The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  My dogs can see the woman too. Bonus! Puzzle bounds easily over the moving hustle of shorter, squabbling Pomeranians. As far as I know, none of the Poms has ever seen a chicken; all of them are ready to tell the lady off. It’s a cartoon moment. The little dogs desperately pile on top of one another for an advantage at the window, and the hen cocks an eye, then ignores them completely and pecks her way across the lawn. Outside my front gate, the woman appears less confident. She looks left and right and then at my front door. She seems unversed in catching chickens and a little taken aback by the roar of dogs in the house. Mr. Sprits’l enjoys jumping up to give her the stink eye through a window before dropping to the floor again. Ha! he barks triumphantly at the top of the jump. Ha!

  Meanwhile, the chicken meanders through the front garden, finds something tasty, and snaps it up. The woman can’t bring herself to trespass in my yard. She waves her arms and tries to herd the chicken from the sidewalk. The hen bounces onto the opposite fence, pauses a moment, then scurries across the road and disappears into the fog. The woman trots behind her with down-stretched pleading hands.

  It’s all so ridiculous that I can’t help but flop down on the couch and laugh. It’s the first time I’ve laughed hard since Misty’s death, and the release is welcome. The dogs don’t quite know what to make of this. They circle me curiously, with tentative wags. Puzzle gives my face a sniff-over. Jake puts his paws on my forearm and looks into my eyes. We live, I tell them, where chickens actually do cross the road. Dallas never gave us this kind of action.

  I lead the dogs back to the kitchen to make coffee for me and breakfast for them, feeling the fine bones of this old house beneath my bare feet, and I think the move has been good for all of us. The pace is slower here, the people friendly. The traffic noise and the increasing presence of neighborhood crime, so long a backdrop to my life in Dallas, are pretty much nonexistent here. This was a move I’d waited twenty years for, and by luck or fate or good karma, it’s just the kind of place, I think, to partner working dogs of every kind. I look down at Jake and recognize that he’s a part of that good fortune—the unexpected, unlikely stray I had tried to resist whose resilience and mysteries of heart have something to teach me about my own.

  After breakfast, the Poms always want a doze, but the big dogs are ready for adventure. I leash up Puzzle and Jake Piper. It’s still early, but we’ll head out for some socialization work, some obedience work, and the sweet, simple opportunity for them to put paws to damp grass. When he sees the leashes, Jake levitates once and squeals his delight, but outside he sits lightly beside Puzzle on the first command while I lock the door. Puzzle holds her Sit patiently, lifting her nose a little. Jake’s Sit is more obviously strained. There is so much good to explore—now! He looks up at me with a poignant expression, wrestling obedience against the pleasure of a mad dash into the chicken-scented fog.

  15

  FIND ONE, PAULA HAD SAID, and Jake Piper may be that one, but now I’ve been asked to find another. In addition to a potential assistance dog, I’ve been looking for a dog that might be a candidate for a therapy partner in schools and hospitals or perhaps a wellness companion—a sort of ESA on loan, a comfort-providing pet for an ill person on day visits. I’ve had requests for help finding both. The health-care professionals who’ve asked are particularly interested in visits from “lap dogs that are happy to be there.” At forty pounds, Jake is no lap dog.

  While Fo’c’sle Jack has actually passed therapy testing (greased with plenty of treats) and has worked with children in this way before, Jack is not really happy sitting on human laps. Fragile, anxious, or simply too high-strung, the other Poms are not strong candidates either. Misty alone would have adored it. She would have shone at this. As I’m looking to rescue a dog with the affectionate, easy companionship needed here, a dog completely open to frail strangers, I feel the loss of that sweet girl more keenly.

  A handful of rescue friends know I’m searching, and, Petfinder addicts the way I was once a crime-map addict, several of them on the same day point me to a Petfinder ad for a little female Pomeranian. Another hardship case, she was dumped beside a highway not too far out of town. Guesstimates put her at about eight years old. A chocolate-brown Pom with white paws.

  Sweet, friendly, housebroken, small. Cuddly. Good with other dogs. Good with children. Has not been tried with cats.

  I decide to pay a visit to Miss Chocolate Pom. I meet her through a rescue group in a small room puppy-gated off from a horde of other little dogs. Hundreds of dogs, it seems like, though it is probably only about twenty, a riot of fuzzy dogs of all kinds who paw at the barrier and bark for the attention they are not getting from me. Chocolate Pom seems oblivious to them, so oblivious that at first I think she might be deaf, but then I see her ears flick at the faraway opening of a door, and I realize that she’s either uninterested in the other dogs or, stunned by the cacophony, a bit numb to them.

  She is a funny little creature, the color of a Milk Dud, with a white muzzle that looks like she dunked it in milk. Her once thick coat has been shaved off—and with good reason. It was matted to the point of ulcerating her skin when she was found. Many Pomeranian owners recognize this lion cut with approval or dread, finding the fluffy head, fluffy tail, and bare body a kindly action for a thick-coated dog in hot weather or a terrible imposition on a dog that could be, should be, beautiful. But in this case, the cut was humane, and the groomer who volunteered her services attempted to make amends for the drastic shave-down by painting the dog’s toenails pink and putting a matching bow in her hair. I am not sure it helped. With the haircut and her chocolate eyes and pale muzzle, she looks most immediately like a marmoset in drag.

  “Hey, monkey-face,” I blurt out, because seriously, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, but I say it kindly (I hope). The adoption supervisor looks on. I hold out my hand. The little brown dog toddles toward me with a stiff, awkward gait. Bad knees there, caused by luxating patellae, but she is a happy soul. She has more of a prance than a hobble. What little puff of tail she has left is wiggling wildly.

  I pick her up, cradle her in my arms, and rub her belly. The tail keeps wagging. I put her down. She skitters around my ankles.

  Hoo. Hoor. Hoo. Aahh-hooooor, she chatters. It’s a throaty, growly little rumble. I have never heard a Pomeranian make such sounds. (I can only imagine how it will set my crew off.) This kid is wiggly and playful. When I extend a forefinger, she pats it with a paw. When I make a light grab at the paw, she removes it from my fingers and play-bows and chitters some more. Hoor! Hoor! Rrrrrr! She slaps my forefinger again. Grab-toes is the game Jack and Misty loved, a game many, many Pomeranians enjoy, an engagement with humans that doesn’t take much strength to play, and the little dog comes to it naturally.

  As far as the adoption supervisor is aware, this Pom hasn’t had any obedience training. It’s hard here, she says, with so many dogs and so little space and not enough time to give every dog the kind of advantage training would bring. But she’s sweet, the supervisor tells me, and she isn’t ever cross with the others and has never snapped at the adults or the preteens who sometimes volunteer here. I move to where the supervisor stands in order to hear better over the roar of the other dogs, and the little Pom follows immediately.

  The adoption supervisor, who looks tired, says the Pom knows this room. She has been here awhile and has been passed over before. “She doesn’t want you to leave her,” the lady says, a statement that may or may not be genuine but is certainly strategic.

  We are left alone for a time so that I can make a considered decision, and the cheerful little Pom never leaves my side. There’s a magazine on a table. I drop it on the floor with a soft slap. The dog walks over to inspect it, then comes back to me with that odd hooting. I crumple up a subscription form that has fallen out and toss it. Miss Chocolate Pom tilts her head a moment, like that’s a new one on her, then skitters to the ball of paper, gives it a sniff, and tentatively picks it up. I hold out my
hands and say, “Bring it back,” and though I know this is all unfamiliar to her, I can see she’s torn, taking a few steps toward me but finding it impossible to both carry the paper and hoot, which she clearly wants to do. She drops the wad of paper midway and dances back, flopping down at my feet and rolling her belly upward. It is the ultimate sell job, and I’m sold, knowing that even if for some reason this gifted little candidate can’t become a therapy dog, it is time for her to have a home.

  Introductions at our house are an old routine. We’ve had dogs in transport visit for as little as two hours. We’ve had foster dogs stay as long as five years. So the little chocolate Pom, whom I’ve named Mizzen, comes in the way they all do, carried through the house and put in a room to get a sense of settle and then introduced to the others, one by one. If the solo introductions are no big deal on all sides (and sometimes, through some strange alchemy of personalities, they aren’t a big deal, with the old-timers barely blinking at the new guy), they are all in Sits for treats in the kitchen in just a few hours. I’ve had some magical moments with some of the transport dogs, little old blind or arthritic creatures, dazed with uncertainty and change, who in some shadowy past learned Sit. The word somehow grounded and reassured them, and they plopped down with my group in the kitchen as though saying, We know the drill, thank you, and bring on the cookies.

  Even the new dogs with no obedience training are quick to learn Sit in the company of the other dogs. They learn how goodness pays in treats. Mizzen wants to be one of those dogs. She is completely food motivated, and she understands that the kitchen is where it all happens. She figures that out straightaway. But Sit doesn’t come quickly. Is it the intellect or the bad knees? She bounces up with the other dogs when I approach the treat drawer, but when I say “Sit” (and dog backsides, large and small, hit the ground), she makes no immediate connection to herself. They sit. They get treats. She capers, bounces into the other dogs, spins a little, play-bows, says, Hooor! Hoor! Rrr-hoo!

  No treat.

  I tap with a forefinger right above her tail. Hold the treat over her head in such a way that most dogs would have to sit to look up at it.

  No sit.

  No treat.

  Hoor! Hrrr! Hoor! she mutters. Aaahhhh hoorrrrrr!

  (“She sounds like Winston Churchill,” a history-buff friend comments later. “‘The farrrrrrther backward you can look, the farrrrrrther forrrrrward you are likely to see.’”)

  “Sit!” I try again. And again. And again. And then one day, I lightly touch her hips while holding the treat over her head, and she magically sits, beaming up at me, then snatches the treat with a hoor! of happy desperation.

  She sits on the first command ever after.

  I’m especially interested in Jake Piper’s reaction to the new little Pom. Dog-friendly he has always seemed to be at home and abroad, but he’s the puppy of the family, the one who has starved, the one who has had Sit in his repertoire the least amount of time. He has been center stage, too, all this time. Though Jake has never shown any signs of aggression, small dogs can be provocative for big ones—new small dogs maybe even more so. Whether he frames the little dogs as pack siblings or small, chaseable critters, I can’t really know, so Jake is the boy whose response I’m watching now.

  But when it’s treat time and Mizzen spins and pogos off Jake Piper, he barely seems to notice her. The other Poms grumble over her heedless skittering, but Jake seems literally and figuratively above all that, treating her with polite deference. He is frankly uninterested. For whatever reason, Mizzen comes to adore him. While the other Poms chide them both and Puzzle watches with what seems to be gentle amusement, Mizzen is like some love-drugged character out of Shakespeare. She is clumsy with infatuation for Jake Piper, hooting and tap-dancing after him as he moves through the house. Where I might find her underfoot presence annoying, Jake Piper is all equanimity. He moves left. She moves left. He flops down in the hallway. She flops down in the hallway, gazing at him with limpid marmoset eyes. Sometimes when they are moving quickly together, he suddenly stops, and she can’t brake as easily, so she keeps going on the polished hardwood floors. More than once she’s plowed into him or slid under his belly to the other side.

  Hoor! she rumbles good-naturedly, careening back.

  Every once in a while, Jake Piper gives her a kindly lick.

  “So odd,” says one friend about them both.

  “Her wiring is off,” says another.

  “And he’s really good for a pit bull mix.”

  I believe Jake’s patience is really good for any dog, and I say so. Mizzen is a sweet curiosity. Jake is a daily surprise.

  I am most impressed one evening when the whole dog-and-human lot of us are piled in the living room watching television, and Mizzen is doing everything she can to win Jake’s attention. She nuzzles his paws and burrows into his chest. She lies spine to spine, then comes around and snuggles up against his belly. He is patient. At one point I hear Mizzen hooting happily and a strange squeak out of Jake Piper, and I look up to see Mizzen pressing her head against Jake’s mouth. Pressing, pressing, pressing her head against his mouth. This is new. She is insistent, a little battering ram storming the castle, and after a few bewildered moments, Jake opens his mouth and Mizzen crams her fuzzy head inside it. I can hear a pleased rumble in her throat.

  Yaagh, he gurgles after a moment.

  She withdraws her head and then does it again.

  What is she doing? I have no idea. But kindly, bewildered Jake acquiesces to her say-ah weirdness. Ears swung back, his eyes wide, he holds still while the little Pom heads in to rummage through his mouth, mumbling and crooning. But he looks at me dubiously, this good dog, as if to say, I sure could use some help here, if you have any ideas.

  Use Your Words is a dog trainer’s mantra, but Mizzen doesn’t have many she understands, and this is outside my experience. What do you say to a dog with this kind of obsession?

  I gently extract her. Jake shuts his mouth. “Mizzen,” I say, “stop feeding your head to your brother.”

  We have no idea I’ll be saying this many, many times.

  Photos

  Puzzle determines a missing person’s direction of travel on a testing scenario.Susannah Charleson

  Smokey and Misty arrive one day after their beloved owner died.Susannah Charleson

  It took time for anxious, complicated Smokey to relearn how to play.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Misty, the happy extrovert.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Gentle senior rescue Sam had known human abuse but retained a loving heart.Susannah Charleson

  Mr. Sprits’l can be trusted for play-by-play commentary, whether it’s wanted or not.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Starving Jake was in bad shape when he arrived.Susannah Charleson

  The shed that may have held abandoned Jake before his escape.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Though she never had puppies of her own, Puzzle mothered Jake diligently.Susannah Charleson

  The Great Cheese Leave-It. Whose leave-it is bombproof, and who is the reluctant saint?Susannah Charleson

  Mizzen: the chocolate Pom with a voice like Winston Churchill.Susannah Charleson

  Ready for adventure: Jake and Puzzle like training together.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Service dog Roscoe ready to take on the wilderness.Alex Washoe

  “Roscoe played ball the way Cal Ripken played ball.”Alex Washoe

  Adolescent Jake takes easily to his vest and its responsibilities.Susannah Charleson

  Safe in arms: rescued Ollie with Tricia Helfer.Susannah Charleson

  Within hours of rescue, Jonathan Marshall takes Ollie for a thorough check-up at the vet.Shauna Galligan

  Out of the shelter and on his way to the vet, Ollie enjoys a moment of sunshine.Shauna Galligan

  Resilient Ollie settled into his new life happily, learning the proper hour to bark for breakfast in less than a week.Susannah Charleson

  Nancy and her service dog, rescued golden retrie
ver Lexie.Carlos Salcedo

  Out of a shelter and into a happy working life beside children, Caro has a presence that encourages young readers.Raymond J. Benoit

  Adult Jake attends illness in other dogs and humans.Susannah Charleson

  After her long, troubling illness, it’s good to have Puzzle home.Devon Thomas Treadwell

  Working Jake Piper demonstrates good manners and focus at a restaurant.Ellen Sanchez

  The upside of rescue evaluations: meeting happy, outgoing dogs like this one.Susannah Charleson

  16

  JAKE PIPER’S GOT AN audience here in the center of town. The local restaurants are doing a brisk Saturday-breakfast trade. The shops have begun to open, their plate-glass windows reflecting an uneasy sky. It is a day that could pucker up and rain without much warning, and those of us out here are taking advantage of every sunny second.