A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life

by Jon Katz

  Lets go for a ride, I yelled to the dogs on a hot and sticky July afternoon. Id been working all day, and suddenly, I was tired and discouraged. Sometimes I get sick of sitting at a computer, sick of myself. I miss my wife and daughter and the ease of life in New York City and Jersey. Anthony and his crew had finished the Dog Room and moved on to other jobs elsewhere. I was glad to have more peace and quiet, but of course I missed them. This is one reason I love dogs: they will not go off to college, tire of my mood swings, or take new jobs. On the other hand, they cannot talk or understand my weariness. A wave of sorrow passed over me. I opened the back door and the dogs rushed out. Clem was happy to go anywhere, Orson just wanted to go with me. Only Rose stopped to see what we were doing. Heading for sheep? Riding the ATV? Walking across the road to the meadow? Lets take the ATV, I decided. A trip for Orson and me. I left Rose and Clementine on the porch; they were disappointed, but they would get over it. I pulled the cover off the machine and Orson hopped up onto the backseat. The engine roared to life and we headed up the slope, along the fence, over the top of the hill. Orson navigated intently over my shoulder. I steered the ATV off the trail and, for the first time, into the woods at the crest of the hill, deeper and farther than Id gone before, beyond my own property and through a thick stand of pine. I saw by the stone fences and rusting wire that this was once pasture. It occurred to me that if any mishap should befall us up here, no one could even guess where to look. The ride got rougher, my face catching tree branches, the ATV bouncing over rocks and logs. Still, I kept going. Suddenly, we hit a clearing; I turned off the engine. I walked over to a boulder and sat down. Orson sniffed and circled. It had been brutally hot for days, but it was cooler up here, and damp from a thunderstorm the day before. I had no clear idea where I was or how to get back. From the sun, though, I could pick a general direction. Eventually I would see something I recognized. In the worst case, I could simply retrace the ATV tracks, so long as I returned before dark. Id learned a few things from my time in the country. Sunbeams streaked through the trees. Orson lay in front of me, keeping me company. What a great creature you are, I told him. Orson came over to me, gave me his paw, licked my face; he always gives the impression, true or not, that he gets it. I was standing outside myself and felt a curious sensation, as if I were suddenly immune from pain, impervious to loss. My leg did not ache. I was neither old nor young, only there, at this place, in this moment, alone in the woods but not lonely. I was surrounded by life itself. And accompanied by this dog.

  It seems important-for their sakes-to understand and accept what dogs and other animals can do and what they cant. People told me all the time that they wished they could follow my lead, that I was living out their dreams on this farm with dogs I love, experiencing their fantasies, creating a perfect life. How strange, I often thought. Nobody knows what another persons life is like; nobody ought to glibly wish to trade places. I was a very lucky man, I knew. My thinking about ecstatic places had helped me understand who I was and how I got to be here; it also reminded me that I could, in fact, step outside myself. But not too often, and never for very long. Soon enough, inexorably, the strange and lonely little boy returns. I wished I could reach across time and speak to him. I wished I could tell him that things would get better. He might be pleased to know that one day he would own a rolling farm with four barns and three loving dogs and donkeys and sheep and chickens. I whistled for my dog Orson, and he jumped up into my lap, and showered me with kisses. How could he possibly know? How could he possibly understand? Why, then, did it seem so clear to me that he did?

  CHAPTER EIGHT Sirius Summer came, hot, humid, and buggy, day after day. Even the border collies dragged a bit, slowed down, took rests in the shade. On the farm, life quieted to a whisper once the sun launched itself into the cloudless, windless sky. It was the kind of moist heat that made showering almost irrelevant: Once you walked outside, you were sweat-soaked. The sheep camped under a big pine tree in the pasture, and the donkeys hugged the inside of the barn. There was little traffic. The only creatures that seemed up and about were the flies, merciless and ubiquitous. By late morning, wed retreated onto the porch or into the farmhouse, where the enormous windows seemed to draw in a bit of breeze. Dog days, people said when you met them at the variety store or passed at the post office, wiping their faces. Though Id heard the term all my life, nobody I knew could say precisely what the phrase meant, or where the idea came from. Id always imagined it originated in the South and pictured torpid curs lying around during the nastiest days of July and August, when even dogs couldnt bring themselves to move. The truth, I discovered, was richer. Thousands of years ago, when the night sky was unobscured by artificial light and smog, the Romans, among others, drew images in the sky by connecting the bright dots they saw above them. These star pictures are the constellations, and at night, when the dogs and I walk into the meadow or to the top of the pasture and look up, I think of those ancient people and feel connected to them. Many of them probably had sheep and donkeys too, and were smelling the same things I was. They saw in the sky what was important in their lives. Some saw images of bears (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) or a bull (Taurus). Perhaps significantly, they named one group of stars Canis Major, the big dog. And they named the brightest star in that constellation-its also the brightest star in the night sky-Sirius. Anthropologists believe that the human-canine bond probably began thousands of years ago. Perhaps wolves were drawn to humans settlements and their campfires, and people threw them some bones and food. Perhaps people found a wolf puppy, brought him into their camp and raised him. Maybe it developed this way: The humans provided shelter and food, and the wolves companionship, protection, help with hunting. The Romans, closer than I am to that original wolf by the campfire, crammed their writings and drawings with references to dogs-house pets, guard animals, hunters, and herders. Generals rode into battles with dogs; the rich kept them as pets; shepherds relied on them to protect their flocks. Clearly, the human-canine bond was well under way when it came time to name the stars. Sirius is bright, in part because it is so luminous, twenty-three times brighter than the sun; but also because it is so close (for a star), just 8.6 light-years away. The Romans must have thought a great deal of their dogs to name this star after them. Sirius shines so brightly that the Romans thought the earth received heat from it. The word comes from the Greek for searing or scorching. Since in summer the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun, the Romans believed that the hot weather of this period-from July 3 to August 11-was caused by Sirius, in concert with the sun. Sirius was, to them, a mischievous star. Thus, the sultry dog days. During the dog days that summer, I began waking at four-thirty, and, instead of lying in bed, listening to the birds, I often pulled on my jeans and a shirt and slipped outside with Orson. Clem didnt usually wake up; she was happy to stay in bed, curled up next to Paula. Rose darted her head out of whatever room shed made her lair when she heard me stirring, but when I waved her off, she vanished. She would rather herd sheep than go look at a star, anyway. Orson, as ever, was excited to go with me. A born navigator and adventurer, he was up for anything, anytime, so long as I was along. We stepped quietly out the back door, usually confronting Winston and his hens already on the prowl for grubs and worms. I climbed onto the ATV, turned on the headlights, released the choke, warmed up the engine, and we headed out. How lucky I was to be living in a place where there are few neighbors to disturb. If Id thought about it and brewed a pot of coffee the night before, I poured some into an aluminum travel mug and fastened it to the front of the ATV with a bungee cord. I might bring along a banana or apple, and a snack for Orson. He was usually already waiting on the ATV seat. He leaned into me, his nose nestled along the right side of my neck or on my shoulder. We chugged to the top of the pasture, a bit of a thrill as there were ditches, puddles, farm debris, and roaming animals, all sometimes hard to see, even with headlights, in the predawn grayness. The donkeys, quietly monitoring as they always do, picked up on the routine. Most morn
ings, when I rumbled up, they were waiting for me at the corner of the pasture. I slowed, let the engine idle, and reached into my pockets for the donkey cookies I usually carried around. I scratched each girl on the nose or kissed her forehead, and left them munching peacefully. The sheep wanted no part of this and usually remained clustered together in the grass, lying in a tight circle. We rumbled over the path that runs across the top of the pasture, into the deep woods with its remnants of stone fences and its scrawny trees, surely a pasture once, part of an earlier farm. From a clearing-the same one Orson and I had discovered earlier-you could see across the Black Creek Valley, well into Vermont, when the sun rose. When I turned off the ATV, the forest resounded at first with quiet. Sometimes I saw startled deer bounding off. Orson, who would chase almost anything, was for some reason uninterested in deer. Nothing about this dog was consistent or straightforward. I sat on a boulder and gazed upward, sipping my coffee, eating my apple, looking for Sirius, the Dog Star, as the eastern sky began to redden. It felt like much of my life had led me to this place, in search of this star. And there it was, right above me. Just as the Internet astronomers and star buffs had promised, Sirius was impossible to miss. Just look up, one of them had e-mailed me, and you will find it. Or it will find you.

  Stargazers call Sirius the champion of the twinklers, but I had never really looked at it before, I dont think. Its the luminary of Canis Major and represents Orion the Hunters larger hunting dog; thats why it has become known as the Dog Star. It was, in fact, luminous. It did twinkle. I could only imagine what it must have looked like thousands of years ago, when nothing on the ground competed with it and the sky was not veiled by pollutants and smoke. Something about it felt personal, not only because of the dog connection, but because it seemed aimed right at Orson and me, shining directly down on us. At this moment, I felt what people might have felt thousands of years ago: This was my star, our star, close enough to touch. Orson plopped down next to me. Look, pal, I murmured. Were so lucky. We had a star and we didnt know it.

  Orson

  CHAPTER NINE In the Garden M y farm was roughly 170 years old, filled with echoes and traces of the past-long-buried wallpaper, the tracings on the walls of old stairs and stoves, bits of broken plates and pipes that rose from the soil after a storm. Its difficult enough to maintain and navigate now, so Im in awe of the energy and will of the people who built it, piece by piece. Somewhere along the line, someone planted the gardens that encircle the house. I planted one myself. The Victory Garden, I called it, the concrete base of a now-vanished silo I laboriously filled up with donkey and sheep manure, hundreds of cubic feet of soil, mulch, and dead animals. I filled it with an unplanned jumble of flowers, annuals and perennials I couldnt even name, and took great pleasure in the riotous color they brought that corner of the barnyard. But the gardens grew difficult to maintain, especially for somebody with gimpy legs, so I hired a group of local women who love trees and plants and who tended to the cultivating and weeding and pruning that were beyond my abilities. Hard workers, they came once a week in summer to turn over the soil, work in organic fertilizers, run drip hoses, and plant fresh seedlings. It took months of brutish work in the sun, but theyd done a wonderful job; I loved seeing Bedlam Farms gardens thrive and flourish. On Tuesdays, Sarah and Wendy would pull up in a Subaru, armed with shovels, bags of cow manure, garden tools, and bottled water. Sarah was a student at Bennington and Wendy took odd jobs, most related to the outdoors. They worked steadily and quietly, and broke around noon for a quick lunch. They loved the dogs, who returned their affections and were delighted to hang out with them. Even Rose came over for a brief sniff and pat once in a while. I always asked if the dogs were bothering them and offered to bring them inside, but Sarah and Wendy were dismayed, even outraged, at the thought. Clementine usually ended up in Wendys lap; Rose retreated to the far side of the yard to watch; and Orson quickly turned Sarah into one of his girlfriends. She was very fond of him. When she came into the yard, he ran up, tail wagging, to slurp at her face. Then he rolled on his back to have his tummy scratched. To me, this friendship was one of the signs that Orson was coming around. Another was the ATV, which had become his passion, purpose, and work. Curiously, the soul retriever was right: hed needed work, and finding it seemed to be anchoring him. Things seemed to be working. Our morning treks to see the Dog Star couldnt have been more peaceful or beautiful for me-and perhaps for him. It was something else we could do together, something else for him to feel happy and successful about. Meanwhile, our calming and grounding training continued, along with regular visits to Vermont for chiropractic and acupuncture. I still sprinkled herbs into his food every day. And except on the hottest days, we also continued our rudimentary herding training; Orson still liked running in circles around the sheep in their pen. I had the unprecedented feeling that Id found the key to this dog; that training, hard work, experimentation, and the opportunities offered by the farm were slowly and painstakingly healing him. I was doing nearly everything that I could and should be doing. To do more seemed inappropriate, even excessive, but to do less would be a violation of our covenant. Orson had work. He was benefiting from persistent and positive training. The two of us had things to do together. As Rose had a role, now, so did he. There were actually long periods of the day when he seemed quite at ease, and didnt annoy me or wreak havoc. Another first. For as long as Id loved Orson, I couldnt remember so much success, progress on so many fronts. Sometimes I looked at him, curled on my foot while I wrote, and thought: Perhaps Ive reached some of those broken parts. Perhaps Ive helped to repair some of them. My soul mate seemed to be finding his place in the world; finally, and at long last, it seemed to be making some sense to him. This was immensely satisfying, uplifting. Often, despairing at the misery and suffering in the world, I nearly gave up on the idea that any of it could be reversed. So Orsons improvement served as something of a hopeful symbol. He, of course, was doing a great deal for me, as well: watching out for me, serving as my muse, my guardian, my pal. During those weeks when Paula was working back in New Jersey, he was always-always-there. Unlike Paula, he admired everything I said or did, approved of every word I wrote. He walked with me through the world. One Tuesday, as I was writing and the dogs were out with Sarah and Wendy, I heard a scream and sounds of confusion and concern from the front yard. I came out onto the porch, and saw Sarah holding a bloody handkerchief to her right shoulder. Her T-shirt had been torn from her shoulder. She was upset, and Wendy was tending to her. Orson looked confused, even abashed. I came running out and asked what had happened. She had been stroking and petting Orson who was lying next to her, Sarah said; she decided to get up and move to another section of the garden. As she stood, he leaped up and bit her just below the neck, at the collarbone. It was not a deep wound, but certainly a wound. I could see the blood and the welts. In a few moments, bruising would begin to appear. I brought Orson into the house. In the bathroom, we applied antibiotic cream and bandaged Sarahs wound. I offered to take her to the doctors office, but she refused, dismissing the attack. It was not a big deal, she said; shed been bitten before, even by her own family dog. She loved Orson; she was sure he hadnt meant any harm. It was probably her fault, she said; she must have stood up too quickly, moved erratically, provoked him in some way. I appreciated her love of Orson and her generosity of spirit, but I told her I didnt see it that way. This was not her fault; she was not responsible. It was a disturbing, even frightening, experience, and I was terribly sorry about it. At my urging, she came over several times in the next few weeks to work with Orson. She brought him food and treats, walked him, petted him. Slightly anxious at first, she overcame that, and made sure to move slowly when Orson was around. For his part, he remained always happy to see her, friendly, appropriate, eager to visit with her and lie nearby. Sarah graciously continued to work with Orson around. But I was shaken. Hed never bitten anyone like that before. I had no obvious explanation. It was certainly possible that Sarahs sudden movement provok
ed some herding response in him, but this was not a nip, it was a bite, inches from her throat. He had drawn blood, torn clothes, left welts and bruises. This was an attack on a human being, the first by any of my dogs. I had no ready understanding of it. Neither did any of my growing circle of vets, trainers, holistic practitioners, advisors, and shamans.