Living in Dog Years (Cont.)

Outside Magazine June 2002

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	Radish at 3 months old (James Minchin)

WHEN RADISH WAS CLEAN he rolled in the grass, then began barking furiously at a pair of red-tailed hawks, which looked down from their gyres to see whether this nuisance might be something good to eat. His love-hate relationship with birds sprang from the dressing-down I gave him after he tried to eat a neighbor's chicken the day we moved from the city to the country. "Yer dawg done bit off Gary's butt hole," Gary's owner observed, cradling his damaged rooster, which would soon recover.

Maybe this kind of projectile barking was compensation for his ebbing powers—his hindquarters, for example, had begun showing the emaciation that strikes the males of all mammals, plus he'd developed a heart murmur. Or maybe it was just a new tactic he was employing in his ceaseless harvest of the world. But friends, this dog could bark! When it happened unexpectedly indoors your stunned eardrums cringed from the force of it. In the autumn Radish sat under our Goodland apple tree and barked heavenward until fatigued, nerve-rattled fruit just gave up and dropped from the branch.

When you make any effort to live the way a dog lives, especially a dog who dances with complete abandon from one impulse to another, the past evaporates and the future becomes nothing more than the next good thing.

He went back to the slough for a beverage and then grazed on the tender tops of the broad grass that carpets the banks between the cattails. After joining Clara and Mister Rogers for a chase game in the backyard, he went to a special spot under a mountain laurel in our walled garden for a nap. An hour later, with temperatures pushing 90, he padded into my office and ordered me to take him swimming in the river.

The instant I grabbed an inner tube from the elm where they're stored, the dogs bolted down the path to the river. Clara flung herself from the bank with Radish close behind, and they began paddling furiously for the opposite shore. Although the channel here is only a hundred yards wide, the current swept us downstream twice that distance before we could beach ourselves on Radish Island. The dogs shook themselves and raced down the gravel to a sandy lagoon on the tip of the island where a languid whirlpool keeps the sticks I throw in play.

Although he was bred to work cattle, Radish had never been fully trained to do anything. He came and went as he pleased, slept on the furniture, drank from the toilets, climbed on the tables to look for butter, and yapped like a hyena when I licked my plate, because that also came under the heading of what he did for a living. Some people were horrified that I was raising a hippie, but I admired the liberties he took. They were the canine equivalents of what I would do if I had more courage—the complete 365-day year I would devote to nothing except learning Welsh, building a still, making preparations to have a taxidermist freeze-dry my carcass on Getaway Day, and riding my horse from Caracas to Buenos Aires.

Uneducated as he was, however, Radish had always been a quick study. He immediately learned how to heel, how to use his dog door, and how to cajole what he wanted from horses without getting kicked. Because a parcel-delivery driver gave him a biscuit ten years ago, he began leaping into all delivery vans the moment they pulled up to the house and would lope down the lane to the neighbor's if a van stopped there instead of here. Since they knew that he would not exit their vehicles until he got a treat, the FedEx and UPS and Airborne Express drivers all began carrying biscuits when they came this way.

His vocabulary included 23 words. When you told him to fetch the ball, he would not fetch a stick. When you told him to get the box, he would savagely tear apart any of the cardboard boxes I threw in the yard. When you ordered him to get the Mousy he brought forth a pink rubber toy he'd owned for three years, gnawing it only hard enough to make it squeak. And when you yelled Mouse! he knew that what you meant was not his mouse, but mice at large. He killed scores of these vermin in the house and in the feed shed by quickly crushing their heads, but ate only one of them—the first one he killed, which made him nauseous.

While we strolled through the river grass to the head of the island after our swim, Radish disappeared, as he often did on these day trips, and didn't join us until Kitty and I were reading in bed late that night. He jumped up between us, forcing Clara to make room, and was asleep before I could say hello. I smelled his coat and rubbed it, trying to figure out where he'd been. Here was the faint astringency of the feral mint that grows in a briar patch not even the horses can penetrate. From his belly I plucked off beggar's-lice that told me he'd visited a thicket where he'd once dined on the remains of a fool's hen that a fox had killed. And here on his hock was a dusting of wood ash that had clung there when he'd walked through a fire ring where we'd gathered around a Christmas bonfire.

But it wasn't till he farted with a burlesque blat that I knew he'd been on the trail of something dead to eat. Whatever it was—beaver, duck, muskrat?—the reek of its by-product was sweet and putrid and combustible. Kitty turned away with a groan and shut off her lamp. The first time he farted loud enough for anyone to hear, Radish yelped and ran out the door. The next time it happened he turned and barked at his butt. And then he went through a period when these emissions woke him from his dreams with a start. But the last couple years he'd grown indifferent to even the most outrageous fart, like the one that just escaped. I considered turning him from the family bed. But before I could summon the energy I fell asleep.

The slapping of the dog door woke me up at 2 a.m. Kitty and Clara were sound asleep. I threw on some clothes and went out into the antiseptic light of a full moon. I heard the rattle of Radish's tags as he trotted off, and decided to follow. Instead of heading back into the jungle, he went to the river and dove in. Out on Radish Island, he trotted to a path through the willows that ring the shores and hide from view the sandy plain within. He stopped to dig. When I appeared before him, dripping, he looked up without surprise. Then he extracted the deer femur he'd buried. Compared to his usual fare, this tidbit wasn't much to write home about. But what did I know? I sat down in the sand as he gnawed and chewed. For the first time in months I had spent most of an entire day in a state of serenity. When you make any effort to live the way a dog lives, especially a dog who dances with complete abandon from one impulse to another, the past evaporates and the future becomes nothing more than the next good thing. I must have been whispering, because Radish, bathed in moonlight and the sultry air, cocked his ear to listen. And then he winked.

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