Maximum Dog

In the summer of 2016, Myshkin the dachshund departed to gambol in the Elysian Fields. A Canine Kevorkian visited us at home, and Myshkin slipped into eternal slumber on her favorite sofa, while James stroked her head. It had been explained to us that the extra expense of the lethal house call was particularly worthwhile when there were other household pets—in our case, Bear, the scruffily professorial terrier mutt that I’d been miserably responsible for blinding years before in an accident, only months after we’d rescued him from a Georgia kill shelter.

Apparently, logically, animals understand death—dogs sniff dead birds or squirrels, and know full well that they’re no longer living. So if a fellow pet dies in front of them, they’ll understand that it is gone. But if you spirit a dying animal away to the vet for a discreet euthanasia, the creatures left at home are forever baffled: Did Myshkin go away on holiday? Why didn’t I get to go too?

Did Bear, blind and already then well on his way to deaf, understand that Myshkin had died? Honestly, I can’t say. Bear—still with us over four years later, though now deaf as well as blind—is a Canine Koan: Utterly hermetic and largely non-relational, he nonetheless projects absolute wisdom and peace. Maybe that peace comes from understanding that Myshkin—who was simultaneously to him a nasty overbearing mother and a rejecting lover—went calmly and courageously to the great hereafter. Or maybe it comes simply from having forgotten that she ever existed.

After Myshkin died, I got obsessed with Bear’s isolation. I don’t know if it’s right to say he looked up to Myshkin (strictly speaking, he was the taller dog), but he certainly relied on her, until her last phase, to lead him on walks, to encourage him to supper, to decide whether he could curl up beside her or not (usually not). He was happily the beta dog; and a beta needs an alpha.

So, at my urging, Stella came to us in December of the same year. I felt some embarrassment at not having sufficiently mourned Myshkin—irreplaceable, extraordinary Myshkin! But I justified Stella’s prompt arrival as a gift to Bear. Stella—the Vogue model of dogs! She’s a pocket beagle—that’s to say, a beagle, and small. There’s some guff about how the breed dates from Elizabethan times, suggesting that English courtiers went hunting with Stella’s ancestors tucked in their pockets, then plopped them on the ground at the last minute to chase foxes or rabbits. Well, maybe. Though probably not the antecedents with temperaments or physiques like Stella’s.

Beagles are infamously hard to train. They’re pack animals, scent hounds, hunters. They listen more to other dogs than to people, and above all they follow their noses. They’re also famously good-natured and famously noisy. They sing, they howl, they bay, they bark, they converse. The repertoire is impressive: an orchestra in a dog.

Our Stella can sing and howl and bark. But she’s not much of a hunter. She’s delicate and shivery, afraid of her own shadow—a trembler. Sometimes she sits on the sofa with a wide-eyed anxious look, as if awaiting the apocalypse, and simply shivers.

Her good-looks get her noticed. But she’s also a great manipulator, a combination of coy and stealthy. Before Bear retreated entirely into his venerable torpor, she’d try to play with him—initially, when she was a puppy, with some success (though like many an old man, he’d get grumpy with her antics after a while). But even as he retreated, Stella came to mistrust Bear: She doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s blind, but she can tell he’s not quite right.

When it was just the two of them, Bear and Stella, she’d want him to play. More specifically, she was often keen to start a fight, a fight being a kind of play. If she got hold of a toy or a treat, and he was sleeping in his bed under the sideboard, she’d carefully place the treat about six feet away from him, then step back a further six feet, and lie in wait, like a cat awaiting a mouse. Her hope, we realized, was that he’d run for the treat, and she’d leap forward and fight for it too, and they’d have a fun-filled scrum, perhaps with some growling and even a bark or two.

But to her mystification, Bear never stirred from his slumber. He’d remain crescented in his pillowy barque, not so much as opening his one blind eye. She’d wait, and wait, and eventually, would tiptoe forward and delicately take the treat in her mouth and move it, then step back and try again; and wait, and wait, and eventually give in, and carry the treat away.

Her good-looks get her noticed. But she’s also a great manipulator, a combination of coy and stealthy.

Stella, Vogue model of dogs, was from the first adored and made much of. But she also flummoxed us. For example: She’s a little dog, it’s true, and presumably has a little bladder. But none of us has ever seen a dog so flagrantly and imperturbably incontinent. She has simply refused to be properly house-trained. What do I mean? You take her outside, and she’ll do her business. You can take her for a short walk or a long walk, and she’ll always do her business, promptly and efficiently. With a regular dog, you then return home with some relieved sense that you’re in the clear for a while. Maybe, with a little dog like Stella (she only weighs about ten pounds), it’s not a long while—maybe it’s three hours, say. But with Stella, sometimes just ten or fifteen minutes after she comes back inside, she’ll squat down and just pee a little, on a whim it seems.

In the beginning, we weren’t wise to the extent of her pee habit. Because she’d pee in hidden places: behind the sofa; under the piano or the coffee table. So little at a time that it would dry swiftly and invisibly. Until you came to mop the floor and discovered little sticky bits. Once we realized, we tried to predict when and where she’d go, to follow her when she headed into the living room and scoop her up and pop her outside. But she was always wilier than we were. We put up gates, so now she can’t pee in the living room; on the other hand, no humans use the living room anymore either.

But she did—and does—make us laugh! She chases her tail for longer and more impressively than any other dog we’ve ever seen, like a whirling dervish, and she can do this on the narrow sofa at blinding speed without falling onto the floor. When she wants your attention, she’ll come up and bat at you with her dainty paw, like a cat. If you’re not careful and leave a chair pulled out from the kitchen table, she’ll hop up as soon as you leave the room and nibble at your toast and lick your coffee. She’s not always so swift getting down, though, and makes a hilarious guilty face—jowly, hangdog—when you catch her up there. She loves the heat, and sits hunched over the floor’s hot air vents so that her giant ears levitate like Dumbo’s. She perches, still and straight, eyes wide, in odd places—on cushions, on the arms of chairs—as if waiting for Bruce Weber to snap her photo.

Her incontinence—much worse than Myshkin’s or Bear’s ever was—ruined our lives. We’d think we’d beaten the problem of Stella’s hidden pees, congratulate ourselves, and then we’d find another. And some time later another. And then she developed another difficulty, too, upon returning from the cageless kennel, a dog heaven where the animals can come and go as they please, lounging in heaps on sofas, tussling and rolling in the urine-suffused gravel yard, splashing in summertime in the kiddie pools set up for them, or chilling in the AC. They bark with excitement as we approach in the car (except Bear, of course, who keeps his own counsel), and like kids setting off for their favorite summer camp, disappear into the care of their counselors with tails wagging and nary a backward glance.

But after a couple of visits to the cageless kennel, Stella took to weeping upon her return. We thought it was perhaps having to sleep again in a crate, after piling in with other warm furries; but what could we do? We couldn’t set her free, and have her roaming around all night, peeing in secret spots. Small though she is, she deployed her giant beagle voice, and howled through the night.

What dawned upon me as the obvious solution might not perhaps occur to you, dear reader; assuming, that’s to say, you’re wiser than I. You see, we acquired Stella to keep Bear company, but Bear had retreated into his private senescence (his own private Idaho?). And Stella—of a particularly pack-driven breed—was lonely. I was obsessed with her loneliness, troubled by the idea that when she arrived at the cageless kennel it was, to her, a return to the joyous litter of her childhood, a gamboling, fulfilling, unconsidered, Edenic joy. And that when, each time, she had to return to her so-called home, she was beset by despair, by the bleak isolation of a life confined with pointless humans and a blind and deaf grandpa as her bunkmate.

And so the obvious thing—for the pocket beagle is, after all, a beagle—was to take on another dog, a third dog, a heart’s companion for our glum Vogue model. And somehow I persuaded my husband and children to endorse this course of action. And so Oliver came into our lives. Oliver came from the same breeder of pocket beagles as Stella. They’re a small outfit, and so the dogs are surely cousins (as well as siblings, as well as mother and son, as well as lovers, depending on the moment in which you catch them); and we expected, therefore—but why?—that Oliver would be like Stella. We pictured two sphinx-like tiny beauties, shivering on the sofa. We pictured two prime manipulators, stalking at an affectedly insouciant distance around a carefully placed treat, each waiting for the other to be greedy enough to go for it. We pictured an emotionally restrained, fine-boned, and elegant companion for our Stella, a sort of Timothée Chalamet for our Natalie Portman.

And so the obvious thing—for the pocket beagle is, after all, a beagle—was to take on another dog.

And we got Oliver. Where to begin? Oliver is now twice the size of Stella. He’s what they call a lavender beagle, which means he has lovely brown and toffee coloring and pinkish rims around his light-colored eyes. Those eyes are of a searing intensity—what Tony Soprano called “Manson lamps”: the dog looks at you. The dog looks through you. Where Stella is dainty, Oliver is physically brutish—his paws are slab-like and his plush fur is coarse. His loose swagger projects barely-contained strength, and as he struts around like a lion, the thin layer of flesh over his muscles ripples and his coat shimmers. His arrogant tail curls so far up and over that its tip almost brushes his spine. And oh, the intensity of his emotional expression—he makes all the noises Stella does, but exponentially more loudly. He barks and howls and bays. But in addition, he emits an entire range of sounds—shrieks and whistles, whines and mutters—that we’ve never heard come from any other dog. He looks at us, and he talks to us. He’s the most human dog I’ve ever known.

As if a manifestation of his heightened sensitivity—like Dante, and Flaubert, and Dostoevsky—Oliver is epileptic. He had his first seizure when he was just over a year old, while eating—devouring—his supper. His torso grew suddenly rigid and he seemed to be choking; in fact, we thought he was choking and did all the wrong things, like trying to look into his mouth to find the obstruction. But then his legs flailed wildly, he frothed and vomited, and peed a little for good measure, his pupils dilated so widely that his hazel eyes were all black. It was terribly upsetting for him and for us. The next night, remembering, he was afraid of supper; and had to be coaxed back to his food. It was a month before it happened again, again while he was eating. It’s only ever happened while he’s eating. We’ve come to believe it’s his voraciousness, that his overwhelming urgency to get all the kibble inside him in a nanosecond snaps a synapse in his brain, or maybe he does choke and the choking causes the seizure . . . whatever the reason, one of us is now always on feeding duty, and talks to him soothingly while he’s eating, and every few seconds moves the bowl a bit further away from him to slow him down; and knock on wood, it’s worked, and he hasn’t had a seizure in a long time. Such a clever dog.

But too clever, it seems, for us. He should be leading a pack through the woods, chasing foxes, not idling away his days in inner suburbia. He’s vented his impatience by chewing the baseboards, chewing the chair legs, chewing both arms of the sofa and pulling out the stuffing with his teeth, chomping large pieces of a couple of (new) passports, swiped out of the inside pocket of a jacket hung on the back of a dining chair. He’s eaten some irreplaceable art books, uncounted numbers of socks and shoes, many plastic container lids, packets of desiccant gel, even twist-ties. He eviscerates all dog toys within minutes—the fluff floats through our rooms almost constantly—and removes the plastic squeaking heart, and chews up that.

When you take him out for a walk at dawn, he yanks fiercely at the leash, panting like Darth Vader, and shrieks at the squirrels and the birds, awful high-pitched gut-wrenching cries as if he’s been hit by a car, waking the neighborhood. He barks with outrageous force at almost all other dogs we encounter on our walks, even if they’re on the other side of the street. He routinely vomits in the car. As soon as you start the engine, he’ll start to cry, piercingly, tragically, desperately—even if you’re only driving a mile to his favorite dog park, or up the highway to the cageless kennel that he loves as much as everyone else.

Oh, he’s a terrible dog—the destruction, the violence, the noise! He gets so excited to go for walks that he barks, crazily, and races up and down the front hall, as if to say, “Can you believe it? Isn’t this incredible? Isn’t it amazing?” He gets so excited that he sometimes hurls himself at Stella, who flinches and squeaks, or turns around to return to her crate, as if he’s saying, “Hurry up already, you shivery slow-coach! Let’s go, let’s go!”

Oh, he’s a terrible dog—the destruction, the violence, the noise!

He greatly enjoys playing a game with Stella that we call “Lion and Gazelle.” It’s quite straightforward: He’s the lion and she’s the gazelle. They tear around our cluttered downstairs at top speed with many hairpin turns, much growling and darting and leaping, until he, twice her size, catches her and pins her down and gnaws on her hind leg for a while. She lets him, quite cheerfully. There’s another activity, less boisterous, where he sidles up next to her when she’s resting and chews vigorously on her ears, as if they’re beef jerky, slick and leathery; she cheerfully allows that too.

And then eventually they curl up together, half on top of one another, and they sleep. Stella is never bored now. We worry sometimes that she’s like an abused wife; but if he’s not nearby, she seeks him out. He, in his way, adores her, as, in his way, he adores us. He plucks so particularly at our heartstrings, in his goodness and his badness both. A bit like Stella, we’re abused by him, overwhelmed by him, infuriated by him, ultimately charmed by him. And he, he does try to be good; he’s simply overwhelmed by his nature, by our failure properly to train him, by his invigorating and inspiring lust for life.

Even before the pandemic, we’d stopped having people over to the house. Because instead of being a human house with a dog or two in it, it’s become a doghouse that allows a few humans to stay there. You can’t necessarily have a conversation with a guest without the dogs barking excitedly around them, or starting one of their tear-away loop races, or trying to take the guest’s handkerchief out of their pocket if they sit down. So in some ways the pandemic hasn’t changed too much the way we live.

And yet what wonderful Covid companions these dogs have been, each in their way: They’ve never lost their fine morale; never grown weary or despairing; never sulked or taken to their beds (except Bear, of course, whose champion sleeping, we believe, is of an existentially awesome rather than depressingly depressive sort). They greet each day with abundant enthusiasm, and each meal—despite the repetitiveness of the endless kibble—with overwhelming pleasure and gratitude. Bear bears his age and limitations with wisdom and aplomb; Stella treats Oliver with indulgent resignation; and Oliver, well, Oliver lives, just as fully and intensely as he possibly can.

We’re sadly imperfect caretakers for our amazing animals. As King Lear observed, “A dog’s obeyed in office”, and our dogs are cleverer than many a politician. We may appear neither civilized nor socially presentable, our lives may look to the world small and uninteresting, but that’s just a sad human illusion. As any clever dog could tell you, there’s never a dull moment in the doghouse.

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