Dog and I

by Roy MacGregor

  The kids called this puffed-up cotton-ball world magic. They said the woods were just as they are in Narnia, the movie version of C.S. Lewis’s fabulous children’s and adults’ classic having just come out, and they were right. The fat snow was everywhere. It hung from the roofs and clung to the wires. It gave cars odd haircuts depending on how much drivers bothered to scrape off and sweep clear before driving away. It brought out the plows and the magic carpets and even the older walkers who would sometimes just stop at a corner and stare off into the distance, seeing a world they had not visited since childhood.

  The growing puppy, Willow, and I went out, as usual, around noon for a long walk through Alice Wilson Woods, a park that covers several acres of hardwood forest, Precambrian Shield, and twisting, happenstance trails a couple of blocks from where we live. Only the evening before, someone on some television sitcom someone else was watching in another room had shouted out, with a note of incredulity, “Dogs can’t tell time!” But they couldn’t be more wrong. Dogs just don’t read clocks—and likely because they have no need, as humans do, of external reminders. Fifteen minutes or so before noon, Willow comes into my office and begins annoyingly dropping a ball again and again and again on the hardwood floor.

  Her predecessor, Bandit, a slightly larger dog, would come at exactly the same time and lay her big head on my knee, staring straight up until I folded down the laptop and declared the “w-a-l-k” about to begin. (Dogs, incidentally, can spell.) And the dog before Bandit, Bumps, would come in and pace about, her nails clicking on the floor, until I would cave.

  All three never missed a deadline—which is more than can be said for their so-called master.

  Off we went, Willow and I, hiking first along the unplowed back streets, then past the high school, then across the small park and in, through our personal entrance, to Alice Wilson Woods.

  It was tough going, but I was not the first there. I had high boots on and still sank, at times, in over my knees. Willow had, at times, to move through the snow the way porpoises will sometimes keep up with the prow of a fast boat, sailing free of the water, then vanishing into it, then sailing free again. When a powerful, energetic dog does it in powder on a day in which the sun turns flying snow to gold flecks and diamonds, it is just as wondrous to watch as porpoises.

  We hiked through the lower half and then up a small rock bluff to an area I call the “plateau.” It is flat and largely empty of trees here, apart from some thick sumac that turn the colour of dried blood in the fall and stay black-red much of the winter. There is open space here for marathon stick throwing and fetching sessions and there is even one part where, years ago, Bumps and I tromped out a new, original trail that is so rarely used even today we consider it our own private domain.

  Except this day someone else had already been there. I have no idea who—the boot marks were more like fence-post holes than anything that would give away details about the lone early hiker—and I could see where he or she had stopped and scribbled something in the snow. My first thought was a kid taking a shortcut through the woods to school, and presumed it was therefore either an obscenity, some currently popular cultural cliché, a paean to a rock band, or just the kid’s name written in soft, new snow with the end of a mitten.

  I went over to have a closer look and, for a moment, could not quite make out the words the way the sun was dancing and sparking on the snow. Yet when I moved to the side, and let the shadows created by the deep imprint of the mitten do their work, it was as clear as if a typewriter had been at a clean sheet of paper:

  Where the woods end, the fantasy begins

  I later spent hours on the internet trying to track down this quote. My first thought—hardly inspirational—was that it came from C.S. Lewis. It was impossible to stand in Alice Wilson Woods this late January day and not think you had entered some fabulous fairyland through a magical portal. There might not have been a wardrobe at the entrance to the woods, but the effect of leaving the streets and the park and stepping into a hardwood forest where every single tree was coated with thick snow was very much what little Lucy encountered when she first pushed her way through the heavy coats and found there was something magical beyond.

  But I found nothing. And that, I must say, delighted me all the more. It meant—unless I am one day proven wrong—that the person who reached the plateau first that glorious day, the unknown person who stopped and simply could not resist bending over and saying something with the tip of his or her mitten, had reached some original inspiration in Alice Wilson Woods and felt compelled to record it, if not share it. For several days I would return at noon to the same spot. And though dozens of tracks formed over those days, no one ever rubbed out or disturbed the words. The mild weather merely shrank the snow until, a week later, the faded message looked like one of those secret notes we used to pass as children, writing on paper with lemon juice.

  I know that person without knowing who it is. We come to walk here for different reasons; we come for the same reasons. I come here to walk with my dog—or dogs, over time—to lose myself, to walk and let my thoughts drift off until it feels as if there is no thinking being done at all. I do this deliberately, trusting in that curious multi-tasking machine—a machine that sometimes purrs along, often misses, once in a while stalls outright—that sits between my ears suddenly surprising me at the end of the noon-hour walk with an answer to whatever all-but-forgotten question was pressing at the beginning.

  Willow comes to find herself. She comes to be as alert and focused as she will be at any time during her day. This walk is the highlight of a day that begins and ends with her being clipped to a lead and sent out into the backyard to do what needs to be done.

  Here, she does what she wants, not what her ostensible master demands. Here, she is the master and the twolegged walker the server. He breaks off the dead branches that will serve as the daily sticks. He throws and throws again until either she tires of the game (unlikely) or he strategically fires it high into a tangled hawthorn where, with luck, it will hang suspended too high for her to leap up and grab and, eventually, she will give up.

  Here is where she chases the squirrels that, uncannily, seem to delight in complicated physics experiments that calculate their relative speed, the dog’s relative speed, the relative distance to the nearest tree, and the time available for safe arrival down to the closest microsecond. She has come so close their tails must tickle her snout; she has never come close at all.

  I talk out loud while I am here. I imagine I sound a bit like one of those obnoxious travellers who walk about airport gates talking into their earpiece cellphones as if their business is, or should be, everyone’s business. But I do it anyway, just as I suspect anyone who walks in isolated places with dogs talks aloud much of the time.

  She pays me no attention. John Steinbeck always talked to his dogs, and in Travels with Charley would talk about everything under the sun—from travel plans to philosophy—with his big black poodle companion. Steinbeck was convinced that some of this habitual “doggerel” was sometimes getting through. “I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes,” he wrote, “a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

  I never see that. I’m more of the Dave Barry school of talking to your dog. “You can say any fool thing to a dog,” the popular humour columnist once wrote, “and the dog will give you this look that says, ‘My God, you’re RIGHT! I NEVER would’ve thought of that!’” That is far more Willow and me.

  We come to Alice Wilson Woods in all seasons, every single day I am home. We come in spring when the trilliums are so abundant it sometimes looks as if it has snowed along the bottom of the small rock bluff. We come in summer when the leaves are so thick on the maple, the elm, the butternut, the ironwood, and the ash that entering the small woods is much like stepping in through the flap of a huge cool, dark tent. We come in fall when the leaves turn and, despite the bright reds and oranges, there is a sadness to
the air so sappy that it is a small wonder the leaves don’t turn back green. And, of course, we come all through the winter, sometimes in winds so howling it seems even the dog has to walk backwards, sometimes on days like this past week, when the forest seems a stage setting for fantasy beginning.

  We have seen wild turkeys and white-tailed deer. We were here one day as a black bear rambled through on its way to terrorize the local high school. We see songbirds and squirrels and rabbits and chipmunks. In winter she hears shrews and mice making their way through that busy subnivean world that exists between frozen earth and snow. We see fox tracks but only once have we caught sight of the fox, and it slipped in under the dark skirt of a spruce stand so quickly it was as if it had vaporized. We sometimes, but not that often, run into another human with a dog.

  Willow is the third dog to roam these woods with me. The other two, Bumps and then Bandit, both eventually grew too old to come here, but in their prime all have been remarkably similar once they get here. Willow, mostly white with some browns, demands far more stick and fetch time. Bandit, mostly black with some white and a perfect drama/comedy split to her face, did the most sniffing and chasing. Bumps, black and brown with some white, who was already a mature dog when we moved here in the mid-1980s, was most content just to walk along, sometimes trailing, sometimes leading, almost always keeping to the trails.

  All three had and have the traits of the famous sheep-dogs with which they were and are somewhat related. When they crouch down, even in plain sight, they think they cannot be seen, much like an alligator in an everglades pond. When they stare at you, they think you know what they’re asking you to do. They will attempt to round up anything available, from young children swimming off the end of the dock to squirrels racing for the lower branches of the nearest pine tree.

  I know every single trail and every stone and every plant and tree in the woods—even the pool that forms each spring along the low-lying ground and seems to attract the same two rather dense mallards who set up house for a couple of weeks and then move on once the pool dries up—and yet I still get lost. This, of course, is intentional. I share the sentiment of American writer Annie Dillard, who has a similar small suburban park she retreats to “not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it.”

  I can, in fact, become so completely lost I forget how many times I have taken certain trails on a long hike. I remember once reading a biography of Charles Darwin and how, at Downe House, his country home south of London, he built a long trail—he called it “Sandwalk”— and would take to it daily for his “contemplative.” So lost would Darwin become in his own thoughts and on his own trail that he invented a system for keeping track of how many “turns” he had taken, setting up a small pile of flint stones at a strategic point and flipping one over each time he passed. I have no such system, but the dog has flint stones she flips inside her head, because she always seems to know when we have completed our normal circuits and heads down the trail a bit in the opposite direction to the one I turn in, and here she crouches, stares back, and flattens her ears along her head as if trying to change her hairstyle to a ducktail.

  One more turn? she seems to be begging. Just one more. Sometimes I give in; sometimes I do not give in.

  We walked the entire trail system twice the Sunday that we discovered the secret message. It was heavy slogging and we were both, for once, tired when we made it back home. The date was January 29, 2006, and I mention it only because, as serendipity would have it, this snowfallen day in Canada marks the moment year 4703 turns over to 4704 on the Chinese calendar. We have entered the Year of the Dog. The last one was twelve years ago, 1994, and twelve years before that, 1982. The next will not be until 2018.

  The Chinese New Year begins with the new moon and the celebrations continue for fifteen days until the full moon is reached. It is a time of masks, lion dances, paper dragons, and fireworks, a time to mark the time of winter when, according to ancient Chinese legend, a beast named Nian would slink around the neighbourhoods, sneaking into homes at night and dining on small children as their parents slept. This is grounds for such a celebration?

  Then again, perhaps the Year of the Dog is actually the year of the watchdog—though this particular dog named Willow will not much relate. She is afraid not only of her own shadow, but also of loud noises, other dogs, smaller ones even more so than larger, trash bins, plastic bags caught in trees, large lumps of snow and— remarkable as it sounds—fire hydrants. Mercifully, she is not a male.

  Those born in the Year of the Dog tend to be honest and faithful, much as a dog is, with a strong sense of commitment and duty. They believe in justice. They are often opinionated and stubborn. They worry a great deal and are often too critical. In humans, those born under this sign tend to go into business or—so it is claimed—spy work.

  I am from the Year of the Rat. The next one will be here shortly, in 2008. I looked up the characteristics and discovered that those born under this Chinese sign are charming, generous, but also quick-tempered and hypercritical. According to a thumbnail sketch I found on the internet, those born in the Year of the Rat “make good writers, critics and publicists.” I take issue with none of this.

  The dog, however, was not born in the Year of the Dog. Because she is still a puppy of undetermined lineage and uncertain birthday, I can only assume she was born either at the beginning of the Year of the Rooster (early 2005) or at the tail end of the Year of the Monkey (late 2004). Those born under the sign of the Rooster are quick to decide, work hard, and are rather self-centred braggarts. They make good restaurateurs. I don’t think so, though dining well is a prime concern for her.

  Those born under the sign of the Monkey are considered very bright and tend to be extraordinarily successful. “Monkeys,” the site tells me, “can run circles around other people with ease.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Monkeys are curious to the point of being nosy. They are clever, amusing, even sneaky. Those born in the Chinese Year of the Monkey, it is said, make excellent stock market traders, jewellers, and air traffic controllers….

  SHORTLY BEFORE noon the next day, she is in the office again, irritatingly bouncing a tennis ball up and down on the hardwood floor.

  Bounce.

  Bounce.

  BOUNCE.

  BOUNCE!

  BOUNCE!!

  “Okay, okay. We’ll go.”

  And off we head again, off to Alice Wilson Woods to walk in the deep snow and chase sticks and come, once more, upon the fading message that the mitten left on the high plateau.

  It is warmer now, and the squirrels are out, teasing her into chases that end, always, within a snapping finger— and jaw—of success. The squirrels move into the high branches, leaping from tree to tree, their condescending, sarcastic chatter driving poor Willow to distraction. She runs from tree trunk to tree trunk, jumping against them as if, somehow, this twenty-pound animal could fell a two-hundred-year-old tree. She barks and leaps, barks and runs and leaps and whines at the squirrels to come back down to earth—I dare you. A frustrated air traffic controller who is living proof that “where the woods end, fantasy begins.”

  And so long as there is a dog waiting patiently for its daily walk through these same woods, it will never end.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful to The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen for indulging him during those moments when he chose to write about his dog rather than the state of the world. Thanks to Cottage Life magazine for placing the odd dog “Weekender” column on the back page, and to Natasha Daneman and Bruce Westwood at Westwood Creative Agency for their continuing advice and support. He is also indebted to Barbara Berson, his beloved editor at Penguin, for the idea of a book on dogs, and to lifelong friend Edie Van Alstine, also a brilliant editor, for good counsel and strong advice. He is most grateful to Jason Schneider for his wonderful illustrations, to Karen Alliston for eagle-eyed copy editing as well as structural suggestions, and to So
apbox for their distinctive design. Thanks to Ellen, Kerry, Christine, Jocelyn, and Gordon for letting me tell some of these stories. Any mistakes, of course, are the responsibility of the dogs.