Dog and I

by Roy MacGregor

  PENGUIN CANADA

  The Dog and I

  Roy Macgregor has been a journalist for more than thirty years, and for many years has written his immensely popular “This Country” column on page two of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. He is the author of numerous bestselling and award-winning books, including Escape, Canoe Lake, A Life in the Bush, The Home Team, The Weekender, and the popular children’s mystery series The Screech Owls. MacGregor was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2005 and currently resides in Kanata, Ontario.

  ALSO BY ROY MACGREGOR

  Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People

  The Weekender: A Cottage Journal

  Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada

  A Loonie for Luck

  A Life in the Bush: Lessons from My Father

  Canoe Lake

  The Last Season

  The Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey

  Road Games: A Year in the Life of the NHL

  Chief: The Fearless Vision of Billy Diamond

  Home Game: Hockey & Life in Canada (with Ken Dryden)

  The Screech Owls Series (for young readers)

  Forever: The Annual Hockey Classic

  CONFESSIONS OF A BEST FRIEND

  Roy MacGregor

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2006

  Published in this edition, 2007

  (WEB) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Roy MacGregor, 2006

  Illustrations copyright © Jason Schneider, 2006

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305055-1

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305055-9

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

  by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

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  In appreciation of Buddy, Cindy, Bumps, Bandit, Cricket,

  and Willow, who have made our lives so much richer

  Introduction

  It’s a Dog’s Life

  Extreme Youth

  Mortification at the Fall Fair

  Shoes and Socks

  The Puppy Brain

  Care and Feeding, Then and Now

  Fetch… Fetch… Fetch…

  The Teen Years

  Alleged Adulthood

  Pawprinted Legacies of the Great

  Lost Dog at Twenty Below

  Merchandising Madness

  Dogs as Fashion Accessories

  Squirrels and Sisyphus

  In the Now of Mid-life

  So Very Old

  Dog in Winter

  Grizzled and on the Lam

  You Will Know When It’s Time

  Walking Alone

  Dog Wonder

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  “No!” I said. “Drop it!”

  Sad to say, dogs are much better than daughters when it comes to obeying simple commands. She wasn’t listening.

  Our old mutt, Bandit, had not long before moved on to wherever it is that old dogs go when everything gives out, from eyes to ears to back end. It had reached the point, finally, where even the adult human in absolute denial had to act, and sadly, we did.

  With Bandit so recently departed, I had no interest at all in a puppy crossing the front-door threshold—fully aware of the consequences.

  Once a puppy makes it through that front door, it’s in.

  That’s just the way it is with puppies and front doors. Imagine, if you can, a parent watching his or her partner come through the door with their brand-new baby, which the waiting parent then holds up to check the heft and colouring and sex before handing the infant back with a dismissive “Not this one, thanks—let’s have a look at another.”

  So no puppy; at least not yet.

  Yes, it was difficult coming home from a long road trip and not having that one member of the family who isn’t shouting “What did you bring me?” race to greet you. And yes, it was odd getting up each morning and going to bed each night without opening the sliding doors that lead to the backyard so that Bandit could go through all the necessary sniffing and squatting and barking at various territorial invaders before closing off her day. But still, I wasn’t ready.

  Jocelyn wouldn’t listen though. Our daughter was already surfing the net in search of something that might approximate the glorious mutt we had just lost. She was poring through shelter listings, checking out Humane Societies within a three-hour driving range, and letting everyone know that someone who needs a dog doesn’t yet have one.

  No … no … NO! she was told.

  She interpreted that to mean “Yes” and, I must confess, that may be exactly what it was. A “yes” with trepidation.

  So when I saw Jocelyn pull into the driveway after a long weekend up in the Ottawa Valley I cannot today say if I was pleased or disappointed that I could see no basket, no wagging tail, no furry little head staring over an elbow at the new world it was about to take over.

  There was really no time to think one way or the other. She ran up the steps, through the door, and simply unfurled her jacket to release a little white and yellow furball that hit the floor wiggling and wagging and hasn’t stopped wiggling or wagging in the year since.

  The new puppy was in.

  And in to stay.

  “I COULD TELL YOU the story of my life through the dogs I have loved,” Erica Jong once wrote in an essay trying to explain her preference for the canine world over the human. “I could tell you the story of the losses in my life through their deaths. Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. We try to replace them but never quite succeed. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart.”

  I am now on to my fift
h dog, though that seems a foolish way to put it; nothing seems as crass as treating a dog as you would an appliance that needs replacing from time to time. Better to say, as Erica Jong suggests, that I have fallen in love again. This time with Willow, a floppy-eared little mutt with long white and tan hair as soft as down, a face sharp as a fox, and a weakness for carrying around dirty socks in her mouth.

  I think I was born a dog person; it just took a while to become one. When I was very young we lived part of each year in Ontario’s vast Algonquin Park, and dogs—especially deer-chasing dogs—were discouraged by those who were there to protect the wildlife. My grandfather was chief ranger; and while he too loved dogs, it wouldn’t do for the head man to have one running around when no one else did.

  I was eleven when I was finally able to have a puppy, though it was made clear that Buddy would have to be tied up whenever we were staying at the grandparents’ log home on Lake of Two Rivers. That sweet little puppy never got to become a dog, but he still leads the list of “dogs I have loved.”

  Buddy came from a rundown house down by the Muskoka River. A kid who, like me, had a Toronto Daily Star paper route also had a litter of part-shepherd, part-hound, part-guess puppies to dispose of, and one late-winter afternoon I picked out a little male, free of charge, and carried him back up Reservoir Hill to where we lived.

  Then came Cindy, a half cocker spaniel with a tail so active it couldn’t possibly be bobbed, at a cost of three dollars from a house on the edge of town. Cindy overlapped slightly with Bumps, the first of what we would come to call “borderline collies,” a soft little black and white puppy that came from across the street when we lived in Toronto and cost not a cent. Bumps was followed by Bandit, a ten-dollar mutt, part border collie, part Lab, from a village down along the Rideau River. And now, thanks to Jocelyn’s inability to obey simple commands, there is Willow, part border collie, part puzzle from higher up the Ottawa River at Petawawa, cost one hundred dollars, but that included shots.

  So let’s add it all up. Five dogs—three of whom lived to sixteen—spanning forty-six years at a total initial investment of $113. That works out to $2.45 a year.

  The price of a coffee and doughnut to get you through the morning.

  Or the cost of a faithful companion to get you through life.

  IT’S BEEN ABOUT TWENTY YEARS since I began writing a daily newspaper column for the Ottawa Citizen. I took on this new job with great seriousness and, at times, would work for hours interviewing and researching and thinking before sitting down to write the definitive piece on a politician or a compelling social problem.

  Most days, such columns passed without comment. In a way, that is actually good news to those of us who work in the daily newspaper industry, as feedback usually tilts to the critical. Those who agree with you tend to nod; those who disagree write; those who really disagree write your boss.

  The day I wrote my very first dog column, I wondered if I dare. People have dogs, and people talk about their dogs, but were dogs a suitable topic for a self-styled serious columnist? Was the subject too light? Too insignificant? Was I wasting valuable news space? I went ahead anyway—and was overwhelmed by the response.

  And since then, every time I have wondered if I should write about the dog, I have been shocked the next day that I even cautioned for a moment.

  Some of those columns, largely abridged, are included here, but more than half of the material is original, specifically written for this book that first began to take shape more than a year ago. There are columns and small essays on the joy of puppies, the trials of the teenage dog, the pleasures of the mature dog and, of course, the heartbreak of the dog lost. Four of those fine friends—Buddy, Cindy, Bumps, and Bandit— are no longer with us.

  Or so the saying goes.

  In fact, they are always with us.

  There might be books about humans teaching dogs, but they have it somewhat backwards.

  It’s a Dog’s Life

  I once had a dog who purred.

  I was eleven years old when I got Cindy. She was not my first dog, but became the first to span a significant amount of my own life—childhood, teen years, school years, marriage, right up to within months of first child.

  The actual first dog, Buddy, was a small black and white mutt with fur as soft as rabbit. Sadly, he never had a chance to lose that puppy fur. I was at school when my mother let him out the back door to pee and he bolted on her. We lived on Reservoir Hill in the small Ontario town of Huntsville, on a street so steep cars couldn’t get up it most winter days, and the frisky little puppy ran right out onto the road just as the garbage truck happened to be thundering down the hill and couldn’t be stopped quickly by anything short of a row of maple trees. Buddy was killed instantly.

  I never even got to say goodbye because my mother, a practical person who did indeed have a good heart, agreed with the garbagemen that they could best dispose of the body. The driver felt bad. My mother felt terrible. I, of course, was devastated and, for years after—in fact, for decades after—would have recurring dreams that little Buddy, his fur still soft as satin, had found his way back to the door where she had let him out and was scratching to get in.

  A few months after Buddy’s loss, not long after the first snow that year, a small advertisement appeared in the back pages of the Huntsville Forester:

  Puppies for Sale

  Mixed breed, mother spaniel, $3

  There was a telephone number included, and I talked my mother into at least calling to see if they were all gone. She did and they weren’t. There were three puppies left, but they were “going fast.”

  I do not think she believed that. Puppies, in those years, were not something you sold. They were simply available, handed out by kids carrying a wagonload of squealing puppies around the neighbourhood or “advertised” by a crude sign hanging at the end of a farm lane that said, simply, “Puppies,” or, though additional information wasn’t really necessary, “Free Puppies.” My mother wasn’t at all impressed by the cost and clearly thought that asking for money was bad form.

  I have tried to understand how things could change so drastically. Looking back all those years, it seems that purebreds and papers and thousand-dollar dogs were something that must have come along later, like second cars and microwaves and plasma-screen televisions. I do remember one huge dog up the street. Bo Bo must have been mostly a German shepherd, but was as close to royal lines as the town got—belonging to a family in the logging business and, by extension, virtual monarchy in this little town that then depended on the timber trade.

  Dogs were mutts, though no one ever used that name because all dogs were mutts. The dog next door, Buster, was a mutt. The dog across the street, a cranky little thing called Jiggs, was a mutt. The dog two doors down, Lady, was a mutt. Four doors down, Queenie, a mutt. None, of course, looked at all the same as another; but none, as well, looked at all the same as any other dog in town—unless, of course, they happened to come from the same litter. But even then you couldn’t count on it.

  Somehow, I talked my mother into letting me go out to this place. I had money from my Toronto Daily Star paper route, so I put together three bucks in change and jammed it into the pocket of my big sweater. My mother was a great knitter—a famous knitter, in fact, for the area—and brought in extra money by knitting big wool sweaters that she sold for the cost of the wool and about fifteen cents an hour for labour. She knit sweaters with white-tailed deer on the back; big, bulky sweaters with pheasants; sweaters with moose, bears, eagles, wolves; sweaters with hunters and hockey players. Mine, of course, was a hockey player.

  The sweater was thick and warm and I put it on for the long walk out to the edge of town. It was a very long walk—we had no car at all, let alone a second car—and the journey, in lightly blowing snow, took me up Main Street, out along the railroad tracks and the choppy, steel-coloured bay that had yet to freeze over, and close enough to the edge of town that you could see and hear the lumber trucks th
undering past on the new Highway 11 bypass.

  There, across from a small planing mill, was a red brick bungalow. I knocked at the door and waited, fidgeting.

  A woman came to the door. She was dark and severe and was wearing a purple housecoat and smoking a cigarette. The room inside was also purple, with smoke. The cigarette, which stayed in her painted mouth, looked as though it had been bleeding about the filter.

  “Yes?” she said. No hello, no greeting.

  I was used to meeting people at their front door. I had to collect every two weeks for my Star route.

  “Is this the place with the puppies?” I asked.

  She nodded, two thick parallel streams of smoke coming out her nostrils. “They cost three dollars,” she said, expecting that to be the end of the conversation.

  “I have it,” I said, grabbing my sweater pocket and shaking the change.

  She opened the door and stepped aside. “They’re in the basement.”

  I went in, took off my rubber boots—black, the kind we rolled down as low as we could so that the white insides hung over them like a cape and rendered the boots essentially useless for what they were made for—and trailed after her in thick grey woollen socks desperately in need of pulling up.

  She led the way, opening a door off the kitchen and stepping gingerly down a couple of steps while she searched along the rough framing for the light switch. She found it and we both went down, I amazed at how clear and clean the air was, she coughing impatiently.

  A blond spaniel was there, somewhat cowering, bobbed tail wagging. Her nipples were almost dragging on the cement floor as she waddled across from a basket and crouched in front of the woman with the cigarette.

  In the basket were three small furballs.

  “You can have your pick,” she said.

  There may be no tougher decision in life. It is easier to decide on a job than a puppy, easier to pick out a new car than a new dog.

  One was dark brown with black spots. One was black with brown spots. Both of these were male. The third was almost the spitting image of the mother. She had silky, curly blond hair and a small face that held the biggest, saddest brown eyes I had ever seen in my life.