A Dog Called Perth

by Peter Martin

  The morning light awakened me. I had a greasy breakfast at the same greasy restaurant and then drove into Rutland where I notified the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that Perth was missing and bought a large-scale map of about a ten-mile radius around the farm. In order to begin my search I assumed that Perth had not run far, that she had been taken in by some kind people who had a proper knowledge of dogs and with whom she had decided to remain. From past experience when we had temporarily lost her, I knew that she often had the sense to stay put and wait for us to find her instead of wandering all over the place frantically. So I drew on the map concentric, widening circles with the farm as their center. My plan was to start searching within the first circle and day after day make my way through the outer circles. This way I hoped to cover much of the area methodically. That would be the first week. What to do after that remained to be seen. The problem was that this terrain was not all just open farmland. There was little farmland, in fact. Most of it was thick forest with steep hills and hidden valleys. There were lakes too, and roads that were twisting, confusing and muddy. It was overwhelming, but I told myself that if I started early every morning and kept at it until sunset, I could make progress. I was sure I would find her.

  And so I began. My heart leapt into my throat only minutes after driving up into a wooded residential area. I heard a dog barking exactly as Perth did, I mean exactly. Over the years my ears had become perfectly attuned to that sound. The combination of howls and sharp yaps, and their pitch and rhythm, were her trademark. The barking must have been about half a mile away. I turned off the car engine and in the stillness strained my ears toward the sound, which was coming from the trees up the hill, not from the houses below. Sure enough, it had to be her. I leapt out of the car and sprinted in her direction. I closed in on the barking quickly but at first could not see the dog. Finally, after some going around in circles I saw it. I peered hard, trying to bring it into focus. It was a beagle but not Perth. This dog looked remarkably like her, and I wanted her to be Perth more than anything in the world, but it was not her. The complete disappointment and dejection were shattering.

  I leaned down to the dog, which was clearly lost and had a damaged leg. “Well, my little friend, I was hoping you’d be somebody else. What are you doing here making all this noise? You should be at home with your master and mistress. If you’ve been lost long, I know how they must feel.” I stroked her. She was delirious to see me, licking me up and down. Her collar had her name, Tara, and address. I picked her up and carried her down to the car. She lived five miles to the north, so I drove her there and witnessed the ecstasy of her reunion with her family. They gave me lunch and afterward I continued on, happy for the family but feeling very sorry for myself.

  That first day I moved like a madman. Whenever I was not in the car, I jogged along roads, across meadows, in residential streets, and through thick trees. I never walked. The competitive running I had done in high school and college was finally coming in handy. Everywhere I went, I constantly yelled as loudly as I could for Perth: “Perth,” “Here Perth,” “Dogge,” “Come here, you naughty dog” and anything else I could think of. Perspiring, cut by branches and thorns, wet, I ran and yelled for hours. I was convinced she would hear me and recognize my voice and come bursting out of the trees straight for me. But there was no sign of her. Nothing. Then it was back into the car and the same thing all over again in another area. By nightfall I was a physical wreck. My voice was gone and I was dirty and severely depressed. There seemed little reason to hope. After dinner, I found the tent in the dark and went to bed.

  Every day for the next week was the same. Vermont must have lots of lost dogs, for I found five more. But not Perth. And I began to get irritated with people I met. When I knocked at their doors asking if they had seen a dog like Perth, several said, “Good luck,” but many more said something like, “Oh, brother, two months your dog’s been gone? You’ll never find her now, I can tell you that. If she hasn’t been killed by a car, there are plenty of dog thieves in these parts who could’ve picked her up for medical and drug experiments.” On the whole there was little point in defending myself or Perth by explaining that there was no way my dog was about to let dog thieves anywhere near her, or that if she did they probably had paid for their recklessness with a little of their blood. It was easier just to turn away and try the next house. I confess, though, that occasionally when I heard this too often from these smug souls peering suspiciously through their partially opened front doors, I did snap at them with a few crisp sentences. But I also had to admit I did feel that Perth’s disappearance for two months now made it seem as if I were trying to rewrite history with a happy ending, like trying to bring back someone from the dead.

  My lowest point came at the end of that first week, during one of those long nights in the tent. As my search continued, my feelings of emptiness and loneliness were accentuated; and it was suddenly brought home to me that I was existing in a nervous world of illusion and imaginative self-deception. My life was like a recurring bad dream. Every day I was running through an unknown landscape and among alien people hunting for Perth amid shadows, imagining that random shapes, sounds and places might take me straight to her. I had begun to lose touch with the real world. Even Perth began to seem unreal to me. I was seeing her over and over where she was not.

  As it became dark by nine and I could do nothing after that except have dinner and crawl exhausted back into my tent, I decided to escape into another fantasy world by reading a novel by flashlight as I lay on my cold and damp air mattress. I bought The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a spooky detective story set in Victorian England, about a stolen diamond and the murder, suicide, sleepwalking, opium and chilling nighttime intrigue by moonlight that Detective Sergeant Cuff faces when he tries to track the diamond down. It is a long book and there I lay, night after night in my little tent, vulnerable and oppressed by the frightening quietness of the Vermont landscape, holding the book in one hand and shining the flashlight on the page with the other. Except for the light it was pitch dark. The only sounds were my breathing and the turning of the pages.

  On this particular night I was in the middle of a chilling passage featuring a troop of mysterious Indian jugglers who appeared to be murderers, when just outside my tent, no more than five feet from my head, I heard a sickening slurping sound, with some scratching and moaning thrown in. My heart almost stopped. I listened in terror, careful not to make a single sound or move an inch. Nobody touched the tent, but the sounds increased. I felt that at any moment I would hear a voice or feel a blow of some kind. This went on for ten minutes before I called on all my courage to switch off the flashlight. Slowly, I lowered my head onto my pillow. I listened and waited, frozen in fear. The sounds continued, with occasional pauses. Two more hours passed. My courage failed me, to slip out of the tent, for example, and run for it. I perspired in fear. I fought mightily against sleep but eventually it lifted me out of this nightmare.

  When the early morning light woke me up, I could scarcely believe I was safe. There was the open book beside me, and the flashlight beside it. The tent was still up around me, snug and zipped up. There were no more sounds. Unzipping the tent, I poked my head out cautiously and saw nothing except some distant cows. There was no trace of anyone having prowled around in the dark. I walked around to the other side of the tent. There in full view on the ground was something I had completely overlooked before. A salt lick. In my rush, in the dark, I had pitched the tent next to a salt lick! What had terrified me during the night was not a band of bloodthirsty Indian jugglers, nor a dangerous burglar or misfit about to slice through the tent with a dagger, but a few cows licking salt, slurping away in the dead of night.

  It was funny, but it was also ridiculous. Was I ridiculous? Was this whole expensive effort to find Perth ridiculous? Why not give it all up and wait in Boston with Cindy’s parents for her return? Even if Perth was alive, it was like searching for an infinitesimal
needle in a gigantic Vermont haystack. And she might not be alive, but long since perished by some desolate roadside. I might be looking for a ghost, chasing a phantom.

  At breakfast, I got hold of myself and rededicated myself to the search. I knew Perth was alive. She had to be. I would push on for another week. I now searched a wider area away from the farm, using the map to give some method to my madness. I even drove up high into the mountains several times, yelling Perth’s name endlessly into the wilderness and never hearing an answer. I had no idea what she might be doing up there, but that made no difference to me. At one point I found myself on top of Bloodroot Mountain, 3,500 feet up, at another on the banks of the gorgeous Chittenden Reservoir, about ten miles from the farm and surrounded by nothing but the wind and wildness. I still hoped for a miracle, that she would appear from nowhere, baying at me and wagging her tail, and hop in the car nonchalantly as if nothing had happened.

  Another week passed with no sign of her. I covered a large expanse of territory. It seemed incredible to me that she could have vanished into thin air. I was sure she ought to have found me since I was all over the place, leaving my scent everywhere. It was unlike her. Nobody called the SPCA, although I left hundreds of people with its phone number and information about Perth.

  Deeply dejected, I drove to Boston to pick up Cindy. She was as downcast as I was. But we decided to search for another week together, joined by our Cazenovia friends the Lammes and their own beagle, who sacrificed a week of their lives to help us look. Pitching their tent next to ours, they were encouraging and cheerful, but I could see in their eyes that they thought Perth had perished somewhere. After another week of fruitless searching, we admitted defeat. We had to retreat to Florida to begin the new university term. I had failed. Perth was no more, at least not in our lives. Three months earlier we had left Florida, happy to be on the move, full of hope, and determined to find the perfect place for her where she could be free and safe. Now we were returning with a devastating feeling of incompleteness, that our marriage and family were no longer intact. Except for the first year of our marriage, we had never been without Perth.

  It was a dismal trip home, even at Cazenovia where we stopped with the Lammes for a few days. The old, dear Cazenovia scenes of our early married days, where we rollicked with Perth in the innocence of our fresh hopes and family fun, taunted us. One bright morning in particular was painful when we walked for a few miles with our friends and their beagle Tarki. Tarki ran and barked happily, relishing the outing, not with Perth’s mad intensity but pleasantly enough. Cindy and I, however, were churned up inside with a sense of loss. Just seeing their dog in the fullness of life and health was more than we could bear. We left Cazenovia that afternoon, not really ever wanting to return.

  9

  BUT WE REFUSED TO GIVE UP. The first thing I did when I got back home was to make a poster with Perth’s picture, explaining where she had run away and when, and most important of all, mentioning that the inside of her left ear was tattooed with the letters PEM. I also offered $100 for her return, no paltry sum in those days. Today that would be equivalent to about $1,000. I cranked out five hundred of these on an old mimeograph machine in the English department at the university. Then I walked over to the library and checked out a huge directory of radio stations not only in Vermont but also in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut—throughout all of New England, in fact. That was a measure of my belief in Perth’s ability to cover the miles. I wrote a letter to the stations to send with the poster, apologizing that I did not have time enough to write a personal letter to each of the five hundred stations, and describing my need. The letter went like this:

  I should like to ask you the very big favor of announcing on your station as often as you could the fact that my dog is missing, giving something of a description of her, and emphasizing the $100 reward. Perhaps most important for final identification purposes is a tattoo inside her ear, which reads “PEM.” If you could keep the enclosed information on hand as long as one month, giving out the announcement whenever you can, I should be more grateful than I could ever say. Probably a family has the dog in their home, not too clear on how to go about finding the owner, nor knowing that her owners are actively looking for her. Your announcements, if made over a long enough period, may just do the trick.

  As I think back on it, how young and naive I was to think that any radio station, busy as they are with thousands of announcements to make every week, would keep repeating my distant cry for help for an entire month. But Cindy and I sealed the five hundred envelopes and sent them off, crossed our fingers and waited.

  October came and we were still waiting. Our hope seeped with the passing weeks. Many evenings during these weeks I walked into the kitchen and saw Cindy washing the dishes with tears quietly filling her eyes as she dreamed of Perth. To both of us it seemed that without Perth our marriage was changing, or that we were entering a new phase of it without the wide-eyed innocence and adventure the three of us had shared. Our lives seemed tamer. Also depressing was that only one radio station of the five hundred wrote back to say they would be happy to help us. And so far as we knew, nobody ever heard any radio station announce anything about Perth. There was only silence from the north.

  One bright spot was the manageress of the SPCA in Rutland, a large, jolly woman in her thirties called Alice, who seemed to feel our loss almost as much as we did, and to whom I sent a hundred copies of the poster. She wrote back to say she had traveled around to lots of large supermarkets in her area, several of them many miles away, to tack our poster up on their message boards. Without a flicker of doubt, she said we were sure to find Perth. She also went out every weekend to look for her.

  October and November passed and we were almost into the Christmas season. There was nothing else we could do, and in an unspoken way we more or less let Perth go. On Thanksgiving Day we attended a church service and heard someone speak whom we usually thought was colossally boring. When he began with the word “DOG,” we pricked up our ears. He went on to say that because a dog is a man’s (and woman’s) best friend, it is always cared for and protected by people. The dog therefore is perfectly trusting and loving, just as we should be toward God. That was his theme. We forgot everything else about the service except that remark.

  “Let’s not worry anymore,” Cindy said on the way home, placing her hand on mine. “As the man said, let’s just let her go and trust that she is safe and happy wherever she is.” Suddenly we felt liberated from worry, fear and self-pity. Whatever else that boring man had ever said, he was on our wavelength that day.

  The next day we took a Thanksgiving break in the Bahamas, for the first time since the summer completely enjoying ourselves without the lingering agony of a lost Perth: swimming, boating, riding bikes, eating out and just loving each other. We returned home on Sunday night, exhausted and purified.

  The phone was ringing as we walked through the front door. Cindy answered. It was my father, who lived near Palm Beach, one hundred miles up the coast. He told Cindy that while we were away he had received a call from Cindy’s parents in Boston to say we should expect a precious package on an airplane Monday morning. He gave us the flight details. She asked what it was and he then told her, “Perth has been found!”

  Cindy was teaching on Monday morning, so I drove to the West Palm Beach airport to collect the package. I had to go to the cargo department. I signed some papers over a counter, paid a small fee and was led through a door to a small room with several metal tables in it. On each table was a wire cage and in each cage a dog or cat. They were all quiet, numbed by their journey from Boston. For some reason the man left me to find my own cage. I was looking at the papers to see what my number was when all of a sudden there was a huge outpouring of sound from one of the cages, mad, frantic barking, baying and yelping. The moment I heard the vibrations of that voice the world fell away and I was standing again with Cindy outside the kennel near Cazenovia six years earlier listen
ing to Perth as a puppy struggling to escape from her cage and slip into Cindy’s arms. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, taking in the delicious sound, then I looked up quickly in the direction of the clamor and saw her immediately in one of the cages. She had spotted me, or caught my scent. I ran over to her and opened the cage. After six months, she was again in my arms.

  I forget what I said to her in those first moments, but I remember vividly her soft head against mine and her unmistakable groggy-doggie smell, even after a stifling, dirty flight in the cargo hold of the plane. She looked wonderfully fit. I held her tightly, amazed that after all those months I actually had my Perth again. She was madly excited, as if she were saying to me, “What happened, why didn’t you find me sooner, I looked and looked for you.” She had forgiven me for my cruelty at Agnes Roy’s camp. I let her down on the floor, grabbed the cage and walked triumphantly out of the building with her. The large parking lot was full of several hundred cars, but without pausing she sniffed her way to ours. She was waiting by it when I arrived two minutes later. She jumped in, took up her usual position in the front passenger’s seat and we were off for home. On the way she crept between my arms and sat on my lap facing the steering wheel, looking out through the windshield as we drove on. It was like old times, as if nothing had happened. I can still see the round, brown back of her head during that joyful drive. I placed my hand on her white chest and gently rubbed my nose against her. I chattered away to her the whole way. She understood it all, I am sure.