Dogged Pursuit

by Robert Rodi

  It’s a residential block, so most of the buildings here are single-family homes or six-flat apartment buildings whose garages and backyards abut the alley. We pass battered iron doors, gang graffiti, wan-looking clutches of weeds. We’re about a third of the way through when a gate suddenly swings open and a slack-looking woman in flip-flops appears holding a plastic garbage bag. She looks at me, I look at her, and before either of us can even register the glance something darts out from behind her legs—a streak of black and tan—and suddenly it’s all over Dusty.

  The woman screams—and I mean screams; compared to this gal, Fay Wray was mealymouthed—and I realize, a beat later, that we’re being attacked by an enormous rottweiler.

  I remain calm and give the woman the benefit of the doubt. After all, there have been a few occasions when one of my own dogs has gotten away from me and gone lunging after some presumed rival. I know the feeling. I understand. I sympathize. More importantly, I know how to get my dog back under control within seconds. This woman, however, is utterly hopeless. She’s down on all fours, scrambling after her rottie, still screaming as though she were being thrown into a wood chipper. Finally, she grabs him and I’m able to pull Dusty back to me, but then the rottie wriggles away from her and attacks Carmen, who lets out such a pitiful yelp that my calm demeanor snaps. Violating every rule of how to conduct yourself in a dogfight, I stick my hand into the fray and try to grab the rottie’s collar. He neatly evades me, leaving just enough opening for a frantic Carmen to bite me good and hard.

  I withdraw my wounded hand and turn to the woman, who’s still clambering around on her hands and knees and screaming bloody murder. “Get hold of your dog!” I command her.

  “I caaaaan’t!” she howls, and she grabs wildly at him, managing to hold him a few scant seconds before he jerks free and goes after Dusty again.

  This time Dusty is ready; in fact he’s spoilin’ for it. I try to reel him back in, but he’s so worked up that he chomps into my thigh. So far, I’m the only one taking any hits here. But this can’t go on; my dogs are Shelties, for God’s sake—lump them together, they don’t weigh as much as this rottie’s head.

  And that’s when I realize I’m living every dog walker’s nightmare. I’m faced with a threat I didn’t see coming and can’t control. Everything’s a blur of fur and saliva, and I can’t think straight because of the snarling and yelping and screaming. Every few seconds the woman gets a grip on her dog, and I think, “It’s over,” then he pulls away from her again and goes after one of mine. Dusty is making noises I’ve never heard before; his eyes are wild; his fur is matted. Meanwhile Carmen’s on her side, her hind legs knotted up in her leash—she’s helpless and mewling.

  Finally, after the next wave of the attack, I haul off and kick the rottie in the flank, which sends him skittering across the alley. All hundred-ass pounds of him. It feels like I’ve broken every bone in my foot.

  Now, it takes a hell of a lot of provocation for me to kick a dog, and I immediately feel bad about it. After all, he’s clearly not the one responsible. It’s his idiot owner, who hasn’t trained him and can’t control him, who’s at fault here (a well-placed kick in her flank would be entirely more appropriate, and over the next several days I’ll console myself by playing this very image over and over in my head). But at this point it was do or die—perhaps literally.

  While the rottie is recovering, I rein in my Shelties and run like sixty. Just get the high holy hell outta Dodge.

  I don’t know how long this whole fracas has gone on, but apparently long enough to attract onlookers. I suppose the woman’s bloodcurdling shrieks were enough to guarantee that. As I spill out of the mouth of the alley, a few people ask, “Are you okay?” But I don’t pause to reply—I don’t want to stop till I’m at least a block away. The rottie might be hoofing it after me for all I know. I’m sure as hell not going to lose a half-second peering over my shoulder to make sure.

  When we’re far enough away to feel safe, I slow down and rein in my dogs. They’re both agitated, but they look all right. I run my hands over them, taking stock—everything seems to be in place. A couple of patches of missing fur, but no wounds. I can scarcely believe the luck.

  We haven’t had our full hour’s walk, but I’m too badly shaken to resume it. I’d be jumping out of my skin at the sound of twigs snapping. Also, I have a few wounds of my own to see to—one from each of my dogs. But I have to give them a pass: they bit out of confusion and fear.

  As we head back, I notice that neither Dusty nor Carmen seems particularly fazed by what they’ve been through. In fact Dusty is walking with a little macho strut, as though he’s gone four rounds with the world featherweight champ and left the ring intact. I’m reminded, again, that dogs are dogs—conflict and combat are just how they do business. What he doesn’t have a grasp on is that street brawling can be lethal, especially if your opponent’s mass is about fifteen times your own. I can scarcely expect Dusty to know that I’ve actually just saved his life. No doubt he’s pretty well convinced he could have handled things on his own. He really, honestly has no idea how small he is. If he did, he wouldn’t be so keen to take on U-Haul trailers.

  Eventually, my adrenaline wears off, and I realize that while my dogs may be fine I’m hurt far worse than I imagined. I’m still limping, and sometime during the melee I seem to have massively wrenched by back. It’s agonizing to sit down, no less painful to stand, and there’s no relief in lying down. I’m a real mess. Jeffrey’s away on another business trip, so I’ve got to be my own nursemaid. I bandage my wounds and tape up my foot, then pop a few painkillers and call it an early night.

  As I lie in bed, trying to wind down with a bit of light reading (Cicero’s scathingly bitchy “Second Philippic Against Antony”—I never get tired of it), Dusty leaps up on the bed and puts his face close to mine. It’s his nightly routine. As always, I say “kiss,” and he very lightly swipes his tongue across the tip of my nose. Sometimes, if he’s feeling particularly affectionate, he’ll allow me to massage his forelegs while he stands bolt upright, looming over me, but tonight he’s not in the mood. Satisfied that I’m down for the duration, he hops off and trundles across the hall to my office, where, as always, he curls up on the couch for the night.

  I’m wracked with pain, bandaged and bruised, and dopey from self-medication. Whereas he, weighing not quite twenty pounds soaking wet, is perfectly fine after going mano a mano with a rottweiler the size of a Ford Escort.

  “This is precisely the worst danger of being in a dogfight,” my friend Haven says when I e-mail her about the incident the next day. “Collateral damage. I think it’s akin to being shot with one’s own gun.” But she’s not at all sanguine about it—in fact her message starts with, “You were attacked by a rottweiler? If I were actually the fainting type, I would swoon.”

  “I didn’t have time to swoon,” I write back. “It all happened so quickly. Or, rather, it seemed to be happening in slow motion; my mind was working furiously, but I couldn’t get my body to keep up. It was more infuriating than anything else. It wasn’t till I got home and tried to unhook the dogs and couldn’t get my fingers to work that I thought, ‘Hmm, perhaps I’ve had just a hint of trauma.’ The dogs, however, were completely untroubled.”

  “Of course they were,” she replies. “They were being dogs. You, however, were being a person who got tangled up in dogs. But the swoony part for me is you referring to the ‘sixth wave’ of the attack.”

  “Six at least,” I clarify. “Fortunately, at the time I was too angry to be terrified.”

  “I can’t believe no one died. I’m sorry to say it like this, but the rottweiler must not have intended to kill your dogs. Am I wrong?”

  I have to think about this awhile. Haven has the most unerring dog sense of anyone I know. She’s also almost supernaturally in synch with what the general public considers the more violent breeds—pit bulls, Dobermans, rottweilers. She loves and understands them. If this is her read o
n the situation, I have to take it seriously.

  And of course it takes only a moment’s reflection to realize she’s right. For God’s sake, Dusty and Carmen are Shelties. Bouncy little herding dogs about the size and heft of your average stuffed animal. Whereas the rottie is a full-bore killing machine. There was no way I, or his owner, or any power short of military ordnance could have prevented him from tearing my dogs to bits and flossing his teeth with their gut strings, if that’s what he’d wanted.

  “I was amazed there were no wounds,” I write back. “So yes, I think you’re right; he didn’t set out to kill. Or even maim. Just to exert his territorial rights. But of course I didn’t know that at the time.”

  “Rottweilers are very tricky,” Haven agrees. “The best dog I ever had, Roxanne, was a rottie, and she truly didn’t have an aggressive bone in her body—not to other dogs, not to people. But she also didn’t posture; she didn’t bark, didn’t make a show of anything. Then I realized: oh, she will simply kill someone, should I be threatened someday.”

  After this exchange, I spend a humbling afternoon reflecting on the incident. I’ve been so puffed up and proud of what I call my “dog smarts,” yet in the heat of a real emergency I acted like a neophyte. Dropped my guard, put myself in unnecessary jeopardy, and—worst of all—kicked a dog.

  I’ve given over a sizable chunk of my life to adopting, training, and competing alongside canines. And yet in many ways I’ve still got so much to learn. Possibly, I’ve allowed the comforting structure of the agility world to define my entire relationship with dogs, forgetting that that structure is artificial, imposed on the animals by us. But isn’t that why I started on agility training back in my days with Carmen? Because I felt that my dogs would enjoy the structure, even thrive on mastering it?

  Yet outside such egalitarian confines, each breed is different: each has its own specific proclivities and characteristic behaviors, and even within a breed those traits alter radically from dog to dog.

  It’s almost enough to make me regret not having chosen cats.

  (I said “almost.”)

  CHAPTER 17

  Hounds for the Holidays

  Winter arrives. In Chicago this can mean appalling quantities of snow or frigid, heart-stopping cold. In a good winter, we’ll have a few memorable instances of each, just to keep us from forgetting that we are in fact nature’s bitch. In a bad winter, we’ll be pounded with one right after the other, alternating blows that leave us reeling. And every once in a while we’ll have a terrible winter, in which we actually get both calamities at the same time. This is shaping up to be a terrible winter.

  It’s eleven below zero and snowing briskly when Dusty and I set out for Milwaukee and our first overnight agility trial. In fact we’ll be staying two nights so that we can compete in three consecutive days of the Cream City Canines Agility Club trial. I’m hoping a three-day trial will break the run of bad luck we’ve had with two-day trials, which have been a series of depressingly similar, lackluster performances. Possibly, the extra day will be just what Dusty needs to grow accustomed to the venue and the people and build a modicum of confidence and, who knows, even honest-to-God ambition.

  This Cream Cities trial is more popularly known as Hounds for the Holidays (or just Hounds, for short). It’s a highlight on the All Fours calendar, and this year is no exception. Almost a dozen of us will be there. I’m especially looking forward to it since it’s my first time—I never attended with Carmen.

  And now I remember why. The snowfall has reduced visibility to almost nil, and with the sun not yet risen, my headlights are reflecting off the whirling flakes as they spiral toward my windshield. The effect is potentially mesmerizing—and thus potentially lethal. I have to keep adjusting my vision, trying to see beyond the storm; it requires some serious concentration. In the meantime, I can’t seem to stop trembling; the temperature climbs a bit (to a balmy six below), and the heater’s on full, but my body won’t adjust. This is where a good breakfast would’ve come in handy. I’m usually Breakfast Boy, but this morning I woke up late and had to hurry out of the house to beat the Thursday morning traffic. My first walk-through is scheduled for 8:10, and it’s at least a ninety minute drive to Milwaukee. So my stomach’s growling and my limbs are shaking as we speed through the dark in a vortex of shimmering snow.

  Where the heater has failed me, the music steps in to dispel the chill. I’ve rather cannily chosen a disc of music by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, whose torrid, tango-driven sound world soon envelopes me and makes me feel, well, not quite like I’m on a beach, but at least like I’m wearing a Panama hat.

  We arrive at Uihlein Soccer Park well before eight, leaving sufficient time to unfold Dusty’s crate and set up shop. The facility is enormous, the largest I’ve seen yet. There are three courts, one of which is dedicated solely to excellent standard, another to excellent jumpers. The remaining ring is for all novice and open classes. Crating areas have been marked off by tape around the perimeter, and there’s additional space on the mezzanine level, which also hosts a variety of vendors including a masseur (for both handlers and dogs) and the inevitable concession stand selling nothing I’d ever eat.

  The All Fours setup is pretty easy to spot, since some of the gang arrived late last night and claimed one of the more desirable bits of real estate, where the corridors leading to the front and side doors intersect. There’s to be a prize for the best decoration of a crating space and Dee is taking this very seriously; when I arrive, she and some of the others are busy stringing twinkly lights over an expansive yuletide display that includes a “Naughty List” and a “Nice List” on which passersby are welcome to scrawl their nominations. Busy as she is, she manages a brilliant smile and a big hello. She seems utterly in her element, the chaos and confusion seeming to add ballast to her, making her physically more present, in the same way they tend, paradoxically, to render me more diffuse and unmoored. Possibly it’s because I’m a writer, but the sight of all these faces—and the particular narrative that shines out of each one of them—is completely distracting to me. I could dissolve in a fit of empathy. Whereas Dee, I think, sees in each face another building block of the world she’s spent so many years constructing. She’s at home; I’m at sea.

  And as usual, my uncertainty translates directly into Dusty’s. He slinks along behind me, fretful and wide eyed, trying to look in each direction at once, sensing menace in all of them. Whenever we stop, he leans into me, lifting his front paw as though ready in an instant to leap into my arms or perhaps propel himself through the roof.

  For his sake I try to focus and gather my resources. I don’t lack self-confidence, but it needs to be summoned. And it helps to see so many familiar faces here: Marilyn, Gus, Deb, Sue, Diane, Alise, Betsy, Cyndi—some I know less well than others, but from what I’ve heard, Hounds is where the All Fours crew really lets its hair down.

  But first there’s the actual competition. Now that Dusty and I have our novice jumpers title, we’ve moved up to the big leagues: open jumpers. It’s trickier than novice—more obstacles, tighter turns, twelve weave poles instead of six, and a shorter time to manage it all—but I’m hoping for a breakthrough this weekend. Accordingly, I take all the time allotted to the walk-through.

  Still, it seems unreasonable to ask Dusty to Q on the very first day of competition. “Although,” I tell him as we await our turn to run, “it’s our last trial of the year, and it’d be sweet to go out on a high note. But,” I add hastily, as he darts me a look more than usually penetrating, “no pressure.”

  I needn’t have worried. So far from feeling pressure, he performs the run as though nothing at all were required of him. We might be on a picnic for all the urgency he displays, and this despite my increasingly shrill prompting. “Dus-teeeee,” I howl as he veers inexorably away from me, like a planet in elliptical orbit. At one point my shrillness actually hurts my own ears.

  After it’s over, I linger a while to watch the next several r
uns, just to reassure myself that I’m not the only competitor to bollix his chances. But this salve to my ego quickly evaporates when I go back an hour later to check the score sheet. Dusty and I have clocked in at sixty-seven seconds. No one else even comes close to being so spectacularly overtime. Even the dog who crapped on the table at least managed to be quicker about it.

  Disheartened, I collapse Dusty’s crate, lead him out to the car, and drive to our hotel. Seeing him in the vast, oppressively clean lobby is a little startling. He seems smaller and bristlier than ever, like I’m dragging a vegetable brush at the end of my leash.

  We get to our room—large, pale, antiseptic—and I unhook him while I reopen his crate. He sniffs around the walls and furnishings. “No marking,” I warn him, so he gives up and just watches me work. I set out bowls of food and water—he disdains both.

  “Look,” I tell him, “I’m famished, so I’m going to leave you here for a while to chill. I’ll come get you in time for your standard run. Okay?”

  He gives me a look that says “very much not okay,” then comes up and places a paw on my thigh. This is about as cuddlesome as he ever gets. In fact in his personal repertoire of gestures, it borders on molestation. I can’t just ignore such a potent appeal for my physical presence; not with those lemurlike eyes boring into mine so pathetically. “All right, all right,” I say, and I order up a sandwich from room service, then settle onto the bed for an hour or so, taking up the novel I’ve been reading (Dawn Powell’s delightfully acid The Happy Island). Dusty curls up at my feet and snoozes.

  He seems fully rested, if still a bit disoriented, by the time I pile him back in the car for the return drive to Uihlein Soccer Park. I quickly discover that there’s been some drama while I’ve been away; Dee, while seated cross-legged on the floor and watching the excellent jumpers with Kaleigh, was attacked by an Australian shepherd, which had apparently been giving her the woolly eye for several minutes beforehand. Dee was alert enough to forestall any harm, shielding Kaleigh and turning her back on the Aussie before it reached her. I blush, thinking back on my experience with the rottweiler. It’s not as if any of the All Fours crew would pass judgment on my for kicking that marauding beast, but it humbles me to think how much I have to learn about handling animals the way Dee does.