a dog who loved the outdoors, this reward would be right up her alley.

  Kelly gave Merion a clicker. Its sound would be a clean, crisp marker for Annie that confirmed for her when she’d done the desired thing: recognized the pace, made the move to block, presented the leash. This was a training tool that they wouldn’t have to use forever. Merion clicked the little object and immediately liked it somehow, the cheerful, chirpy sound, like the Halloween noisemakers of her childhood.

  Merion paces. Annie blocks. Annie offers leash. Merion and Annie go for a walk. That’s the sequence.

  “What do I do when it’s raining?” Merion mused.

  Kelly said, “Take an umbrella.”

  Merion’s therapist said, “Right on.”

  Six weeks later, they were firm collaborators. Merion would stand in the Great Hall of Traffic Cones, as she called it, and Annie would lie on the floor while Kelly sat in a chair at the far side of the room. Sometimes Merion would pick up some random object, say an empty box, cross the room, and put it on the counter. Annie watched. Merion would move to the window and stand for a long moment, looking out. Annie watched. And then somewhere in the training period, Merion began to pace. A slow cross of the room in front of Annie, as though she had somewhere to go, and then a turn and a slightly faster cross back. Annie would look into her face on the second cross, tail thump-thumping on the floor, but when Merion didn’t respond and turned to pace again, Annie would rise. She would tolerate two, sometimes three, passes and then move across her path, her attached leash in her mouth.

  As they advanced in training, Merion began stopping and acknowledging Annie absently, then sidestepping the dog to keep pacing. It was a big day the first time they tried this, simulating Merion in so deep a funk she resisted diversion. Annie joined her, bewildered, permitted one more pass, then blocked her again when Merion turned to go back the other way.

  Merion looked down at her dog, hands on her hips. Annie sat on her feet and grinned upward, as if daring her to try to pace again. Merion thought the only way the dog could have been more obvious was if she’d set off fireworks. She blocked Merion’s pacing when she should have, and when she was ignored, she blocked Merion again. Intelligent disobedience is the term handlers use for a dog’s awareness of a greater goal that requires a momentary refusal to do something a human partner asks. That moment, that willful intercession of the dog, and the equilibrium for Merion it provided took them six weeks to achieve.

  It began with something as simple as giving Annie a cheddar treat after every second turn in a pacing sequence. She was not rewarded for intervening too early. She was clicked, rewarded, and praised every time she got it right. Merion noted in her journal that she, too, seemed to have been classically conditioned. Sometimes when she started pacing, she got the vaguest whiff of Annie’s cheddar treat, anticipated the scent before it happened. Merion wonders if now anytime she smells cheddar, she’ll stop where she stands.

  14

  SUMMER GIVES WAY TO AUTUMN. The animals and I are ready for it, exhausted from months of heat. I sympathize with the brown, drought-weary leaves that drop early, ugly rather than brilliant. And I’m grateful for the series of violent storms that shake us up and wash us clean. Seasonal change can be an unsettling, dangerous time in central Texas—we have the tornadoes to prove it—and when I was a child, storms terrified me. But now, even the worst of our storms are somehow invigorating. The civil-defense sirens wail. We scurry to the inner rooms of my old house, and I sit there, sometimes for more than an hour, amid the sweet, warm breath of dogs and cats who seem to enjoy the huddle, dozing on one another, sometimes draped across my lap. Only Mr. Sprits’l, my single storm-phobic dog, chitters and worries over the thunder. Jake Piper is unconcerned. Puzzle and the rest of the Poms sleep through it. Afterward, the cold air is welcome. It smells like change, and even the senior dogs turn frisky.

&nb
sp; Jake Piper’s coat begins to come in. He’d been patchy and bare from malnutrition when he came to us, but now several months of good food have put fur on him. And muscle. While I can’t figure out how big he’s going to be—his legs are long; his feet are small; his head outsize compared to the rest of his body—I can tell Jake’s going to be powerful. The chase play with Puzzle is more evenly matched. She is still stronger and corners much better, but when he can manage to stay upright, Jake is gaining speed. Puzzle has to struggle harder to take him down. He came in frail three months ago, but now he is almost the strongest dog in the house.

  A dog like Jake could be hell on wheels very soon, but something in his nature prevents that. He reminds me a bit of Gene’s Merlin, with his gentleness to the little dogs, and there is something in his loving, connected eye gaze with humans that makes me think of Bob’s Haska.

  Despite his size and some remaining puppy immaturity, Jake Piper is still what I would call a soft boy. When Puzzle and he are roughhousing, he struggles for dominance, but in every other thing he defers to her. He defers to all the dogs, in fact: young and old; big, small, and smallest. I’ve often seen rescued dogs come in stunned and subdued for the first couple of weeks and then begin to get a little pushy, laying claim to territory—corners, toys, even humans—with a sort of “I’m here, get used to it” swagger that can become a problem. But not Jake. When he’s not racing from one end of the house to the other in play, he pads through rooms wary of the other dogs’ spaces, cautious not to encroach. If he does cross some invisible boundary a Pom (Mr. Sprits’l) has set, and the Pom (Mr. Sprits’l) springs forward crabbing at him, Jake’s ears droop, his head bows, and his tail wags a little whip-whip-whip of apology. He’s a social beast and eager to be loved.

  “Awww, Jakey P,” I say after this kind of exchange, and he ducks his head and pulls up his front lip in a shy flash of grin that some dogs do, a sheepish “my bad” when he’s not at fault at all. (At least, not from my point of view. The muttering Poms, the cats staring poisonously from high spaces, no doubt think differently. They are sick of his galumphing. They wish him gone.)

  Jake finds comfort in Puzzle, who mothers him, and he still clearly needs her. At six months old, Jake suddenly becomes afraid of the dark. A summer-born puppy, he came into a world of long days and short nights, and when he first joined the family, his final outing before bedtime was still reasonably light. But now the time has changed and darkness comes earlier. Jake grows dispirited after sunset. Is there a seasonal affective disorder for dogs? I wonder. Is there such a thing for dogs as the night-gloom common in human depression? I put on all the lights in the house, which seems to help him, but the darkness outside is something I can’t fix.

  Jake is housebroken, bless him, and he seems to want desperately to be good, but I notice that now at night he’s unwilling to go outside without a human beside him, not even in the presence of the other dogs. It’s an odd sight, that last nighttime constitutional: Puzzle’s calm descent down the stairs, the little Poms flashing past her into the gloom of the backyard, and muscular, adolescent Jake running ahead of me out onto the deck, then stopping to look behind him. If I don’t follow, and especially if I turn away, he runs back to me—bladder full and face anxious.

  I’ve never had a dog that was afraid of the dark. I’ve had plenty of dogs go through expected puppy-fear stages, and the training guides say Jake’s on time for one now, but this is something different. It doesn’t take much to remember Jake’s puppyhood five blocks away: tied down out of sunlight in the deep shadows of a shed, abandoned and left to die there. I’m not sure if this new fear is an echo of that hard beginning or something else entirely, but darkness now seems to have a meaning for him I have never seen in another dog.

  For a couple of weeks I go out with Jake at night, both of us orbited by the other dogs, and I stay in his sightline while he does his good-dog business. But the little Poms are quicker to get things done, and patience is not their strong suit. When they’re ready to go in, they are Ready to Go In. I hear them spinning and nattering away at each other at the door, and I hear them yapping at me. In! We. Would. In! If I move away from Jake to let them back in the house, he will follow me, no matter what the state of his bowels. Reinforcing Jake’s housebreaking is the first priority. I infuriate the Poms by making them wait. Sometimes they stand peering at Jake over the edge of the deck, as if to say:

  Are...you...not...done...YET?

  As time passes, however, Puzzle seems to recognize the problem. She changes her own routine to stay near Jake at night. Puzzle is flawlessly housebroken and fearless in the dark, and where once she would have done her business and then ambled the perimeter of the fence line, inspecting and sniffing for change, now she stations herself within feet of Jake, a mother-that-never-was attending an overlarge puppy-that-isn’t-hers. She doesn’t hover, but she remains a calm presence nearby, cropping grass or flopping down on the slate pavers to huff over some scent on the stones.

  I have no idea why she does this. It’s a choice Puzzle makes undirected by me and based on dog impulses alone. Perhaps she sees his anxiety or senses it some other way. Perhaps Jake’s fear has a scent that brings out the maternal in her. Whatever the reason, it’s working. I notice that with Puzzle nearby, Jake begins to need my presence less. I’m soon able to back away and let the Poms in the house. Within days, I’m able to merely stand at the door and let all of them in and out at will. Jake’s fear of the dark diminishes. By the time he turns eight months old, he is comfortable in the deep shadows of the backyard beside Puzzle. They go out together often and spend hours in the dark. Puzzle seems to lead the dance. She moves, and he is her devoted attendant. I look out the window and see the golden and Jake, white as moonlight, provoking night rodents across the stiff grass.

  Jake seems to have learned he can trust his new life. He has food, safety, family. Humans leave and come back again, and in the company of other dogs, he is never deserted, never entirely alone. In this happy atmosphere, Jake Piper grows in every direction. Curious, joyful, engaged; his cheerful personality makes him seem larger than he really is. A dog-loving friend says it’s hard not to smile at Jake Piper, because he’s always smiling at you.

  When we head out into the neighborhood, he is delighted with everyone—dog, cat, and human alike. Especially human. Puzzle and Jake Piper are an odd couple on walks. They are not what people expect. Jake is as social as Puzzle is quietly reserved. Jake likes children and especially loves babies, leaning in when comfortable parents allow it, wagging furiously when infants gurgle or laugh. A few passersby are surprised to see the remote but sweet-faced golden retriever walking with the muscular pit bull mix who approaches everyone with the soft-eyed wiggliness of a pup.

  Jake’s still learning. He is not a perfect dog by any means. He can pop out of his Sit when meeting friendly strangers. He sometimes jumps on visitors to the house. He is, occasionally, conveniently deaf to his commands. But these are issues I could expect with any maturing dog, and I prefer these to the troubling alternatives adolescent Jake might have shown: the separation anxiety, the resource guarding, the mouthiness that can come from a rescued, unsocialized puppy who’s known profound neglect.

  Jake also possesses a gift that some dogs have, the ability to recognize physical frailty. Two senior, special-needs rescues come into the house, and he welcomes them with a gentle lick of the ears and nothing more. When Jake greets a convalescing friend quietly and lays his head on her knee, holding there, motionless, she is as grateful for his restraint as she is for his attention. She is sound sensitive and light sensitive after a bout of flu followed by a three-day migraine, and she can barely speak above a whisper. As her fingers move lightly across Jake’s shoulders, she wonders, as I do, if this is the service dog candidate I’ve been looking for. “He sure seems willing,” she says. “He sure seems to know what to do.”

  Early, too early, in the morning, and the dogs are going nuts over something at the front of the
house. They are in full voice.

  “Dogs! What is going on?” I shout. In the half-light through the windows, I stumble out of bed and promptly walk into a wall. I still often wake thinking I’m in the old Dallas place, and now it takes me a minute to get out of my bedroom and down the corridor to where the dogs are, near the front door.

  Mr. Sprits’l spins toward me, very much aggrieved, then turns back to the window to bark some more. The other dogs ignore me in favor of whatever is outside.

  It’s a chicken. A hen has hopped the low picket fence around my house and is calmly working her way through the foggy yard, ghosting in and out of sight. Though I can’t imagine the chicken would have made much noise, clearly it made enough to wake, delight, infuriate the dogs. A chicken! They are following it from window to window across the house, all of them barking except Jake Piper. This surprises me. Jake’s got plenty of prey drive, but he watches the chicken with only mild interest, wagging idly, as though he’s a been-there-seen-that country boy to the others’ citified astonishment.

  When did Jake Piper ever know a chicken?

  Through the glass, I can see a lady roll up in a truck. She is driving with one hand, talking on a cell phone, cruising slowly, her eye on the hen. She claps the phone shut, stops the truck, and gingerly gets out. She’s wearing sweatpants, house shoes, and a Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt. Her hair is every which way, and even when she crouches down and creeps along the fence line in the fog, I can see the spikes of it sticking up. It’s like something from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: No sudden moves. Don’t spook the chicken.