by Tod Davies.
Gray died the day before Alex was booked to fly to England for my mother in law’s 100th birthday. I hadn’t planned to join Alex—couldn’t leave a blind, old dog with anyone else, but especially I couldn’t leave Gray. Then we woke up the day before, thinking he must have eaten something bad. He wouldn’t even look at his breakfast. I took him to the vet right away, and she said it was a form of cancer that, once it showed, progressed rapidly. She said I could take him to emergency to relieve some of his pain. I asked if that meant they could give him any more time, but she just shook her head. So I asked for him to have a big dose of morphine, and took him home to lie on the deck, with us all there.
He died an hour or two after I brought him home. And we buried him in a hailstorm. I’d taken his collar off, but then, remembering how much he had loved it, and how anxious he had always been whenever it was removed for any reason, I put it back on his body and buried it with him.
So I joined Alex on the trip. Lucky. We had friends who could take Pearl in on short notice, the friend he was to stay with in England welcomed me as well, and I had enough miles accumulated to get a fast airplane ticket.
I had hated the idea of missing Moyna’s birthday. I knew, though, if there was anyone who would understand it was her. She loved hearing about the dogs. She never forgot their names, even on her bad days where her short term memory left her, and she forgot so much else.
In fact, a brief anecdote to illustrate fits in here. On one of our trips to see her, as we sat with her in her room, her son-in-law’s mother came to visit, bringing chocolate and a card. After the guest left, Moyna stared at the chocolate, confused.
“Who brought that here?” she said.
“Gil did,” I said.
“Who is Gil?”
“Gil is Tim’s mother.”
“Who is Tim?”
“Tim is Felicity’s husband.”
“Who is Felicity?”
“Felicity is your daughter.” Then I thought it best to just show her the card. Gil had signed it for herself, her husband, and their two dogs.
Moyna looked at the card for a moment, brow furrowed. Then she put it down, shook her head, and said, “I know who Roxy and Sasha are, but who are Gil and John?”
Alex shouted with laughter. “What are our dogs named, Mother?” he said. The answer was immediate. “Gray and Pearl, of course.”
I know that I’ll be the same when I am old. I knew when I told her, the week of her 100th birthday, that she wouldn’t forget I had told her that Gray was dead.
And indeed, for the two years she lived after that birthday, she always remembered to ask after Strider.
* * * *
The first sight I had of Strider was in the middle of the night on my cellphone, turned sideways so the light wouldn’t wake Alex, in the guest bed of my friend’s house in London. I was searching all the databases for sign of a heeler dog to adopt. This is characteristic of me, to try to hurry over pain and pretend it’s over, on to the next thing. It was too soon after Gray’s death to think about getting another dog, but thinking about getting another dog was all I could think about.
Things had changed since I had walked into the local shelter at home and thought Gray was some kind of mutt. Heelers had gotten popular, and there was not a single one for adoption in any shelter within 300 miles of our home. Not that night, anyway. There I was, lying on my side in Margaret’s guest bed, scrolling website after website. I could find plenty of puppies for sale from breeders. But I was set on adoption.
I wanted a heeler. But I didn’t want one that looked like Gray. I wanted a dog I could love for itself, not because it reminded me of the best dog I had ever known. That just seemed fair.
But there was no dog like that anywhere for adoption in Oregon. I could have waited. We were still in England, after all. But there it was, the middle of the night. I missed my dog. I was desperate.
I started looking in Nevada. In Washington state. In Utah. In Colorado.
Then I found a website for Fedwell Farms, a herding dog sanctuary in the desert of southern Arizona, close to the border of Mexico. It was, and is, run by a miraculous woman named Carrie Wright, who takes in herding dogs that wash out of the local shelters. Fedwell Farms is their last chance.
She puts pictures of all her dogs up on the site, with perky little descriptions meant to catch someone’s eye. It wasn’t the description that stopped me when I scrolled through and got to a red heeler with a crushed left ear.
It was his expression. His expression was the same as Gray’s had been, that first day I had seen him in the shelter. It was intelligent and sad. But this dog’s expression said a little bit more. It said he was just about resigned to never finding a person just for him.
His name was ‘Trykker’ the description said. Stupid name, I thought. Sounds like he’s been living in a mobile home doubling as a meth lab. I later discovered that I probably hadn’t been far off. “This dog is FUN,” Carrie wrote. What she meant, I found later, was that he hated to be left alone. Even though she had fifty dogs who lived outside up for adoption, and six dogs of her own in the house, Trykker insisted on sleeping with her and the other six. And he was stubborn. He had figured out how to get his way.
There must have been something of that in his picture. Because I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I called her from San Francisco airport, while we waited for our connection back home. She called me right back. “I do need to tell you,” she said in a worried but cheerful voice. “He is a bit of a character.”
Which means?
“Well, he’s an escape artist, for one thing. That’s how he ended up with me. He’s already run away from three different homes and been brought back to the shelter, where they finally gave up. I said I only have a fence that’s about two foot tall, but they said I was his last chance.”
I told her I didn’t have a fence at all, and I live in the country. Maybe he was the wrong dog for me.
“No, wait,” she said, and I strained to hear over the airport announcements and the chatter in the bar where we’d settled to wait for our plane. “The first day he was here, he jumped over the fence. Two hours later he jumped back, and he hasn’t tried to leave ever again. So I have this feeling he’d be all right with you.”
I laughed and said, well, I’d call her again from home when we got there and were settled and could think about making a long trip from Oregon to Arizona. “And don’t worry if he gets adopted before I get to you,” I said.
“He’s been here six months, and no one’s called for him yet,” she said sadly. And we heard our plane being called, so I had to go.
I couldn’t get him out of my mind, though. “We could call him Strider,” I said to Alex. “It’s close to Trykker. Stupid name. ‘Strider’ has two good strong consonant sounds. Dogs love that. Also,” I said, thinking it over, “it’s pretty appropriate.”
“Why?” he said absently. I don’t think we either of us were serious about driving to Arizona to get a dog. Not just yet.
“You know,” I said, though I knew he didn’t, since he didn’t warm to Tolkien, and hadn’t gotten past a few chapters of The Hobbit. “Not all who wander are lost.”
Alex looked at me blankly.
“Aragorn,” I said. “When he’s a ranger, before we know he’s the king. When his name is Strider. His motto: ‘Not all who wander are lost.'”
“Oh,” Alex said, and went back to his beer and his book.
But I kept thinking about Trykker. And I kept looking for heelers up for adoption closer to home. There weren’t any. But there was a huge wildfire that sprang up all around our little valley. I evacuated with Pearl to a nearby motel while Alex went off to fight the fire. They stopped it right before it headed up our road, and turned it off to the east of us, where it burned through thousands of acres and kept going for days. I came home. We all waited to see which way the wind would blow. When it was plain it would blow in every direction but ours, and that the humans were on the way to winning against the fire, both of us needed a break from the smoke and the worry.
I called our fire chief. “Do you need us?” No, he said. He was pretty sure the danger for our valley was over. I called Carrie. No, she said, still no interest from anyone else in Trykker. So we packed up the car, lifted Pearl into the back seat, and headed down to Arizona to bring Strider, and Shadow, home.
When we got there, Carrie told me that she’d had three different calls from three different people, looking to adopt Trykker, just as we were driving. “Never seen that happen before,” she said. “He must be meant for you.”
I wasn’t sure, though. Carrie had given him a bath and a new blue mesh collar that showed well against his strawberry and white fur, but he barked like a mad thing when we met, snarling and leaping against the leash.
She saw my expression. “You don’t have to take him,” she said. “You can decide overnight, and if you don’t want him, no hard feelings.”
He barked and barked as we left. “Go away! Go away!” we thought he was saying. But what he was really saying was, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I can’t bear it if I’m left again.”
I cried in bed that night. “What if we adopt him, and he doesn’t love me?” I said. It was too soon after Gray’s death, really. I was still mourning Gray. I wasn’t awake enough to understand what Strider was trying to say. I thought maybe I should wait.
But if I had waited, I wouldn’t have Strider. And somehow that feeling got through to me.
So we packed him and Shadow into the car with Pearl the next day and drove north. He was like a mad thing when anyone else approached, growling and snarling and barking. We had to do some footwork when we ordered dinner to be delivered to the hotel room, so that he wouldn’t get out and savage the poor delivery boy. But when I took him for his first walk behind the hotel in the woods, just the two of us, I felt his rush of incredulity and amazement. It was like he couldn’t believe it. I was walking him. He was being walked. He was being walked by a person. He had a person.
That night, he slept by me on the floor next to my side of the bed. I heard him get up in the middle of the night, disappearing around the corner of what was a really large room. “Strider?” I said softly. No answer. I got up and turned the corner. He was standing there, bewildered. “What am I doing here?” his expression said. “Come back to bed,” I said, and he followed obediently, and slept the rest of the night through.
“By the time you get him home,” Carrie had said, “he will be your dog.” That turned out to be true. In the next town, when I told him to sit and he did, I praised him. His delight was extreme, and he got up and insisted on me telling him to sit again, and again, just so he could hear from me what a good dog I thought he was.
But when she said he would be my dog, she wasn’t kidding. He growled every time Alex came near me at bedtime, or in the morning with my tea. He went crazy ‘protecting’ my car when I left him alone in it to go to the market. The claw marks were all over the upholstery. He had never been in a state where someone else pumped your gas, and when I pulled into a station, he saw his mission as making sure no one came near my car, or me, who he was sworn to protect.
His bark was piercing, inexorable, and decibel heavy. He was like a serial killer those first few months, whenever anyone approached me.
He bit my friend Cindy when I left him alone with her on the deck. I’d only been gone a moment to get her a glass of wine. She didn’t tell me about it for months after.
I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. We had only ever adopted dogs from shelters that vetted them before sending them out for adoption. We didn’t understand what it meant to adopt a dog who had washed out of shelters.
I didn’t understand what it meant to adopt a dog who had been a street dog. A reservation dog, our vet theorized. The crushed ear from an untreated ear infection when he was a pup.
He was the most hysterical dog we had ever had. He continued to bark and growl at Alex, who was beginning to dislike him. He couldn’t be left alone in my car, the destruction was beginning to be too much. Left with my friends when I had to go away for work, he let himself into their house when everyone else was outside in the garden, and stole the two steaks defrosting in the kitchen for their dinner.
“He’s a street dog!” one of them exclaimed. Fortunately, it was meant as a compliment. My friend liked street dogs. I was embarrassed, though secretly impressed that my new dog knew how to open doors.
Slowly we began to understand that he had been praised for acting like a mad thing when anyone approached the house. We were afraid he would break our windows, such was the energy with which he threw himself at them when the UPS driver, or even a visiting neighbor, appeared on the deck outside. I began to understand that my joke about his having been a guard dog for a meth lab was probably not very far off.
Still it continued to be a problem. Alex went off to work with Shadow in Arizona, leaving me with Strider and Pearl. Then the wildfires started up again around us. The smoke was almost unendurable. My neighbors got air conditioning for the first time in thirty years. We all wore particulate masks. Everyone who could get out of the area was encouraged to do so.
It was summer, of course, not my choice to go to the beach, but that was my best option. I made a few reservations where motels had room and set off. My first destination was the same room, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, that had been my favorite room when I was there alone with Gray.
That was my first mistake. The moment I got to that beachtown, my heart began to ache. It didn’t help that when I checked in, Strider threw himself at the car window and terrified another guest who just happened to be passing by. And then, any noise outside the room’s door would set him off again.
I began to wonder if I had chosen wisely. Had I chosen the wrong dog, simply in desperation at my grief?
The next morning, Pearl insisted on staying in the car rather than walking her arthritic bones down the long steps to the beach. Strider and I headed out alone.
The sand stretched out, empty. The wind blew hard. I let Strider off his leash. And then a woman suddenly appeared from behind a rock.
Strider leapt into action, jumping up around her, snarling and barking like a mad thing, baring his teeth. I shouted against the wind and ran, yelling at him to stop. Once I got close enough, I was sputtering apologies, and the woman was shouting for me to get him on the leash. I grabbed him, leashed him, and then, to both of our amazement, he sat wagging his tail, a sorrowful look on his face.
He reached out and licked the woman’s hand.
“He’s apologizing,” she said in a tone of wonder. And it was obvious that he was.
I apologized too, and explained his history and that I had not seen her on the beach. As I did, the three of us turned and walked together.
“I know,” she said, nodding. “I’ve had rescues like that.”
I told her I was worried he wasn’t meant to be my dog.
Then she surprised me.
“Do you want me to ask him?” she said. I was rather startled, so she explained that she was something of a dog psychic, and usually could get in conversation with whatever dog she met.
Stunned, I nodded.
She bent down, and Strider sat, looking up at her. She nodded. He had an earnest expression on his face.
“No,” she said. “He’s definitely your dog. He says he’s been looking for you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And he says could you keep him on a leash for awhile. He’s very anxious when you let him off the leash.”
“Oh,” I said again.
We stood there for a few moments, and she told me another story about a dog she had rescued long ago who always barked at women our age. She never found out why. I said I was worried Strider would be the same. She said she didn’t think that was going to happen, and we exchanged a hug, and went our separate ways.
After we got home from the beach, Strider tore himself on a jagged branch. He wouldn’t let me even look at it, so it was off to the vet, where they had to put him under to stitch him up. While he was asleep, the vet discovered he’d had an exposed nerve in his mouth for some time. She fixed it. When he woke up, I was there. He felt around in his mouth, looked at me, astonished, as if to say, “Did you do this?” For weeks later, every morning when he woke up, he would do the same.
Then one day I left him in the car while I went shopping. I told him before I left that if he was good and didn’t act like a serial killer toward anyone who walked by, he could have a treat.
When I got back, there was a woman my age standing there laughing at him. He sat looking at her shamefacedly on the other side of my car’s window.
“Oh dear,” I said. “Was he a bad dog?”
“Well,” she said. “He started barking at me, and I shook my finger at him and told him to be a good dog, so he sat down and wagged his tail.” She said he deserved a treat.
As time went on, and Strider and I came to understand each other, I slowly understood all that he was trying to tell me about his former life. Slowly, he began to understand that his new life meant strangers were friends, not monsters he needed to guard me from. And slowly I began to understand that his frightening and frantic barking didn’t just come from fear, but from his desperation to prove to me that he was my dog, that he would guard me to the best of his ability, since that mindless guarding was all he had been valued for before.
Slowly he began to understand his value. He slept under my hand every night. We went for two walks a day, and I was sure he knew that it was me who made his food. And when I bought him a leather collar, he pranced. He knew then he was my dog forever.
He was still hard for strangers to handle, though. He seemed to think that anyone not me or Alex was threatening to take him away from me. A new vet handled him gently, but still had to tranquilize him for treatment, and when she handed his leash back to me, warned me that he would need to be kept warm that night.
“He sleeps with me,” I said.
“You know,” she said, looking at Strider who looked at me with an expression of heartfelt relief that I had come back for him. “I kind of guessed that.”