by Susannah
***
For so visible a presence in the public consciousness, the Golden Retriever is not an ancient breed. Though its early history is sometimes debated and there are folk stories of Russian dogs being the sire and dam of the first pups that would be Goldens, the Golden Retriever Club of America credits the Golden's origins to Sir Dudley Majoribanks, Lord Tweedmouth, who acquired the single yellow pup in a litter of black wavy-coated retrievers in Brighton, England, in the early 1870s. Lord Tweedmouth named the yellow dog "Nous" and added him to his pack of sporting retrievers at Guisachan House in the Highlands of Scotland, later breeding him with a liver-colored female Tweed Water Spaniel named "Belle." That mating yielded several yellow pups that would become foundation dogs for the Golden Retriever breed. "Crocus," a Nous and Belle pup, appears in photographs to bear a striking resemblance to the contemporary Golden. Golden Retrievers began appearing in British dog shows in the Retriever-Wavy or Flat-Coated category in the early 1900s, but the American Kennel Club did not recognize the breed until 1932. Goldens were a rare breed at the time.
Like their forebears, modern Goldens are intelligent dogs that are eager to partner humans in a variety of ways. Though bred to retrieve, they can also be talented, disciplined athletes in the agility ring and obedience trials. Many excel in tracking and at other scent-associated tasks. The AKC literature confirms they are loyal, loving companions. The breed's natural inclinations are all potential positives in the search field. I'd heard the general buzz for years, but during months of research prior to locating my puppy, it was good to see a solid reputation surface.
Now the Golden Retriever consistently places in the top ten most popular dogs in America—in part due to the word-of-mouth PR, perhaps in great part due to all the media exposure—a popularity that may contribute to the breed's serious problems. And there are some. In the open market, where supply meets demand, some smell the money to be made in Goldens, and commercial breeding can be haphazard. In the long months prior to finding my partner, I researched genealogies and read up on the breed's vulnerabilities, among them possible hip issues, heart issues, eye problems—and cancer, a common killer of Goldens, young and old. Hemangiosarcoma and lymphosarcoma: twin specters that shadow thousands of heartbroken posts on the Internet, lowering the Golden's average lifespan to ten and a half years. Deaths at age four or five are not uncommon. As a member of several online Golden Retriever forums, I read hard news from online friends and went to sleep some nights saddened by vicarious loss.
There were other caveats. For all their cuddly, genial good looks, Goldens are extremely social dogs who want to work beside their humans. The cute puppies that become grown dogs are ill-suited to haphazard training, intermittent contact, and banishment to the backyard. Hundreds of high-energy, anxious Goldens end up in rescues and city pounds every year, the result of poor choice-making on the part of owners who want a good dog at their leisure but don't want a Golden that jumps on them in the backyard, the ten-minute-a-day family pet now desperate for affection after long hours of abandonment. The collective research unanimously asserts that Goldens cannot be treated as accessories. This is true of all dogs, of course, but with a big dog like a Golden, the behavioral result of social neglect can be catastrophic for family and dog.
I was a newcomer to Goldens, but at least, I thought, I could promise attention, companionship, love. And work. The breed's drives and my own seemed right in sync.
I inquired with several Golden rescue organizations that promised to keep their eyes open for just the right young Golden that might work, but no solid leads emerged there. From pages of notes, I made ten breeder queries, nationwide. Four breeders indicated they had no new litters proposed for the year. Two had pups, but they were already sold. One seemed unwilling to believe I'd travel to get the right dog, no matter how much hypertext I used in my e-mails: Plane! Car trip! Off for the summer! Three others never responded. Nine months of close calls and almost-dogs that never came to pass—a whole series of Goldens that nearly came home to me. I had begun to wonder if a wiser universe was telling me something.
"No," said a neighbor, when I whined my frustration. "You said yourself this is more than a dog to be had and a thing to be done. You're being prepared." Gerand is a feng shui practitioner whom I've known to find a reasonable meaning in food poisoning and the bad chicken salad behind it, so I listened—and chafed—and waited.
In a moment of serendipity, a breeder who'd been recommended to me by five separate sources responded to tell me that she had a female named Spirit whose pregnancy was established, whose background was what I'd been looking for, and who might be very likely to bear a puppy with an aptitude for SAR. She sent me a link to information and images of her Spirit and the litter's sire, Ozzie, from another breeder on the East Coast. There was obedience, agility, and hunt in the merged background—good health and longevity too.
I already had notes on this breeder's line, but I took a day or so more to review them, imposing some kind of rationality while inside my heart leaped. Everything seemed right about this litter. I sent my application and puppy deposit and began a second wait for a Golden that wasn't yet born, charged with the idea that somewhere out there in the miracle of cell division and good dog DNA, my partner was becoming real.
"Look at that head," said Terry, weeks later. He was looking at a picture of Ozzie, my puppy's sire, a big boy with a genial, teddy-bear expression. "You've gotta smile at a face like that." I agreed. Another in the long list of reasons I wanted a Golden was the attraction factor. We search for children and Alzheimer's patients with some frequency, and I didn't want these victims more scared when they were found than when they were lost. I knew I wanted a light-faced dog with an open, kindly expression.
Terry looked at pictures of pretty mama Spirit, posed calmly in a "watch me" command, and he looked at my first pictures of her puppies, sent two days after the litter was born. Ten pups: nine girls and a boy. They looked like fuzzy tater tots, all butts and tiny ear flaps, their faces obscured as they huddled together. Each wore a little "collar" of colored rickrack for identification.
"I'm taking guesses," I said, pointing to the little tabs of rickrack. "Tell me which one you think will be my puppy, and if you guess correctly, I'll donate one hundred dollars to the Golden rescue of your choice." Terry pointed and picked. I'd played this game for a few days. Everyone had a reason for picking the puppy they did. "This one looks like she's protecting the others," one said. "This one has a big nose," said another. I made my choice last, picking a little blond pup curled on her side like a comma. In the picture, she was independent and apart from the others, wearing a yellow rickrack collar—and she was fat as a piglet, which suggested she could find something when she wanted it, and she didn't mind crawling over nine other puppies to get it.
As it happened, I guessed correctly, more fluke than intuition. "Yellow" and all the other pups were pretested for evidence of drive, confidence, and willingness to work for a human at six and again at ten weeks, and their breeder conferred with our SAR team head trainer. It was a close call indeed between this female and the little male. Breeder and trainer talked at length long-distance, and they made a decision for me—like an arranged marriage with four paws and a tail. I found out the day before I flew to Midland. "It's a girl," I was told. And she wore yellow rickrack.
Now it was just a matter of meeting her and bringing her home to join my family of three elderly cats and six adult dogs. I'd been raising dogs for years. I thought: How hard could it be?
Most of the animals in my house are rescues themselves. Coming from a family that always rescued cats from the pound, some part of me still draws energy from a rowdy, highly interactive little pack of animals, and I have one—a household of distinct personalities, none of them shy about expressing his point of view. A few dogs are fosters, living here on a temporary basis until they stabilize enough to be adoptable—plucked from animal shelters a day before their scheduled euthanasia. Excepting Pomer
anians Fo'c'sle Jack and Mr. Sprits'l, the population here swells or decreases as this dog comes in to foster or that dog adopts a new family.
In the weeks preceding the new puppy, they were all aware of my changed motions, but only Sprits'l appeared deeply suspicious as I puppy-proofed the house, mutter-grumbling his way behind me, giving occasional "augh" barks of disapproval. He is a bright, fox-faced little guy, the color of a cigarette filter stubbed out into ash, which sounds ugly—but he is a good-looking dog. Sprits has small, dark eyebrows, and for a couple of weeks they were raised speculatively at the excessive housecleaning, the throwing away of once-loved-but-now-much-ignored small dog toys. The other dogs appeared curious but unconcerned.
Fo'c'sle Jack, the first Pomeranian in the pack, is much attached to me and has always been an easy dog. Jack came into the world mellow. Even though he was attacked by two large off-leash dogs as a pup, a violent event that shook both of us up for months, Jack recovered his equable nature. He doesn't rattle easily; he rarely barks. A soft and genial orange sable Pomeranian, his chief concern is food: when's it coming, how much is coming, and by the way, you could give a guy a treat now and then. With confident graciousness, Jack's seen foster dogs come and go. He was the least likely to be affected by this change, I thought, especially if I brought in a puppy of a breed known for its dog-friendliness.
By contrast, rescued Miss Whisky is all nerves, stretched tight as a violin string about to snap. When Whisky's previous owner, an elderly woman with advancing Alzheimer's, put a kitchen towel over a gas burner a few years ago, her whole house went up. The woman was pulled from the bedroom alive, and on his way out another firefighter found Whisky crouched in the kitchen between the refrigerator and a cabinet, semiconscious, the long fur of her tail already burning. He pulled the dog free, but in the aftermath of the fire, the woman's son placed his mother in a care facility and turned Whisky over to the pound. A poorly bred, cowering, traumatized black Pom with few social skills, she was given little time. A rescue organization got her out of the shelter, and I took her a few days later, the fur of her tail still crimped and scorched from heat. She is calmer now, but reactive: new neighbors throw her, the scrape and clunk of the mailman throws her. In truth, a strong breeze can still throw Whisky some days. She's in a state of almost permanent exclamation. Though she wags and smiles, her eyes are wary, and she barks about everything like an old record on the skip, shrieking a high note: Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!
Whisky's staccato bark makes Salty Sophie blink, as though she winks away kickboxing butterflies. Sophie is the smallest of the Poms and perhaps the pluckiest. Another rescue, Sophie had been found duct-taped in a cardboard box and tossed in a Dumpster in Florida. A passerby heard her whimper, extracted the little dog, and then took her for veterinary care—despite the fact she could not keep Sophie herself. She came to us shaved free of mats and ticks, but with serious medical conditions: a collapsing trachea and congestive heart failure, both of which impair her breathing, particularly on hot, humid days. Despite her rough history and medical problems, Sophie is a cheerful, upbeat little dog, a round and waddling creature eager to keep up with household events. Dinnertime inspires Sophie to dance a doggy mambo, and occasionally she gets too excited about her coming food and falls over, dazed and blue about the mouth. But after a moment's pause, she is up again, does a little box step, and makes a honking sound through her nose, the closest she gets to a bark. Sophie is unruffled by the fosters who pass through on a layover to their new homes, and I think she'll get along with a new dog—even a larger dog—just fine, as long as the puppy has a little sense and equilibrium, thereby not sitting on small Sophie or spinning her silly on a race through the house.
The senior statesman of the household is Scuppy, aged twenty-one, another rescue who has already taught me much about how a smart dog works the wind.
A friend first e-mailed me about Scuppy after seeing a Petfinder ad pleading his case. A very senior dog who had been the pet of an elderly couple, he was abandoned when the couple died. Neighbors later said that the couple's adult children simply opened the front door and let the old Pomeranian out. Blind and deaf, he had wandered along the street, crossing traffic and colliding into unfamiliar fences for days until someone took him to the pound. There, the shelter's attending vet recognized Scuppy as one of his own former patients. A phone call confirmed the old dog's abandonment. No, the family denied, their mother's dog had died years ago. They knew nothing about a dog, about this dog, about any dog. Nothing, even when the vet's digital photograph exactly matched the stray Pomeranian sitting in a cage at the pound.
The shelter staff had made something of a pet of him as long as possible, but his age and disabilities made him unattractive for adoption. When I called eighteen hours before his scheduled euthanasia, the attendant on the phone wept. The Petfinder ad had been removed, she said. Scuppy couldn't be adopted because he was unneutered, and the law prohibited the adoption of an unaltered pet. But the shelter vet believed he would not survive surgical anesthesia due to his great age, and thus neutering was out of the question. One way or another, it looked like Scuppy would be put to sleep.
I asked about his health apart from the listed disabilities, and she said his condition was good for a dog both elderly and lately neglected. He was an active, mobile dog interested in exploring; he was gentle and responsive to touch. He was just very, very old. The shelter staff had been looking for someone to give him a soft place to live out his last months. But the decision had finalized today—he couldn't be adopted. The woman's voice was weary with the finality of it.
"What about foster?" I suggested. "Could I ... sort of permanently ... foster this dog?"
She put me on hold.
"What time can you get here?" she asked when she returned to the phone.
"What time do you close?"
"Five-thirty," she said.
"I can be there by five-thirty."
There was a pause. "Come at six," she said, and hung up the phone.
We met behind the shelter later that evening in the dark, where I signed paperwork I couldn't read. The young woman advised that the normal pet insurance that came with adoption was not available for fosters. Another attendant in the shadows, with bright-red hair lit only by the occasional flare of his cigarette on inhale, said I wouldn't be needing insurance, anyway: an old dog like Scuppy didn't have a whole lot of time. There was a little bundling movement, backlit in fluorescent from the shelter's half-cracked door. The two hustled something into my pet carrier, then scuttled back into the shelter. The whole thing was as quick and dark as an exchange of state secrets, and I would not have been able to recognize either one of them on the street in daylight. It would have been creepy if I'd not sensed how much these two wanted to avoid putting down yet another dog. Especially this one.
In the car, I unzipped the top of the carrier and saw him for the first time, a "clear orange" Pomeranian, his face sunken and white with age. His ears did not flick the way a hearing dog's would, and when I gently lifted his chin, I saw his clouded eyes. He was the oldest dog I'd ever seen. Toothless too. Accepting change with equanimity, he yawned, showing a wedge of bare, pink gums. I kept one hand down beside the old boy as I drove, feeling the soft, exploratory huff of his breath against my palm.
Once home, Scuppy accepted the other dogs calmly, submitting to their sniffs and prodding and circling without fuss or complaint. He clearly bewildered them, but something in his demeanor kept them respectful. At suppertime, he stood beside them in the kitchen, barked when he smelled dog food, and put his nose to his bowl as though he'd had this houseful of siblings his entire life. When he finished, he bobbed his nose and scented incoming air as I opened the back door for the other dogs, and he too headed outside, feeling his way along the porch to the ramp leading to the yard. There he revealed unexpected abilities. As he walked the backyard to become familiar with it, Scuppy marked the fence perimeter every few feet, demonstrating a bottomless bladder and a ge
nius ability to meter his pee. He marked an entire fence line in that first single outing. The other dogs stood together and watched him, not one of the little males attempting to best the old boy by peeing over his mark.
He would mark further across the following days: trees, shrubs, the birdbath, a coil of garden hose, a clutch of flowerpots at a fork in the flagstone path leading to the garage. The outside water bowl too, which deeply offended the other Poms until I washed and raised it a little, allowing Scuppy's mark to land on the bricks beneath.
Scuppy clearly loved to be outdoors, and once he'd marked his territory, he never collided with objects again. He would walk the backyard for hours, then sit in the soft grass and lift his nose at the passage of squirrels on the fence or a fluster of pigeons beneath the feeder. When he was ready to come in, he would give a polite, solitary bark from where he sat—a little upward inflection like a query— errrrr, now? There he'd wait to be picked up, cuddled, and brought into the house. I learned that I could stand upwind of him many feet away and, waving my hands at knee level, would see him give the signature head pop of recognition I'd learned from the on-scent search dogs. When Scuppy caught the scent of me, he would rise, turn, and follow it to the source, his small tail wagging. And so it was that I learned how to call blind, deaf Scuppy and realized he could come when called just by the scent of me—even across the entire yard.
Having hidden electrical cords, replaced loose mattress batting, and installed some puppy gates, I took up all the cat toys and the small-breed toys, and I told the Pomeranians they'd just have to understand we couldn't have a puppy chew-and-choke hazard around for a while. The Poms tilted their heads when I spoke to them and looked even more speculative. Something's changing, their expressions said, and it don't smell like bacon. All this commotion began four weeks before Spirit's litter was due on the other side of Texas and fourteen weeks before I could bring the puppy home. I knew it was early, but I lay on the floor and tried to imagine this world through a Golden puppy's eyes. I wondered, in turn, what she would teach me and when.