The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  —She asked me to tell you she’s fine. She’s happy.

  —She’s a fuckin’ dog.

  —Yes.

  He lay back on the bed and knew he’d be getting up in a minute. Sleep was gone.

  —Was that someone about Emma? Mary asked.

  —Yeah.

  —Another nut?

  —Maybe we should take the posters down.

  —No.

  —O.K. You’re right. We’ll keep at it.

  Then there was the Web site. She showed it to him—www.missing-dogs.ie. She’d opened her own page. The same photo of the dog; the location last seen—a little map, their house filled in red. The dog’s personality, “outgoing.”

  —Will people look at this? he asked.

  —Yes, they will, she said. Dog-lovers will.

  —Grand.

  —And there are links to other sites, she said. All over the world.

  Some prick in Hong Kong was staring at the picture of their dog.

  He said nothing.

  Nothing.

  That was the way their life had drifted. They never recovered from the dog. They didn’t get another one. He wasn’t blaming the dog. Things had been heading that way before the dog. The dog had even saved them for a while, or slowed down the drift. They’d had something new in common for a couple of months, and the excursions to the land behind the airport.

  He hadn’t opened the gate. He hadn’t left it open.

  But he’d failed. He could have pretended. Cried a bit, let her console him, take over—he didn’t know. It wasn’t about the gate. It was about grief. She grieved. He didn’t. Simple as that. He should have pretended. It would have been a different kind of honesty. He knew that now. He thought he did.

  He’d said they should get a new one. She’d stared at him and walked away. It wasn’t a house you could walk away in; she had to walk out. She came back. They had another row, and he walked out. It was his turn. He stayed away for hours. He went to the pictures. He came back.

  The walking out stopped. The rows stopped. The talking, too; it was a wordless life. They’d drifted. But, actually, they hadn’t drifted, and that was another problem. One of them should have gone. They should have looked at each other one night, over the dinner or something, and smiled, and known that enough was enough. But that wise moment had never happened. He hadn’t let it. He’d wished for it, but he hadn’t let it happen. He hadn’t let his eyes sit on hers.

  Now she was taking off her new coat.

  He didn’t know her. Didn’t know her hair, didn’t know why she’d have wanted a tan in January—didn’t really know how it was done. Some sort of a lamp, or a bed. He didn’t know.

  —Your coat’s nice, he said.

  | 2007 |

  “And what do you think will happen if you do get on the couch?”

  LINE AND TREE

  A. J. LIEBLING

  Some time ago, I went to a coondog field trial in rural Connecticut as the guest of Mike Izzo, a neighborhood grocer in New Haven who owns a notable dog named Indiana Trigger. Mr. Izzo’s dog has a statewide fame among coondog-trial fans, and last year won about five hundred dollars in prizes for his owner, which is a lot, considering the size of the purses run for in Connecticut. (The biggest and richest coondog trials are held in the Midwest.) Procyon lotor, the raccoon, is an omnivorous, courageous, and highly adaptable arboreal mammal found in every part of the North American continent, from Alaska to Mexico (a man trapped one in Brooklyn last spring), but the fact that he is almost completely nocturnal curtails his role in coondog trials, which are held by day, so that people can watch them. Coon-hunting is at least as old as the rifle (about two hundred years), but field trials, which are a combination of a drag hunt and a race, have been in favor only since around 1925. Their increasing popularity has brought about a bifurcation in the coondog business, much like the one that occurred, by slow stages, in the barber-surgeon’s trade in the late Middle Ages, when practitioners who lacked fluency in conversation or a light hand at shaving turned to what seemed a less exacting specialty. “Night dogs,” those used in the darkling pursuit of the wild raccoon, are often not much good at field trials. Many of the best field-trial dogs have never been hunted in the woods at night, and never will be, because they might there develop habits of ponderation that would unfit them for their purpose, which is the rapid pursuit of the obvious.

  In a coondog trial, a sack filled with litter from a captive raccoon’s kennel is dragged over a cross-country course a couple of miles long, ending at a tree in the upper branches of which a live raccoon in a cage has been placed. The dogs are usually let loose ten at a time at the starting line. A hundred and fifty feet from the tree with the raccoon in it, the course passes between a pair of flags, customarily nothing more than white rags tied to saplings, seventy-five feet apart. The first dog to pass between the flags is said to win “line,” and the next dog “second line.” Dogs that run outside the flags are disqualified. The first dog to spot the raccoon up the tree and bark at him as if he means it wins “tree.” There are generally about a dozen qualifying heats in trials of the size that are run in Connecticut, and after the last one the winners compete in a tree final, a line final, and a second-line final. The finals are run on other courses than the heats, so the dogs won’t be aided by memory. The bag of litter is hauled over the track after each heat, so the scent will not go cold. Consequently, night-dog men say, a dog doesn’t need much of a nose to follow it. In a real night hunt, a dog must sometimes follow a trail several hours old. On the other hand, a trial dog needs a lot more speed than a straight cooner. The publics for the two forms of the sport are separate but overlap. A man putting a dog in a trial pays an entry fee, usually three dollars, and all the prizes come out of the pooled fees. When a hundred dogs are entered, the finals for line and tree are worth about fifty dollars apiece.

  Although an urban, non-arboreal, mammal myself, I got so interested in field trials after attending several last fall that I subscribed to a remarkable monthly called Full Cry, published in Sedalia, Missouri, which carries a schedule of trials as long as the list of books in the Fall Announcement number of Publishers’ Weekly. It was from Full Cry that I learned about the field trial I attended with Mr. Izzo, at Southington, about twenty miles from New Haven. Mr. Izzo’s acquaintance I made a year ago, at a trial near Baltic, a mill town not far from Norwich. (One of the minor advantages of following coondog trials is that you get to know geography in detail.) I arrived at Mr. Izzo’s house, in New Haven, at five minutes to ten on a Sunday morning, and found him already in an aged two-door sedan, with three dogs loaded in a low trailer hitched on behind. Mr. Izzo is a stocky, sallow man in his late forties, who has a heavy, Roman-legionary jaw and wears steel-rimmed spectacles. The other human members of our party were Mrs. Izzo, a tiny, lively woman wearing slacks and high-heeled shoes; a coondog fancier named Jack Galligan, who works for the New Haven Bridge Department; and a twelve-year-old boy whom Izzo introduced as Mrs. Izzo’s nephew, Junior Matrianno. Mr. Galligan, who looks like a ruddier, jowlier version of Al Smith, is one of those Irishmen who go in for mock solemnity, mock ferocity, and slow, reassuring winks. He has been a coondog man for nearly forty years, but he finds cooning at night a bit too rough for him now, and so sticks to trials. Last year, when I first met him, he had no trial dog, but he now informed me that he had acquired one, and that it was in the trailer with Indiana Trigger and another belonging to Izzo.

  After we had all fitted ourselves into the car, we started out, the three dogs barking as if the sedan were a coon and they had hopes of catching it. “Trigger and Jiggs start barking as soon as they see the trailer,” said Izzo, who was driving. Jiggs is his second-string dog, a youngster he got for nothing out of a dog pound a year and a half ago. (There is no such thing as a pure coonhound breed; any dog that will hunt coon or follow a trail with acumen and enthusiasm can be called a coonhound.) “My dog is the one with the beautiful voice on him,” Galligan said. “He
’s a registered bluetick, but the man down in Tennessee that sold him to the fellow I bought him off of won’t let go of the papers. The only thing I don’t know is what will he do. He’s never run in a trial before.” A bluetick is predominantly white but flecked and mottled with a smoky blue. A setter with this marking is known, I believe, as a belton, and a horse as a blue roan.

  There had been rain earlier in the morning, and the air was warm and moist. “The scent will be plain today,” Galligan said. “No breeze to turn over the leaves.” When the air is moist, the scent lies close to the ground and lasts longer. After we had gone about ten miles, Izzo drove into a large field by the side of a wood and we let the dogs out for a breather. Indiana Trigger, whom I had seen run twice before, is a small, compact black hound, with tan on face and breast. He hasn’t the long, drooping ears of the classic black-and-tan type, but he is recognizably a hound dog. Galligan told me that Trigger had been whelped somewhere in the South and had been sold for ten dollars by the man who bred him, and then had passed through the hands of a dozen owners on his way North, each selling him at a profit. When he got to Indiana, a man paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars for him and then sold him to Izzo for two hundred and fifty, after he had failed to win anything with the dog. “He’s been running better for Mike than he ever did for anybody else,” Galligan said. “He run maybe thirty times last year and was only beaten before the finals twice. That’s the way with dogs. Sometimes they improve with a change of owners and sometimes they go sour.” Galligan’s Blue, the putative bluetick, also looked like a hound. But Jiggs, a long-legged dog with medium-length reddish hair, was simply and happily a cur. Junior Matrianno, speaking as a loyal friend of Jiggs’, told me the dog was “shepherd and bull.” Izzo said, more dispassionately, “He could be anything.” The ability to follow a trail by scent is a hound characteristic, but dogs like Jiggs, with forthright native talent, keep coondog trials a highly democratic sport. After the dogs had taken their ease for a few minutes, Izzo called them. Jiggs and Trigger came lolloping back and hopped into the trailer. Blue was a bit hesitant.

  Soon after we had passed through Cheshire, which is not far from Southington, we began to look for road signs that would indicate the way to the field trial. Trials are always held in thinly settled sections of townships, because the dogs need a lot of ground to run over. The routes leading to them are posted with cardboard signs bearing red arrows and the name of a dog-food company, which distributes them, on request, to field-trial sponsors. Sometimes the dog-food people give a free sack of food to every dog entered. We soon picked up the arrows, and after passing a couple of dairy farms that Galligan said belonged to famous coon-hunters we turned off the highway and onto a gravel road that led up the side of a long hill covered with spruce, hemlock, and hardwood trees. The top of the hill was a plateau, and ten or fifteen automobiles were already parked on it, most of them with dogs tethered to their bumpers. Other dogs were tied to trees, just out of reach of one another, and still others were being walked on leashes. Most of them howled in greeting as we arrived with our trailer, and Izzo, steering a course neatly among them, drove to a vacant spot near a tree, where we climbed out and disembarked our three dogs.

  Galligan put a leash on Blue, and he and I took a walk around while Izzo moored Jiggs and Trigger. Blue stopped in front of a large, gaunt, anxious-looking, biscuit-colored middle-aged hound that was holding one forepaw off the ground. Galligan, carefully keeping Blue out of the old dog’s reach, said to me, “There’s a dog that win some of the biggest races in the East a couple of years ago, but he hurt his foot, and he’s an adder now.” “What’s an adder?” I asked, as I was expected to, and Galligan said, “Puts down three and carries one.” At that moment, the adder’s owner, a very fat man in a green shirt, came up and shouted to Galligan, “Well, well, ain’t seen you since what you done in Dalton, Mass.!” “What did he do in Dalton, Mass.?” I asked, since I was plainly supposed to play straight man. “Went into a strange church and passed the basket!” the fat man shouted, and immediately burst into loud laughter. “Never mind,” said Galligan. “I never picked up no butts from the ground, like I seen you do.” “I was just picking them up for you—get more flavor that way,” his friend came back. Galligan laughed hard. “He’s a witty fellow, that Warren,” he said to me as we walked away. “Hell of a witty fellow.”

  Cars were arriving on the plateau in a steady stream now, and the majority of them were towing dog trailers. Most of the dogs looked like hounds, but usually like hounds with traces of sheep dog, bull terrier, or whippet. There was one coarse collie that showed no trace of anything else, and a number of sheep dogs and unclassifiable curs that might possibly have had a recessive dash of hound. The fastest pure-strain dogs—greyhounds and whippets—are no good for trials, because their instinct is to run with their heads high and their eyes on the quarry, making no effort to use their noses. These traits, the product of centuries of breeding, cannot be altered by any simple attempt at reeducation. Crosses between greyhounds or whippets and proved coonhounds—the result of one-generation attempts to combine a nose and speed—are seen at tracks, but they seldom work out; the dogs seem to be torn between conflicting inherited aptitudes. “I still think a hound with a good cat foot—a dog that stands high on his toes—is fast enough to beat any of them crosses,” Galligan said. “The crosses run wide on the turns and have to wait for the dogs with noses to pick up the scent again. Look at the feet on Blue, now. I think he’s got a future.”

  The Southington Sportsmen’s Club, which owns the hillside over which the dogs were to run, is a member of the United Raccoon Hunters Field Trial and Protective Association of Connecticut. The Association makes up a regular schedule of trials, each of the member clubs holding one meet a year. A field trial gives the host club a chance to pick up a bit of cash for its treasury, the money coming from the sale of refreshments and a 30 percent cut of auction pools on the dogs, the standard form of betting on coondog trials. The members’ wives in charge of the feeding arrangements remind one of the committeewomen at any church clambake; in fact, they are the women who run the church clambake when that event comes along. A field trial combines aspects of a church affair and of a very small race meeting, but it has an entirely individual sound accompaniment—the continual howls, barks, and snarls of the parliament of coon-dogs. Coondog men, incidentally, pay much attention to the noise their dogs make, and speak learnedly of “bawl-and-chops,” “squall-and-chops,” “long bawls,” “short bawls,” and “long bass bugles.” Some dogs, known as silent trailers, steal up on a raccoon and give tongue only after they have treed him. They are deprecated by coonhunting aesthetes.

  For silent dogs don’t give a thrill:

  With them it’s two barks, then a kill,

  a poet wrote in Full Cry. I attended a meet last year with a man who bought a dog on the spot for no other reason than that it had a beautiful baritone voice. It turned out that its gifts were exclusively vocal, so my friend sold it as a foxhound. “I didn’t know but what he might be,” he told me. “He certainly wasn’t interested in coon.”

  The Southington clubhouse is a one-room structure, built of gray concrete blocks, on the slope of the hill just below the edge of the plateau. Under the downhill side of the clubhouse, there is an open basement, which serves as a restaurant, selling hamburgers, hot dogs, steamed clams, clam chowder, clam broth, raw onions, apples, pickles, coffee, birch beer, root beer, home-baked pies, a meat-loaf dinner for a dollar, and a number of other items that I forget. There was a beer bar outside. Hard liquor is sold at some trials, but none was evident at Southington, except in the gaits of a few of the sportsmen.

  As it got on toward twelve o’clock, the members of the committee running the trial began to appeal to owners over a public-address system to get their entries in. The entry lists had been open since ten o’clock, the grounds were packed with dogs, but only a few owners had paid their three dollars and put down their dogs’ names. “Hangi
ng back to see if they can get in a soft heat,” Izzo said to me. “They want to wait until all the hot dogs are drawn.” I asked him if he had entered Jiggs and Trigger yet, and he said he hadn’t—he wanted to have a look at the lists first.

  LOST

  There was hell to pay in the Gladstone Hotel the other morning. A lady guest who was in the throes of packing to check out reported that her Pekinese was lost. A squad of bellhops searched the premises for an hour or more before they found him. He had been packed. | 1944 |

  While the dog-owners were outwaiting one another, I stopped at the lunch counter for a moment to deal with a bottle of birch beer, a hamburger with raw onion, and a portion of steamed clams, and then went to look at the finish line of the course, in a field bounded by a low stone wall halfway down the hill. The starting line was about two miles away somewhere; the dogs in each heat would be taken to it in a pickup truck. A dog running through the flags of the finish line and continuing straight on could hardly fail, it would seem, to come right up against the coon tree, a tall walnut, alone amid low spruce. The coon, in his cage, was already up in the crotch of a limb, about thirty feet above the ground, and the countryman who had put him there, probably a veteran bird’s-nester, was already down. “I hope the boys get a lighter coon next time they hold a race,” he said to me. “Nearly ruptured myself lugging him up there.” As we talked, the track-layers, a couple of boys in their early teens, came into view, walking cater-cornered through the field, dragging the sack of coon litter behind them. They were completing a sidehill scramble through briars and over fences, across pasture land and wood lots. On their way, they had marked their course by tying rags to trees, so that the sack could be hauled over the same trail after each heat. The boys walked across the line midway between the flags and then marched up to the tree in which the coon was perched. They smacked the bag vigorously against the trunk several times, then held it clear of the ground and walked over to us. They said they expected to go over the course a couple more times during the afternoon; other pairs of boys would spell them. “In some Western states, they allow you to drag a live coon along the trail in a wet bag,” the tree-climber said, “but here the Humane Society won’t let you. It doesn’t make much difference, because even if you had a live coon, a good coondog could smell that there had been a man along there—man scent and coon scent all mixed together for two miles. He would know it wasn’t on the level. You ask me, there are mighty few of these dogs that are fooled into thinking they’re hunting a coon. They know it’s just a race.”