Born to Bark (44 page)

Flint gently inched himself forward
.

There was a pause that seemed to go on for hours, while Alice sat with her eyes on Flint as she patted him with slow hand movements. Finally, she responded in what might have been a wishful tone of voice, “Could you get me another Snuffy?”

Norma’s eyes were full of tears, “As soon as I can.” I nodded my head and silently mouthed, “Tomorrow.”

Norma glanced at me and said tentatively, “Maybe even tomorrow.”

Alice momentarily moved her eyes from Flint to her daughter and smiled a wan smile. “That would be wonderful.” She then looked back at Flint, who was contentedly resting on her, and said to him, “You could be my Snuffy, you know.”

Norma motioned to me and we stepped out of the bedroom, while Jennifer came over and sat on the edge of the bed next to her grandmother.

“This is a miracle,” she said wiping tears from her eyes. “She hadn’t said more than a dozen words since I brought her here. This is wonderful. But where can I get a Cairn terrier as quickly as tomorrow?”

“On the off chance that Flint’s visit might be helpful, I contacted a local Cairn terrier breeder named Glen,” I said.

I had originally met Glen when Flint had scored a rare high in class at an obedience trial. Glen had been impressed at seeing a Cairn terrier do well in obedience, but he was quite unimpressed by Flint’s looks. “His back is too long, his ears are set too close, and his tail is set too high. Listen, for your next Cairn come to me so that people who love the breed can take pride in a Cairn doing well in obedience who is not quite so badly put together,” he told me.

I continued, “Glen told me that he has an 18-month-old gray Cairn that he was keeping as a possible show dog. However, his coat never came in quite the way that he wanted, so he was willing to sell it. That way you’ll get a dog that is a young adult and already housebroken, which should make things easier. Anyway, that is one possibility to consider since I don’t think you want the hassle of starting with a puppy for your mother.”

Norma nodded and we went back into the room. Jennifer was still sitting on the bed next to Alice. Both were petting Flint and they were murmuring something to each other. Alice looked up and nodded at us. Norma smiled and said, “Dr. Coren and Flint have to go now, but tomorrow we’ll get you a new Snuffy.”

Flint turned to look at me and I signaled for him to come. Jennifer got up and came over to me. She gave me a hug and whispered “Thank you. I think that she is back with us.”

As Flint and I sat together in the car on the way home, I started talking to him. Just because he couldn’t hear me made no difference, since he always seemed to know that I was speaking to him and he would look at my face attentively.

“You’re a good psychotherapist,” I said, glancing in his direction. “I was worried when everything started falling over and making all of that noise. I was afraid that you would get upset and ruin the mood. I suppose that it’s proved to be a
blessing that you are mostly deaf, because it meant you weren’t spooked by all of that commotion.”

The old familiar voice answered me,
“Yes, just call me Sigmund Cairn, the world’s greatest canine therapist. You know being deaf isn’t such a bad thing for a psychotherapist. Most of them don’t listen to what their patients say anyway.”

A month or so later I received a “thank you” note addressed to Flint and me. Inside was a photograph of Alice sitting on a large rocking chair. On her lap was a handsome gray Cairn terrier and she was smiling warmly at it. The “thank you” note was signed Jennifer, Norma, Alice, and Snuffy.

My father once said that when you own a dog and observe his life, you learn that it is possible to grow old with grace and dignity. Flint never did anything gracefully or with dignity, however. Although he slept more than he used to, when he was awake he could still careen around the house as if he were putting out wildfires, barking when Wizard indicated that there was something to be barked at, and chasing glints of light or flickering shadows that might be rodents or other vermin that needed the attention of the great gray hunter.

Still, Flint now moved a bit more stiffly and was not quite as quick or agile as he used to be. One evening he had difficulty jumping up on the bed. While Wiz slept every night curled tightly against me, Flint only came up on the bed to rest against my legs for the first hour or so of each night. Sometime after I was asleep he would hop off and spend the rest of the night on a floor pillow that I kept in the bedroom for him. If the night were particularly cold, I would sometimes find him on the bed when I awakened, where he had curled up in a nest that he had made of the blankets.

The fact that he could not climb or jump u
p to the bed bothered
me enough that I couldn’t go to sleep, so I went down to the basement and constructed a step and covered it with a scrap of carpeting. Then I went back upstairs and put the step near the foot of my side of the bed, called Flint over, and gave the step a little tap. He looked at it for a moment, then stepped up on it and then to the bed. He then proceeded to lie down in his usual place with an audible sigh.

In the morning the alarm clock went off and we got up. Joannie swung off of her side of the bed and as she moved toward the door, of course, she tripped on Flint’s new step, nearly fa
lling in the process.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Just a step,” I said. “Flint was having trouble making it up to the bed last night.”

She gave a little snort and replied, “So if he has trouble biting me, you’ll give him some false teeth as well?”

Flint’s mind was still sharp and capable of finding novel solutions to problems. Because Flint could no longer hear the scratching and scrabbling sounds made by mice when they found their way into the house, the number of dead mice that we found diminished until we rarely found them.

One evening we were out at our farm, which used to be Flint’s prime vermin-hunting area. We were still living in the little shack, since Joannie was taking courses on house building and designing the new house, and we could not quite afford to build it yet. The little shack was a great place to catch mice, since it did not have a proper foundation but simply stood over a crawl space with the wooden floor about a foot or so above the bare ground, and there were gaps in the floor and the baseboards that gave the rodents easy access to the house.

I had just put out food for the dogs’ evening meal, which
normally they virtually inhaled in a minute or two. This particular night Flint did something very odd. He finished all of the food in his bowl except for one piece of kibble. He then picked that kibble up in his mouth, moved to a corner of the kitchen, and spat it out on the floor. He then moved across the room and lay down staring at the piece of food.

Wiz noticed this behavior, and opportunistically moved toward the corner to grab this last edible bit, but a low rumbling growl from Flint caused him to change his mind and to put some distance between himself and the dropped morsel. Flint was still staring at the place where he had dropped the kibble when Joan and I went to bed that night.

In the morning we woke up and there was a dead mouse in the kitchen with a broken neck—the clear sign that Flint had dispatched it. Over a number of subsequent nights Flint would continue to leave a bit of kibble in that corner after each evening meal. It was seldom there in the morning. However, now and then we would again find dead mice indicating that Flint was on the hunt again.

Late one night, I was having difficulty sleeping because of a headache and decided to get up and take a couple of aspirin. As I walked out of the bedroom, there was Flint, lying on the floor, staring at the corner where he had dropped the piece of kibble that night. I was about to say something to him when I glimpsed some motion in the corner. Flint shot from his position to the corner, and after two shakes of his head we had another dead mouse. Flint was baiting a trap by placing a bit of kibble in a corner where there was a gap in the baseboard. He had figured out that, if he cou
ldn’t hear the mice, he could still see them and catch them if he knew where they would appear and if they stopped for a moment to nibble a bit of kibble. It didn’t always work, because sometimes he would fall asleep and miss the rodent’s arrival, but it did work well enough to allow him to continue his hunting at least out on the farm.

Some aging humans tend to become more religious and spiritual, although to the best of my knowledge no one has ever observed such behavior in dogs. There was one moment, however, when I thought that it might have applied to Flint.

It was a summer night out at the farm, and there was one of those big full moons, such as you find only in paintings. Joannie had been working in the garden all day and had decided to go to sleep early. While she was getting ready for bed, I wandered out on the wooden platform that served as a deck behind the little house. I had a can of beer and had just
settled into a chair when I noticed Flint staring at the moon. His back was toward me and he sat unmoving with his head tilted up for a long time. Then he did something that I had never before seen him do. He leaned back his head and gave a long and mournful howl. He was still howling when Joan opened the screen door. She was in her nightgown and she asked, “What’s he doing?”

“I think that he has had a religious epiphany and is singing some kind of prayer,” I said.

“For which religion would that be?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe the
First Church of the Domestic Canine?
They have a rich and complex dogma, I’m told.”

Joannie smiled and disappeared back in the house.

I don’t know if Flint’s god heard him that night, but the local coyotes certainly did. From a distance I could hear them answering with their familiar yip howls. Within a few moments a veritable chorus of howls was drifting across the field. Sadly, Flint could not hear the musical performance that he had triggered and after a minute or two of further singing he stopped and trotted back to lie down beside me. The wild canine choral continued for several more minutes and drifted away.

“Do you think that your prayer was successful?” I quietly asked him.

His silly voice answered,
“God appreciates a good tenor.”