A Dog Called Perth Read online

  Except, that is, when she played with the dog next door, a huge Saint Bernard named Frederick.

  Frederick was everything Perth was not: big, slow, pre-dictable, generally slobbery, and with vast amounts of hair. He was also immensely affectionate. They met often. You could always tell when they had been together because Perth would arrive home with her head saturated from Frederick’s saliva. Frederick looked like he could have swallowed Perth in one gulp, but the most dangerous he ever got was to open his jaws wide and close them playfully on her head. As they rolled on the ground, his saliva poured onto her like a warm waterfall. He could do this without any of his teeth leaving the slightest mark on her. She took her revenge by moving off thirty feet or so and then running headlong at him, crashing into his furry side or chest, bouncing off and then repeating the assault. Frederick scarcely felt it and merely salivated more. They were exquisitely fond of each other, but Frederick, with his massive body, could be no part of Perth’s life of quickness and exploration. He could only guess at it. He was always tied up. They could never roam together in this dogs’ paradise. He only slobbered a little more than usual when he saw Perth.

  During the autumn months, to relieve my long days at home alone, I began to teach Perth an assortment of clever tricks, which she learned with ease.

  “Are you spending your time teaching her silly nonsense?” Cindy asked one day when she got home from teaching. She had just seen Perth stand on her hind legs with a slice of sausage on her nose for five seconds without eating it. “I’m spending my days teaching children how to read and you’re training her to be a circus performer!”

  “Ah, yes, but unlike many of your pupils, Perth is an in-credibly keen learner. There’s so much intelligence in her that I feel I’ve got to tap.”

  “How about tapping some of your own pent-up intelligence instead, and getting on with your writing? If you don’t finish your thesis by August, you’ll miss out on that university job you’ve been offered. Then we’ll be poor and have to sell Perth.”

  As she said this, Perth, who was growing impatient with this conversation, tried a few of her tricks to get attention. She performed three consecutive roll-overs, a sit-up, a stand-up, and a lie-down in quick succession.

  “Look at that.” I beamed.

  “She looks programmed to me. Why did she do all those tricks at once?”

  “For emphasis, mostly, as well as because she’s hungry and wants another piece of sausage. If one trick doesn’t get her what she wants, she tends to try a whole bunch at once.”

  “How many tricks have you taught her?”

  “Eighteen.”

  As if to answer the question, Perth suddenly came out with a series of rhythmic barks.

  “For heaven’s sake, is that a trick, too? She’s not even barking naturally now.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s still in the training stage. She’ll soon get them sorted out and then do them only on command. It’s good for her, it sharpens her mind.”

  “I’m worried about what else it’s doing to her mind, not to mention to your own.”

  I also spent these months training Perth for more serious things, especially to beware of the perils of roads and traffic. The most common way for a dog to be killed is by a car. The obvious road to start with was the one about one hundred feet from our home, a lonely road but not without its share of mad drivers. I was playful with the tricks, but with this part of Perth’s education I was ruthless. My goal was to make her distrust all roads on planet Earth. After training her not to set one paw on the road’s surface unless she was with me, I tested her. Standing on one side of it while she waited on the other, I dangled a piece of meat or some other enticing morsel and beckoned to her softly with endearing phrases like, “What a nice doggie; come with me, Perth, and let’s have a good run. Come on, come here.” Or I would speak more angrily and command her across the road, “Come here now, Perth, you bad dog. Come here!” At first, she couldn’t resist crossing the road, but after a week or so she held her ground, ignoring everything I could do to lure her across. I then took her into Cazenovia village and, to both the displeasure and amusement of passersby on the High Street, tested her there, too. This demanded more of her concentration because of the noise and commotion all around, but she soon caught on. Undistracted by people who stopped to watch her, she would not budge from the street curb. This was risky, but I was careful and she learned. I succeeded therefore in making her perfectly streetwise. It was a lesson that in the future would save her life many times over.

  2

  THAT FIRST WINTER was the worst this part of the country had known for decades. Before Christmas the temperature fell well below zero and stayed there for weeks at a time. The lake froze solid and became a magnificently hard, glassy surface, several square miles of open, perfect ice: a skater’s wonderland. You could skate for miles, whizzing along and taking in the views of the rolling hills as you went. Fishermen came onto the lake too, with their ice saws and fishing tackle. They cut holes in the ice, dropped their lines in and waited, every now and again stirring the water in the holes to keep it from freezing over.

  We were among the first on the ice. With Perth running and sliding with us, we skated back and forth across the lake and several miles down its length, occasionally stopping along the shoreline to sit on a log to rest or to drink hot tea from our thermos. Perth had grown almost to her full size and, as a result of constantly running freely during the autumn, had developed very strong muscles. It was ecstasy for her on the ice. Her favorite orbit was to run on far ahead, then pause, pivot around, and burst into an explosion of speed right at us, and finally, instead of crashing into us as she did with Frederick, veer to the side in a huge loop that carried her far off again. She did this endlessly, untiringly, a black and brown body with a white chest streaking into widening circles. She seemed in a trance, driven furiously by something that would give her no rest.

  As for snow that winter, old folks who had lived in Cazenovia all their lives could not recall ever having had so much. Two feet fell a few days after Christmas—too late for a white Christmas—and it just kept on falling. A storm in late January, which they still call the Great Blizzard, dropped three more feet in a couple of days, so that by February there was more than five feet on the ground, none of it showing any sign of melting. The snow made life miserable for many people, but its shining magic on the hills, trees, farmhouse barns and lake was breathtaking. The entire landscape was frozen into a muffled stillness. All wildlife seemed buried alive. If you could find a plowed road to walk on, it felt as if you were alone on earth, a solitary being boxed in by walls and layers of white below, beside and above you. It was exquisite.

  There was no more skating on the lake that winter after the snow fell, but Perth still coursed over its crusty blanket as best she could, for hours on end. There was a drama to her life in these months, scripted by nature, that she began to take for granted as part of normal existence. Would life always be like this?

  As the world began to thaw out in March and April, it was plain that I would finish my degree by midsummer and then we would have to move to the Midwest to take up my new job. Neither of us looked forward to it because it meant the end of our vigil of innocence and freshness that we identified with the encompassing beauty of landscape and water, our new and perfect marriage, and the startling presence of Perth as a force and an energy. We felt embraced by youth and hope. Having to trade upstate New York for a relatively flat and prosaic part of midwestern Ohio seemed unfair. I even thought of giving up the job. As for Perth, she must have thought everywhere was like Cazenovia. We could not picture her anywhere else.

  The final summer months by the lake felt like an Indian summer of all that was good, blooming, and delicious. Every day Perth roamed and explored trails for miles through the woodland, pastures, hills and lonely farms, and along rivers and waterfalls and into gardens and golf courses. She had total freedom from dawn to dusk. Often she returned home in the
evening with scarcely an ounce of strength left in her limbs. Then she slumbered motionless for hours, only twitching slightly, her eyes rolling as she dreamed of her adventures, sinking deeply into the soft cushions of the armchairs. The re-markable thing was that she always smelled clean. You never had smelly hands after touching her, the way you do with many dogs, even those who are carted off regularly to stylish grooming salons by their owners. Nor did she ever have bad breath, a terrible thing for a dog (and its owners) since it is usually worse than the foulest of human breaths.

  She had one enticing aroma, however, that was strangely seductive. It was what we called her groggydoggie smell. This was an odor unique to her that Cindy, especially, loved. After Perth had been sleeping for a while, or been curled up somewhere, her body took on a warm, cozy, intimate, furry smell—not a dirty or cloying smell such as that of dogs who are not allowed to run outside enough with plenty of fresh air passing through their hair. The groggy-doggie smell, on the contrary, made Perth mysteriously attractive. We seemed to be the only ones who were aware of it, but I often thought that if somehow it could be bottled it could become quite the fashion among the sporting set.

  Another endearing quality she had already shown was that she scarcely ever licked us. She clearly had fallen in love with us, but she never slopped her tongue on our hands and faces. Here again she differed from dogs that seem to use their lolling tongues as the only way of communicating, and do it with anyone in range. Once in a long while she would give us a brief lick or two, but she never did it to anyone else. It was not unloving; it was discriminating, a clue to her intelligent devotion and essential lack of sentimentality.

  One evening in early July, standing on the pier, watching the shimmering trail of moonlight across the lake, as we savored the present and wondered about the future, Cindy said, “Have you noticed that we never worry about Perth? You know, that one day she may be run over, or that some angry farmer will throw a pitchfork at her, or she’ll break a leg or lose her way.”

  “Perth, lose her way!” I was amused by the thought. “She was born with a magnetic needle in her head that always guides her safely home. If I am ever lost in a wilderness, I would certainly want to have her with me. It must be more than her sense of smell because she always seems to know where to go without ever having been there before.”

  We fell silent. I kept thinking of her unfailing sense of direction. Years later, in unhappier times, Perth would have to draw on all her instincts and stamina to find her way out of a wilderness and survive, but now all was well and we were at peace with our young world.

  3

  MISERABLY QUICKLY, the glorious summer ended. I completed my degree and in early September we packed our belongings, mostly books, into a rental truck. Saying goodbye to our friends was less painful than leaving the lake, where we had centered our lives for several years and where in the last year Perth had become a fearless, roaming, even defiant genius of the place. There would be no lake where we were going in the unbeckoning heartland of America.

  As we drove out of our driveway through the pine trees, the ground beneath covered with golden pine needles lit up by shafts of sunlight, starting our thousand-mile journey to Ohio, Frederick (who had somehow got loose from his rope) sat motionless watching us go, streams of saliva running out of his mouth and an unmistakable look of aloneness on his face. Perth stared through the back window at him, making no sound, just staring, as if she knew she would never see him again.

  It is not necessary to this story to say anything more about our move to Ohio than that we found a pleasant house to rent on the edge of uncompromisingly flat farm fields. Cindy found a teaching job, although she had to drive twenty miles through endless acres of corn and wheat to get there. There were pigs everywhere, it seemed. I settled into my teaching of English literature at the university.

  It was a plain and simple life, without any drama of landscape, or drama of any kind except what Perth provided. What we left behind in Cazenovia quickly became, as a poet once said, like the distant “glory and the freshness of a dream” that now we could see no more. We had been turned out of paradise. Instead of a lake there were smelly pig farms; instead of hills and thick pine woods, straight and dusty roads in between inert and motionless fields. Closer to town there were sterile subdivisions with houses lined up neatly beside each other along treeless drives.

  Perth felt the dullness of it all, at a loss as to what to do with herself. At first she began to lose her spirit, as often happens to humans when they are bored. Her behavior changed. She had complete freedom to go wherever she wanted, but in place of heroic deeds on lakes and treks in wildernesses, she raided garbage cans. She drifted over to the pig farms and rolled around in the mud and slop. She also became irritated and started growling at people. She terrified the postman and milkman, howling madly and running straight for them with the hackles up on her neck, as if she were going in for the kill It was all a pretense, of course, for she had never bitten anyone. But they did not know that. What worried us was that her joy and boldness of spirit in the East was turning into a dangerous sort of impatience and intolerance in the Midwest. With us she was fine, but otherwise she seemed angry and disoriented. She mirrored our own feelings a little, though we masked them better than she did.

  She shocked us one day by serving notice that she refused to be left alone at home. It was not always possible to let her stay outside. There was a children’s birthday party next door, and with many toddlers running around outside we thought it best to keep her inside when we went off for a couple of hours. We learned our lesson the hard way. When we got back home, the living room was a disaster area. The armchair was completely torn to shreds. In a delirious fury Perth had ripped out all the stuffing, which was spread out all over the floor. There was hardly anything left of the chair. The carpet was not in much better shape, shredded and ripped along the edges.

  So a few weeks later when we went out for an entire day, against our better judgment but compelled to do it because we had heard there was a dogcatcher working the neighborhood, we decided to keep her in the garage. The garage opened to the driveway with two large, swinging wooden doors. Returning home at the end of the day, we were surprised to see Perth trotting jauntily up the road about a mile from home, as if she had not a care in the world.

  “What is she doing out?” I shouted. “Someone must have let her out of the garage. Maybe her barking was too much for the neighbors.” We opened the car door and she hopped in, her tail wagging.

  Even before we turned into the driveway, we saw the damage. There was a gaping hole in the garage doors. She had eaten and clawed her way through one of them.

  “That dog is becoming lethal,” I complained as I ap-proached the door. “She must have jaws of steel.” Fragments and splinters of wood were all over the place. She had gone about it quietly. The neighbors had heard nothing. But the ferocity of her determination to escape was daunting, as if she had been possessed by the devil.

  “She went berserk,” Cindy said, now holding Perth and stroking her gently. “What’s the matter, Perth, what’s wrong? You know we’ll come back to you. You don’t need to do this.”

  “She didn’t just chew the wood from the door,” I moaned, inspecting the damage. “It looks like she bit off large chunks and then gnashed away at them all over the garage. And look at these deep gouges she made with her nails. This door won’t keep anyone out now. This is getting expensive.”

  The next week we left her outside when we went off to work, and this seemed to do the trick. We had no idea what she got up to all day, but at least no debris of splintered wood nor fragments of stuffing or other displaced parts of our house were waiting for us when we got home. Perth won that test of wills. From then on she was much happier. The devil had been somewhat exorcised.

  That weekend, though, a new and unexpected side of her character showed itself. On Saturday morning, a crisp and sunny October day, we were outside talking to our neighbors Jim and
Mary Jo Clark. Jim had also just joined the English faculty at the university. He taught Shakespeare. He was a bearded, heavy-set young man from Arizona who incongruously combined antiquarian book collecting with motorcycle touring. Parked outside his house next door was his enormous, gleaming, dangerous-looking 850 cc. Moto Guzzi cycle monster. He was amused by our emotional troubles with Perth.

  “Don’t be too worried about Perth,” he said. “She’ll get over this rebellious mood in three or four years. The question is whether you’ll have any money left by then.” A very helpful remark.

  Perth was listening to this calmly, a pretty picture of docility.

  “Perth’s problem is not her age, it’s her steely determination and stubbornness,” I replied. “She’s always been that way and doesn’t have enough to do around here. There aren’t even any dogs in the neighborhood for her to pal around with. She’s bored.”

  “She’s really a pretty dog,” said Mary Jo, trying to make up for her husband’s joke.

  I thought I could put him to use. “Look, Jim, we’ve got to go into town for a couple of hours and it’s really inconvenient to take her with us. But if we don’t, she might follow. I don’t suppose you could hold her until we’re well away, could you, just for a couple of minutes? Then you can let her go and she’ll stick around.”

  “Sure, anything to help a desperate colleague.”

  I saw him in the rear view mirror crouched down and holding on to Perth as we drove off. She was looking intently after us.

  Two hours later we returned. Perth was waiting on the front porch, delighted to see us. I immediately went next door to thank Jim, who answered the door holding a large bloodstained handkerchief in his hand. His nose had spots of blood on it.

  “What happened to your nose?” I asked, trembling a little.