A Dog Called Perth Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  A Dog Called Perth

  “Perth is simple, funny, and touching.… James Herriot’s early books come to mind.”

  — New York Times Book Review

  “A Dog Called Perth is not just another story of a dog, but rather that of a family.… Entertaining and touching.”

  — The Regal Beagle

  “An adventure story, a love story and a touching tribute to a dog that changed a family’s life forever… Sure to delight anyone who has ever loved a dog, beagle or otherwise.”

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “For one more doggone good book, check out A Dog Called Perth. Peter Martin’s recounting of the 21 years his family spent with this amazing dog would make a wonderful family read-aloud.”

  — Connecticut Parent

  “Martin is more eloquent than most [dog] owners [and his] biting prose enlivens the bio of Perth the beagle.”

  — USA Today

  “Martin is a graceful writer, painting detailed pictures with only a handful of words, and we sink into the book the way we sink into a comfy chair.”

  — Booklist

  “A loving tribute to an extraordinary dog.”

  — Kirkus

  “Animal lovers will really enjoy this book!”

  — Daily Star

  “You’ll be caught up in the love story.… Perth may bring tears to a soft-hearted reader’s eyes.

  — Publishers Weekly

  To my parents

  who gave Perth early pointers

  Kay and Otto

  who brought her back

  and Barbara Stapeley

  who saved her

  To plains with well-breath’d beagles we repair,

  And trace the mazes of the circling hare.

  —Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest”

  Also by Peter Martin

  Pursuing Innocent Pleasures:

  The Gardening World of Alexander Pope

  British and American Gardens in the

  Eighteenth Century (editor)

  The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia:

  From Jamestown to Jefferson

  Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar:

  A Literary Biography

  A Life of James Boswell

  Copyright © 2001, 2014 by Peter Martin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Orion Media, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-879-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  1

  WHEN ONE CLEAR AND GOLDEN September morning in 1965 we guided our beige Volkswagen bug through the gorgeous countryside of upstate New York to a local kennel to purchase our beagle, we had no way of imagining what was to come. We expected the average expenses and inconveniences but never dreamed of the profound and lasting effects our new companion would have on our lives. With our beagle, my wife Cindy and I would come to endure far greater trials, anxieties, and suffering than most dogs ever inflict on their families. Much of it was our own doing, but this dog would never be a mere pet. She would be more like a force, a way of life, a way of looking at things, a friend, an inspiration, an adventure. She brought us the most intense pleasure, along with the most intense agony.

  We were in our mid-twenties, just married. We did not yet want to have children, just a dog. It was a good time for us to buy one. I was in the final year of my Ph.D. in English literature, spending my days at home writing my dissertation while Cindy trudged off every day to teach in the local elementary school. Writing is a lonely activity, so I thought I would be happy to have a dog’s companionship during the day. We lived in a perfect place for a dog, a pretty apartment that had been made out of the loft of a large, wood-framed garage poised picturesquely on the banks of Cazenovia lake, just a mile outside of Cazenovia village, a nineteenth-century Scottish settlement nestled in the soft hills. There were woods and fields everywhere, a lake to swim and canoe in, and an infinitude of rabbits to chase. A dog’s paradise.

  We wanted a beagle for practical reasons. Beagles are intelligent, spunky, middle-sized with short hair that does not shed over the furniture and carpets, and specifically a member of the hound family that would be a compromise between a lap-oriented dachshund or spaniel and a shuffling, salivating basset hound. A kennel in the woods over in a village by Green Lakes State Park had two or three litters of beagles for sale. We sped over there.

  This kennel had a good reputation for breeding beagles, which were especially popular in that northern territory for hunting and tracking. It did not take us long to get there from our lakeside haven. As we walked up to the wire fence that caged fifteen or so purebred beagle puppies, about half of them began to bark and howl frantically at us, which beagles do very convincingly. The others were tired and uninterested, passive, their eyes too glazed over with boredom to rouse themselves. As we thrived on peace and quiet, the noisy ones were not for us. But since we also had a taste for adventure, neither would the dull ones do.

  “There’s no way we’re going to choose one of those sluggards,” I said. “We’ve got to have an energetic dog.”

  “Yes, but not too energetic.”

  In the next instant we caught the eye of a puppy who perked up her ears and quietly fixed us in a comprehending gaze. Cindy nudged me. “Look at that beautiful black one with a brown head, over there on the grass, looking at us. I wish she would come closer.”

  The puppy kept looking at us intensely, not yet stirring. I was taken with her beauty, especially the softly rounded brownness of her head and her perfectly white chest and paws. Suddenly, as if sensing in us some sort of kinship, she bounded up and streaked straight toward us through the riot of confusion the other puppies were making. With her paws up on the fence directly in front of us, she looked at us desperately and pleadingly. We touched her head and paws through the fence and knew instantly.

  “This is the one, without doubt,” I whispered urgently. “She wants us, the others don’t.”

  “And we want her! Let’s take her home. Look at her eyes.”

  Fifty dollars and ten minutes later her papers were handed over and Cindy had her in her arms, where now she was quiet and contented.

  “Oh, one thing before you go,” the burly man who ran the kennel said as we were walking out the door. “You’d better let me tattoo her ear with your initials. Lots of thefts of dogs in these parts, especially of beagles. Mad scientists like to do vicious experiments on them. They won’t touch a dog with a tattoo, though.”

  “Will it hurt her?”

  “Not a bit.” With that, he slipped my initials, PEM, into his tattooing pliers, delicately placed the puppy’s floppy left ear into them, and squeezed. The letters appeared in purple, like veins, inside the ear and out of sight. No sound from the puppy. It took only seconds but years later those would become am
ong the most important seconds in our lives.

  There were problems straightaway. Our little friend got sick in the car on the way home and chewed up a section of the carpet in the apartment on the first night. But what kept us up most of the night was deciding what to call her.

  Her name had to be romantic and imaginative, not trite, commonplace, or the kind of cute and humdrum name that generally makes you feel as if you are breathing stale air in a stuffy room, or the overly clever, affected choice like “Mozart,” or “Himalaya,” or “Shakespeare.” Also it had to suggest her energy and beauty. And she certainly was beautiful. Slightly smaller and less chunky than the British hunting variety, she was an American “blanket” beagle, so called because of her solid black back. As the black spread down over her shoulders and haunches, it turned to a golden brown that two-thirds down her legs became the purest white. Her chest was of the same soft white, her short hair combing itself naturally and delicately in various directions, joining in several places like the crest of a breaking ocean wave. It was a pleasure to trace her hair with a finger. Her tail was also black, but tipped off with white at the end. Her silky brown ears, which hung gracefully down to her shoulders as they do incomparably on beagles, framed a smooth, soft brown head except for a thin white line along the middle of the crown and a delicate line of black around her eyes that really did seem as if someone had applied eyeliner to them.

  As Sir Toby Belch said of his beloved Maria in Shake-speare’s Twelfth Night, this little puppy was “a beagle, true-bred.” And I hoped that she would have many of Maria’s qualities—mischievousness, imagination, humor, energy and a refusal to suffer fools gladly. Only time would tell, but the signs were good.

  “Although that head is unmistakably feminine, I don’t think we should give her a feminine name,” Cindy said at about three in the morning, sipping her tea with the three-month-old puppy stretched out on her lap.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I replied, becoming poetic. “It would be too narrow for her. She needs to travel this earth with a larger identity. She needs a name that doesn’t tie her down to her sex, a distinctive name.”

  Then a name suddenly popped into my mind. “Perth! We’ll call her Perth, after Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Fair Maid of Perth.” We were just back from an entire summer in Scotland, our minds brimming with its romantic landscape’s magic of hills, mountains, lochs, mountain breezes and wild echoes. We had also visited the lovely town of Perth in the Lowlands, on the Great North Road between Edinburgh and Inverness, near the mouth of Scotland’s longest river, the Tay. Mild and civilized in its outlook, it has been called the most congenial place to live in Britain. In Scotland, in fact, we found much of the spirit of romance and adventure with which we hoped to keynote our marriage.

  My father always thought the name was absurd. How can you call after her with a name like that, he would ask. It does not exactly trip off the tongue. But with her name, Perth received our dream of the future. We fell asleep, with her perfectly at peace somewhere between us on the bed.

  In the morning we threw on our bathing suits and walked down the twisting, wooded path to the magical lake. There Perth gave us her first surprise. It was a warm late September Saturday, the water was crystal clear and still warm, the hills circling the lake were bathed in morning sunshine, and the trees were showing early signs of autumnal color. Perth stood with us on the water’s edge, sniffing the air, eyes wide open, all her senses alive to the sensations of her new life. Her little body was sharply de fined in the bright air, her head moving briskly this way and that as she caught a succession of delicious scents.

  “Let’s promise never to live in any place where we have to tie her up,” I said, my eyes fixed on her. “She’ll always be free to run, and beagles will run. I’ve heard that when they begin to chase rabbits and other game they can run up to four hundred miles in a weekend. They don’t look especially powerful, but their muscles are supple and conceal great strength. Not to mention their lung power. Apparently they never wear out. Which poet was it who wrote of setting out with ‘well-breath’d beagles’ to ‘trace the mazes of the circling hare’?”

  This theme of freedom was important in our lives. Even before Cindy and I married we knew the kind of life we did not want to live together. Neither of us wanted office jobs. Nor would money be an overriding factor in any decisions we made. As long as we had enough to be comfortable, we preferred a lifestyle that would give us time and space. Would it not be a life misspent to slog it out mechanically and repetitiously, day after day, year after year, in confined spaces pursuing the illusory, conventional pleasures of monetary success? Money can buy lots of things, but could it produce time, the time to go places, see things? If we had lots of money, we could buy lots of fine furniture, but the problem with even the most splendid sofa is that it is not very mobile. To enjoy it you rather have to stay at home. What could be worse than feeling trapped by material possessions? How sterile an existence that would be.

  Call such attitudes the idealism of youth, perhaps, but we were highly ambitious—for time, adventure, freedom, and variety. We also told ourselves that if we ever had children, we would try to impart such values to them, too. But now in Cazenovia we had Perth, not children.

  “It would be criminal ever to tie her up,” Cindy said, gazing fondly at Perth’s brisk, keen movements. “We chose her because she chose us. Do you think she wanted us because we didn’t look like the sort of people who would ever tie her up?”

  “Could be. It’s good to think so. Imagine her as inheriting the earth, as the Bible says, or at least the natural world. Isn’t that the kind of dog we want? One who will be as free as we want to be? How can a dog inherit the earth if she is tied up all the time?”

  “Many people will feel it’s irresponsible of us never to tie her up, you know,” Cindy replied. “Why shouldn’t we have to keep her on a leash most of the time, they might wonder, if they have to? They’ll think we should play by the rules. Also, they’ll think we don’t care about her safety, that she’ll get run over or lost.”

  “Something about Perth tells me that if we ever take to tying her up, shutting her up in a room, or restricting her in any way, we’ll be in for a lot of trouble. Anyway, I don’t think we’d be placing her in any danger if we leave her free.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you train a dog for the life you intend it to have, just like a child, it will be equipped to deal with that sort of life. I don’t think that a dog on a leash thinks for itself as much as one on its own. It’s like closing up a part of its mind. By running free Perth will be more alert, more in tune with her instincts. She’ll be wary of strangers who might want to harm her and be capable of navigating for herself. She is less likely to get lost or run over.”

  “I hope so,” Cindy said wistfully.

  “And she’ll also be lovable. We won’t pull her toward us; she’ll come to us when she wants to. We won’t suffocate her with love.”

  “It’ll be hugely more fun having a free and adventurous dog, that’s for certain.”

  “She’ll be the way we want ourselves to be.”

  “Well, while she’s discovering her brave new world,” Cindy shouted, “let’s go for a swim. There won’t be too many more warm days like this.”

  “Better yet, let’s take the canoe out and swim in the middle of the lake.”

  We often did this. It gave us a fine view of the shoreline and the air was even fresher out there. Perth had gone off into the woods, sniffing among the previous autumn’s leaves, and without any fuss we let her get on with whatever she was doing while we paddled off across the early-morning, glittering water, our paddles dipping softly in and out of the water with a rhythmical quietness in tune with the peacefulness of the scene. The lake was six miles long but only one mile wide, and we made for about halfway across. There were no other sounds except the songs of birds.

  “I wish we never had to move and could stay here for-ever,” Cindy whis
pered after a few minutes, clouded for a moment by the sudden thought that by next summer I would have finished my dissertation and would need to find a university teaching job somewhere far away from this lakeside paradise among the tinted hills.

  “We’re about halfway out now,” I piped up. I tucked the paddles into the canoe and gazed back at the shore. “No sign of Perth; maybe she’s down some rabbit hole by now.” I had to squint because of the sun’s brilliance, reflected on the water in a riot of dancing bright lights.

  “You go first,” I said. Cindy eased her smooth, suntanned body into the cooling water. I followed. We swam around the boat, dived under it, floated lazily on our backs. After half an hour I was climbing back into the boat when I heard slurping and breathing behind me. I looked back and there was Perth.

  “I don’t believe it,” I shouted. Cindy, who was by then dozing in the canoe, sprang up and almost managed to tip it over.

  “What’s the matter?” she shouted.

  “Incredible. We’re not alone. What an animal! It’s Perth, she swam all the way out here. How wonderful!”

  Cindy reached down and took hold of her firmly under her front legs, lifting her into the canoe. Perth shook herself, barked at me as I held on to the side of the canoe, and then walked smartly to the bow where she took up a position on the front seat looking out across the lake. No fuss from her, no puppyish whimpering and endless tailwagging. It was as if she had asserted herself as a member of a new triumvirate. I climbed back into the canoe and with her still at the prow we paddled slowly back to shore. “I didn’t think a little dog like this could swim so far,” was all Cindy permitted herself to say. I just paddled, staring at the back of Perth’s brown head, held high.

  The next few days were spent getting to know each other and walking through the woods and meadows along the lake—which Perth relished with a frantic energy. She tracked scents everywhere, yapping delightedly in the distance, out of sight. But she always knew exactly where we were. She did not act like a slight puppy who had passed from womb to cage and only the day before been released into a new existence.