A Big Little Life Read online

  When she came to us, Trixie accepted the work schedule that Gerda and I maintained, which kept us at our desks until at least six o’clock, often until seven or later, though we were up every morning by five thirty or six.

  Within two weeks, however, Trixie decided that we were insane for working past five o’clock, and she set out upon a campaign to free us from our offices at a normal quitting hour. One day, promptly at five, she came to the farther side of my U-shaped desk and issued not a bark, but a soft woof. When I turned away from the computer to discover what disturbed her, I could see only her glorious big head above the desk. She stared at me with an intense expression that Gerda called the “Ross look.” Ross Cerra, her father, had a frown of disapproval that could wilt a fresh flower from a distance of forty feet. After telling Trix that it was not yet quitting time and that she must be patient, I turned my attention to the keyboard once more.

  Fifteen minutes later, she issued another sotto voce woof. This time her head was poked around the corner of the desk. Her Ross look had grown so solemn that Ross himself could not have matched its effect. Again, I told her the time to quit had not arrived, and I returned to the scene that I was writing.

  At five thirty, she came directly to my chair and sat staring at me. When I didn’t acknowledge her, she inserted her head under the arm of my chair, squinching her ears and fur, peering up at me with such a forlorn expression that I couldn’t ignore her. A few minutes later, I knocked off early and took her outside to play.

  The following afternoon, when she woofed softly at five o’clock, I didn’t yet understand that she was on a crusade to change our lives. As before, she started from the farther side of my desk, poked her head around the corner fifteen minutes later, and came to my chair at five thirty. When she squeezed her head under the chair arm and implored me with her melancholy gaze, I realized she had a strategy and the tactics to fulfill it.

  I tried to defend the sanctity of my work schedule, but her wiles were irresistible. Within two weeks, we regularly knocked off work at five thirty, and within a month, because of the clock in Trixie’s head and her diligent insistence, five o’clock became the official end of the workday in Koontzland.

  SOME WILL TELL you that dogs’ memories are short, that they retain only what has been drilled into them through repetitive training and what relates directly to their basic needs of food, water, and shelter.

  My polite response to that is, “Balderdash.”

  Vito and Lynn, who had been vacationing at our beach house when Trixie came to us from CCI, returned the following year to stay two weeks again. On their first evening there, we drove a Ford Explorer to the peninsula to pick them up for dinner, and Trixie rode in the cargo space, gazing out the tailgate window at the world receding.

  When greeting people whom she had met before, Short Stuff’s enthusiasm was directly proportional to how much fun they had been on the previous occasion. As usual, Vito and Lynn had been more fun each day than an entire amusement park, and that was before the cocktail hour. When they got into the backseat, Trixie lost her composure. She wiggled excitedly, tail slap-slap-slapping the walls of the cargo space. She made that winsome, hardly audible squeal of ecstasy in the back of her throat. Unable to contain herself, she sprang into the backseat, between them, which she had never done with anyone before, and lavished on them the Tongue of Love, though she rarely licked.

  She had seen them several days on their previous visit, but not again for a year. Yet her behavior confirmed beyond doubt that she not only recognized them but also remembered that they had been great company. No other explanation holds water, especially since Vito had long ago stopped wearing that liver-scented cologne.

  But Trixie displayed remarkable long-term memory, as well. In one instance, going back to her earliest days as a puppy…

  A year earlier, when Vito and Lynn had accompanied us to the CCI campus in Oceanside, with the crew of Pinnacle, Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what would be done with the large portion of their land not yet used. She said they hoped to build a residential facility in which each class of people with disabilities could stay for the two weeks that were required to learn how properly to handle and care for their dogs.

  At that time, those who were chosen to be teamed with a dog (henceforth “team partners”) had to stay in area motels and motor inns during the two-week “boot camp.” This was unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. Some of the team partners could not easily afford those two weeks of lodging and dining out. Older motels could not usually accommodate people in wheelchairs, and some of the team partners could find rooms only miles from the campus, which made an exhausting day of instruction even more draining. And with the class scattered to numerous locations every night, there was less camaraderie, fewer opportunities for the team partners to cheer on one another.

  CCI envisioned a wheelchair-accessible residential facility on the Oceanside campus, with rooms large enough to accommodate the team partners and their family members, with also a full-service catering kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, and other features. Gerda and I agreed to make a grant to CCI through our charitable foundation, for the purpose of constructing this residential facility.

  A few years later, the grand opening celebration was tied to the graduation of the first class—numbering ten or twelve, I think—that had stayed in the new residence hall. When Gerda and I arrived with Trixie, we were surprised to see a monument sign on the front lawn that identified this as the DEAN AND GERDA KOONTZ CAMPUS of Canine Companions for Independence. We do not ask any charity to which we contribute to emblazon our names on anything. It had not occurred to us that this would be done as a surprise. While we prefer to keep a low profile, CCI is so close to our hearts that we were more touched than embarrassed by this tribute.

  Every parking space along the street was taken, and neither Gerda nor I realized that a space in the CCI lot, near the front door, was reserved for us. We followed a road to the top of a long hill overlooking the campus and parked at a considerable distance.

  When Trixie jumped down from the back of the SUV, she was adamant about getting to CCI quickly. This was the campus where she received her six months of advanced training and from which she had graduated with Jenna years ago. I assumed that she was excited by nothing more than nostalgia for the old days when she had been the class clown. No horse could have pulled harder than Trixie pulled me, and on the way down the hill, I thought she would drag me off my feet. Gerda kept saying, “Wait, wait, slow down,” and as I struggled to keep my balance on the slope, I couldn’t explain that Trixie had for the first time in my experience become a rowdy girl who ignored all the rules of leash training.

  If Trix continued this behavior once inside CCI, I would need to explain how I had allowed their perfectly trained young lady to be transformed into a candidate for a dogs-gone-wild video. Some of the blame might credibly be placed on an exuberant yellow Lab who lived across the street and was a bad influence, even though no such Lab existed, but I didn’t have enough time to work out plausible details to support a claim that she had eaten fermented kibble.

  In the dry and sunny day, the drooping trees did not whisper in the motionless air, but at a higher altitude, a breeze chased clouds toward the faraway coast. In the perfect stillness, shadows of clouds undulated across the ground, and seemed to be spirits invading this tranquil reality from a more turbulent parallel universe. Trixie’s radiant coat shone red blond in the fleeting forms of shade, blond red in the brighter light, her flags fluffy and white in either condition. Perhaps the strangeness of still air and rampant shadows contributed to my impression that our golden girl’s beauty was more ethereal than ever—even though she strained mightily on the leash, as if determined to pull me to my knees.

  When we arrived at CCI, I hoped Trix would stop pulling, but my hope wasn’t fulfilled. She hadn’t yet arrived where she wished to be.

  A few hundred people were in full celebration, standing in the hallways and between
buildings in the courtyards. There might have been a hundred dogs in attendance, not just those who had graduated this day with their team partners, but also younger dogs in their training capes, with their puppy raisers, and release dogs, like Trixie, who were companions to the volunteers who gave so much time to CCI and made it purr like a high-performance engine.

  Straining at the leash, Trixie led Gerda and me through the crowd, not the least interested in the double score of dogs she passed or in the people who called her name and reached out to pet her. At last she stopped nose to nose with another lovely golden retriever, their tails lashing with delight. Clearly, this must have been her destination from the moment she exited the SUV.

  As the two dogs communed, Gerda and I chatted with the woman who had the other golden. When I described how determined Trixie had been to get to this very spot, she said, “Do you know what dog this is? It’s Tinsey, one of Trixie’s litter mates.”

  Most experts will say that a few weeks after the pups in a litter are separated, they no longer recognize one another as brothers and sisters. Insufficient long-term memory.

  Hah. Years later, Trixie caught the scent of her sibling from a couple of hundred yards and would not rest until they had been reunited. Considering all the other dogs present that day, this bit of evidence, though anecdotal, convinces me that dogs can remember not only what they learn from repetitive training or what knowledge directly assists their survival, but also what most matters to them otherwise, and they can remember it for a long, long time.

  XVII

  dogs and death

  WHEN A BELOVED character in one of my novels dies, I must write about that death with the emotion and the reverence I would bring to a eulogy given for a real person. We all go into that dark, which is the darkness of God, the ultimate humbling of our prideful kind; therefore, death is a sacred subject requiring me to consider the native knowledge with which I was born, whether I am writing about the death of a fictional person, a real person, or a dog.

  Current theory claims that dogs are unaware they will die. Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with our intuition and common sense, which are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity.

  We might take comfort in this claim that dogs are unaware of their mortality because it lifts from dogs the fundamental fear with which we must live. But it’s a false comfort, as anyone knows who has loved and been loved by a dog, and who has not surrendered his common sense.

  Worse, in believing such a thing, we rob dogs of the profoundly moving stoicism that gives them immense dignity. When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.

  We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women—meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices—live as if death is not a part of life but only an end. They worship youth, live for the moment, in time and of time, with no capacity to imagine anything outside of time. They do not deny death as much as they repress the recognition of their intimate relationship with it. Death is given a place in their thoughts similar to that occupied by a childhood friend not seen in twenty years, known to be still out there in the old hometown, a thousand miles away, but not currently relevant.

  A life-altering lesson can be learned by considering what dogs know about mortality and how they know it.

  Intuition + common sense = dog wisdom.

  Contention One: Dogs know. Dogs know they die.

  Contention Two: By intuition, dogs know more about death than the mere fact of it.

  A neighbor of ours heard commotion in the backyard and stepped outside to discover that a mountain lion had come out of the canyon and over the fence. The big cat, one of the most ferocious of all predators and seen seldom in these parts, was after the family dog.

  Around the yard, across the patio, around the pool, the dog—let’s call him Winslow—raced for his life, spun-jumped-scrambled from one hoped-for haven to another. Happily for both Winslow and his owner, the mountain lion allowed itself to be chased off with loud noise and a makeshift weapon. This is fortunate because the lion could have decided to go for a Big Mac instead of a small burger, and could have killed the owner as easily as it could have chowed down on Winslow, who was a third its size.

  If dogs have no concept of their mortality, if they don’t know they die, why did Winslow strive so frantically to avoid the mountain lion? Maybe the big cat only wanted to play. Maybe they could have had a great time with a tug toy.

  We could say that instinct inspired Winslow to flee.

  Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity or a tendency to action, a natural impulse, genetically programmed. Bird migration in winter is one example, as is the pattern that the spider spins in its web.

  Intuition is a higher form of knowledge than instinct. It is a direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning, knowledge neither derived from experience nor limited by it, such as that the whole is greater than a part, that two things each equal to a third thing are also equal to each other. Intuition also includes perceptions of space and spatial relationships, and an awareness of time.

  Although instinct may exist in every creature from human beings to whales to field mice, it’s also a quality of essentially brainless creatures like ants and goldfish, which have no intuition. Common sense tells us a dog is more like a human being than like an ant.

  But even if it was just instinct that told Winslow to run from the mountain lion, did it tell him merely to run or specifically to run because he would be eaten?

  You might say it doesn’t matter which, because in either case, the action taken by Winslow was the same. But if Winslow knows he will be eaten, surely he knows he is mortal. Therefore, if one wishes to insist dogs are ignorant of their mortality, one must stick with the idea that it is enough for instinct to impel Winslow to run even if he does not know why he must escape the mountain lion.

  But there will be many instances when Winslow or another of his kind will have seen a family dog or a house cat attacked and killed if not by the rare mountain lion, then by coyotes, which are more plentiful in these canyons.

  So my next question is: Once Winslow has seen Fido or Fluffycat consumed by a coyote, does he finally realize what almost happened to him that day with the lion? Does he now recognize his own mortality?

  To be consistent, if we support current theory, we must say no. If it was so easy for a dog to recognize he is mortal, all dogs would be wise to Death.

  All right. After Winslow has seen Fido eaten, if he does not reason his way to the concept of mortality, what does he think has happened to the luckless dog? Does he think Fido now lives inside the coyote or that they have morphed together?

  Perhaps some will reply that Winslow thinks nothing at all, that his brain is neither large enough nor wired in such a way as to allow him to ponder those questions. Fido was there. Fido is now not there. It means nothing to Winslow, who moves on with his day.

  I don’t believe anyone who has a much-loved dog can defend current theory past this point. Those who remain certain that Winslow never ponders Fido’s fate may work with dogs in the laboratory but are invariably dogless in their private lives.

  When a dog is your companion and not just your lab subject or your pet, when it is a member of the family and as lovingly observed as would be a child, you learn that the smarter breeds—and perhaps all breeds to different degrees—have greater intelligence than they are often said to have. Not only are they smart, they are also immensely curious, more curious than some of the people who speak with authority about them. And if their curiosity is encouraged, they can astonish with their ability to learn.

  Thirty-five years ago, Bonnie Bergin realized that dogs were capable of s
erving as more than guiding eyes for the blind. She created the concept of the assistance dog for people with a wide range of disabilities, and she implemented that concept in Canine Companions for Independence. She later founded the Assistance Dog Institute, which became Bergin University for Canine Studies.

  Not long ago she told me: “When I started down this road so many years ago, I would not have believed that one day I might say these dogs can be taught anything.”

  She has taught them to recognize the scent of grapevine-destroying pests so early in the infestation of a vineyard that the enterprise is saved, and only the first couple of infected vines need to be removed; large-scale pesticide spraying is not as necessary as it once was. She has taught them to smell cancer in a patient so early that the usual medical tests cannot yet detect the disease, and experiments in this area are ongoing.

  “But it’s true,” Bonnie emphasized. “With patience and the right techniques, with reward training and respect for them, these dogs can be taught anything. The more they learn, the more they can learn.”

  Because for over twenty years I have seen canine intelligence in action at CCI and elsewhere, I have no patience for movies that sell the dog as a dumb, goofy, blundering agent of chaos. Nearly always, the problem is not the dog but the owners who cannot or do not bother to teach it as they would teach a child. A movie about dumb, goofy, blundering, agent-of-chaos humans and a wise long-suffering dog who loves them in spite of their idiocies is long overdue.

  Dogs know.

  Mike Martin, our friend and general contractor, who said he usually thought of anal glands when he thought of me, died suddenly of a massive heart attack before our new house was finished. He was only fifty-five years old.