A Dog Year

by Jon Katz

  I wanted a dog with the right temperament and instincts for me, a dog I could get close to, have an affectionate but respectful relationship with. I’d do the work on my end, but I wanted to make sure that I had a dog that could carry his part of the bargain. That meant a breeder who knew me, knew his dogs, and could match us up; a person who’d be there if there were problems. So I started doing research.

  I wound up a half-hour’s drive north. The breeders—a vet and his wife—made an appointment to meet me. Before I could see a single dog, they sat me down in their living room and grilled me. I’d brought my daughter Emma along, but Paula was busy. Where was my wife, they wanted to know. (She was working.) Did she want a dog, too? (Sure, as long as I handled ninety percent of the feeding, walking, training, and grooming.) How many kids were at home? Had I had a dog before, and if so, what problems had I encountered? What was my lifestyle like? Did I believe in training? Neutering?

  The couple obviously liked the fact that I worked at home, liked to walk, and had a fenced yard. Even more, they liked my determination to train a new dog thoroughly. So they brought four-month-old Julius up from the kennel. He was delighted to make our acquaintance, licked me and Emma repeatedly, and when I took him in my arms, he fell asleep, his body cradled upside down, his head lolling. He came home with us.

  A professional trainer named Ralph Fabbo—so calmly authorative that the freakiest, most out-of-control dogs would sometimes wet the floor when he appeared at their front doors—came to my house an hour each week for two months. He’d trained Clarence, and I needed no more convincing about the value of training after that. Julius became one of his very best students.

  Stanley followed after Jules was firmly settled in the family, housebroken, and ready to help mentor a new puppy. They were swell guys almost from the start, though Stanley, in his puppyhood, did gnaw the fringe off an area rug.

  Under Ralph’s direction, I’d spent many hours teaching Julius and Stanley to stay away from the street, to sit, stay, come, “leave it” (essential for hunting dogs, with their delight in scarfing down revolting things). They followed all these commands, quickly and without complaint. Their tails were always wagging.

  Their tails were wagging now, as Devon and I walked back to the house, and I opened the gate to the yard. The airport scene and van-jump were both jarringly fresh in my mind, but Devon seemed calmer now, his curiosity taking over. I thought he might be more relaxed about interacting with the Labs if he had some running room, so I let him off the leash.

  Julius and Stanley looked still and alert, aware that something important had happened. They may also have sensed my tension. The fur along Stanley’s spine stood up. Julius just came over and licked me, ignoring Devon completely. The three didn’t have much to do with one another. There was no overt hostility, just lots of circling and sniffing.

  When I opened the door to the house, the Labs lumbered up the stairs. Devon, however, leaped right over Stanley and took the steps in two hops. He raced into the living room, pivoted sharply—the Labs were staring at him in astonishment—then dashed into the kitchen, where he jumped onto the kitchen table, then off again, all before I could open my mouth.

  It was like watching speeded-up film, all action.

  Three

  Old Hemp and Old Kep

  * * *

  Devon was a mess. His hair was matted and knotted, and underneath the tangle, he was skinny as a chicken. His eyes indicated near-perpetual panic as he took in every sight and sound. His nails were long and sharp. His breath was foul, and since dog breath mints failed to solve the problem, I soon tried cleaning his teeth with treated wipes, then later with a special antiplaque dog toothbrush. He was not appreciative.

  He was a split personality, fiercely proud and willful, but at the same time lonely and defeated, with a sense of anxious despair about him. His eyes were sometimes deep and mournful wells.

  Somehow, in the intense, high-expectation world of the border collie, a breed that imposes rigorous standards on itself, he had failed. I would never really know what happened, but he didn’t seem to have been loved, or to have succeeded in his obedience work. He was ultimately fired and dumped, a triple catastrophe that had to be crushing to such a dog, one bred for centuries to attach to a single person and energetically undertake important tasks.

  He didn’t appear physically abused so much as neglected and drained, like an employee who’d been laid off three times in one year and couldn’t get a job interview. Yet, certain objects—brooms, flyswatters, sticks—would spark terror. He’d shake and hide in a corner.

  No, I wasn’t reading too much into this, Deanne counseled during one of our extended phone consultations. She hadn’t had Devon back for long, and he mostly had stayed out back in her fenced-in fields with a score of other dogs day and night, so most of the problems I was having didn’t show themselves. But she’d seen some of the same behavior; that’s why she’d worked so hard to find him a new home.

  Long after having sold him, Deanne told me, she ran into him one day at a competition where he was entered in the obedience trials. He’d left her proud and spirited, but now he appeared broken and discouraged. She was worried about him.

  “He just looked unhappy,” she said. “His ears were down. His tail was down. I kept asking myself, ‘Why would his ears be down?’ “ This was no minor matter.

  Somehow, she urged, I had to persuade Devon that I loved him and would stick with him, and at the same time—even more difficult since he was ferociously strong-willed—convince him to accept my authority without further damaging his psyche. I also had to train him to live compatibly in New Jersey with the other members of the household, human and canine. I feared this was way over my head.

  That first night in our house, he lapped up bowls of water. He raced frantically, still panting, from room to room, sticking his head in Paula’s lap, then in mine, then rushing to sniff the dogs. He jumped up on sofas and chairs, then off again, dashed upstairs and back down.

  Julius and Stanley sat mute and astonished, their heads swiveling as Devon whizzed back and forth, a juiced-up, perpetual-motion machine. I wondered if he’d gone mad. The border collie books were filled with horror stories of these energetic dogs going insane with nothing to do.

  He rattled me. He simply wouldn’t light anywhere. He picked up rawhide strips and chewbones, then put them down. He created a circuit: to the back door, then to the front, to his food bowl, then the water bowl, then back to the living room, then around again. But he was always circling back to check on my whereabouts. He didn’t have many fixed points, but I was becoming one of them.

  Okay, we’d try a walk, all together. I put Devon on a leash and took him out with Julius and Stanley. Still wary and a bit confused, they walked ahead while Devon raced in circles around me, dodging left, then right, tangling my legs in the leash. Sometimes he’d walk calmly for a bit, then appear incapable of proceeding five feet in a straight line. For an obedience competitor, he seemed to have spent very little time walking on a leash.

  Exhausted, we all went upstairs to bed. Expecting a night of frenzied pacing, I thought about having him sleep in a wire crate, but just the sight of it seemed to terrify him.

  Julius and Stanley went to their dog beds, and I came over to pat each of them reassuringly. Julius wore his most reproachful look. Stanley seemed to be pretending that Devon wasn’t there, perhaps in the hopes he would disappear. When Devon came too near him, Stanley let out a quiet growl, something truly out of character.

  Still, the Labs always kept their priorities straight. Just as would have happened if I’d brought a mountain lion into the bedroom, both were soon on their L.L. Bean cedar beds, snoring.

  Not Devon. He came over to my bedside and seemed to be awaiting instructions. I said, “Devon, down,” and he dropped to the floor. But neither he nor I slept much that night. Between fitful snoozes, I watched him, and he watched me watching him. All night, I saw those deep black eyes.

&
nbsp; They never closed, and never left my face.

  I suddenly had some serious logistical problems. I couldn’t walk three dogs, not if one of them was Devon. He needed lots of exercise but I didn’t have time to walk the Labs and him separately each time. No ready solutions came to mind, other than training Devon to walk off-leash. After the first night, that seemed dangerous.

  My Labs had been trained to walk off-leash since they were puppies, and had no interest in pursuing anything but a sunny spot in the backyard, while Devon was two years old and had no measurable attention span. What he did have was a powerful chasing and herding instinct.

  He was so much more frantic and unsettled than I’d expected, a mixture of curiosity and stubborness. He was fearful and often anxious, but not so afraid that he was necessarily obedient or anxious to please. I was quietly ticked at Deanne. Why would she think this wild thing and I would make a perfect match? Why hadn’t she told me what a mess he was?

  I wanted Julius and Stanley to maintain as much of their normal routine as possible. The last thing I needed was for them to feel unsettled, and I had promised myself that if they showed prolonged signs of being disturbed or unhappy, Devon would have to go. I owed them at least that much.

  So the next morning, I let the three dogs out into the backyard, then carefully latched the gate, leaving Devon in the yard for a while as I walked the Labs. I’d gotten no farther than the corner when I sensed something behind us and turned to see Devon sitting on the sidewalk, watching me.

  Had I left the gate open? No, it was still latched. How had this dog gotten out? Jumped the fence? There wasn’t time to dig underneath it.

  I reached for his collar; he bolted. Outside of a greyhound track, I’d never seen a dog move so fast. Devon rocketed away across the intersection of the next street and hurtled toward the elementary school on the next block.

  Shooing Julius and Stanley into the yard—wide-eyed, they both sat down to watch—I tore after Devon with a leash in one hand and my pooper-scooper in the other. I heard horns and shouts as I neared the school, wheezing and sweaty.

  A school bus had halted just before the school, and Devon was crouched in herding position in front of it, barking furiously, nipping at the tires, giving the bus the evil eye. He was trying to herd it. “No, no,” I yelled. “It’s not a sheep. It’s not a sheep!” Even as the words left my mouth, I was aware that this was a curious thing to be shouting. But no one was paying attention anyway, least of all the dog.

  The bus driver was shouting and hitting the horn. Parents were yelling. Devon, fixated on the tires, remained undeterred.

  This dog and I had one slim chance of emerging from this without a court date: we had to get the hell out of there as speedily as we’d arrived.

  I ran up to him, screaming, “Stay!” He kept barking furiously. I leaned over and smacked him on the butt to get his attention; startled, he stopped, but looked at me with excitement and joy, inviting me to join in. It was the happiest I’d seen him by far; his ears were up at last. It took him a moment to realize that I was not as happy as he was.

  I snapped on the leash and dragged him away, yelling apologies to the driver, kids, and bystanders. “He’s a sheepdog,” I tried to explain. “Like in Babe. He was working. He thought he was after a big, fat, yellow sheep.” I smiled as warmly and unthreateningly as I could.

  We walked away with exaggerated casualness, rounded a corner, and took refuge in a small park. Furious, I was yanking him along roughly, then was instantly sorry as he turned jumpy and scared all over again. I sat down on a bench; Devon sat down across from me, panting, looking guilty. His ears were down. He had nearly been killed several times on this brief adventure.

  “Devon,” I said wearily. “What the hell were you doing? You can’t do that. You can’t herd school buses. You can’t run off like that. You can’t run away.”

  He climbed onto the bench and collapsed in my lap, leaning up to lick my face. I hugged him. His tail started wagging for almost the first time since we’d met.

  I wanted to assure him that I would never abandon him, but I stopped myself. I didn’t know if that was true, not yet. If I made that promise, I had to mean it, because this dog would know.

  Dogs don’t understand our conversations (although with Devon, I couldn’t be sure), but they definitely know whether you’re on their side or not. I wanted somehow to let Devon know that I cared about him. I wanted him to forgive the smack on the behind. No dog owner is a saint, and anybody can lose his temper in a difficult spot, especially when safety is involved. And I had a long and deep relationship with impatience. But apart from the obvious, the problem with hitting or screaming at dogs all the time is that it doesn’t work; they usually just become more fearful and anxious. It’s not only cowardly but ineffective. Over the next few months, I was to learn a lot of things about myself, patience, and dogs, mostly that I didn’t know as much as I thought about how to train them properly.

  Still, I’d just had another sobering demonstration of the power and impulsiveness of his instincts. If this was going to work, I had to get through to Devon in some way that left us both alive.

  For the next few days, every time I drove off and left him in the yard—the one time I left him alone in the house, he jumped on a table and knocked the phone and answering machine onto the floor—I would glance in my rearview mirror to see him sitting calmly outside the latched gate. I couldn’t figure it out.

  I tried to trick him. I left him in the backyard, got into my car, drove around to the front of the house, ran in through the front door, and raced to the windows in the rear of the house to see if I could catch him trying to escape. No good: he was sitting in the yard, peering at my face in the window.

  Sighing, I went back outside, got into my car, drove down the block, then several minutes later headed back to the house on foot, sneaking in as quietly as I could manage.

  My yard is enclosed by a whitewashed picket fence. Through the window, I saw Devon in the yard, racing to each slat, inserting his needle nose in the spaces between. When he found a loose slat, he wiggled his nose furiously, pushing the wood to one side. He squeezed through the narrow opening and then—here’s the scary part—turned around and pushed the slat back into position.

  Then he ran onto the sidewalk and sat down, watching for my car, leaving no evidence of his escape route. Devon understood the concept of covering his tracks.

  I ran out the back door yelling, a dumb strategy. If you don’t catch dogs in the act of wrongdoing—almost at the exact moment of transgression—then scolding only confuses them. They have no idea what you’re shouting about. But a dog who’s smart enough to move slats might be smart enough, I thought, to grasp that I was angry. Could I convey to him that this was a life-and-death issue, that a dog couldn’t be loose on the busy streets of northern New Jersey and survive for long? That there was danger to others as well, to older people and kids and dog-phobic people, to drivers who might slam on their brakes and cause accidents if they saw a dog running through the neighborhood? That this, more than any other single thing, could put him on a plane back to Texas?

  Devon looked at me defiantly, with a soon-to-be-familiar challenge: You leave me, you’ll pay every time.

  Devon wanted to be loved, yet he also had a powerful independent streak. Battered though he might have been, it hadn’t left him submissive in any normal canine sense.

  His escape sent me back to Janet Larson’s book, which included a description, written in 1600, of the perfect shepherd’s dog: “He ought to be gentle to his own household, savage to those outside it, and not to be taken in by caresses. . . . He should be black in his coat in order to appear more fearful to sheep thieves in the daylight and being the same shade as night itself, to be able to make his way unseen by the enemies and thieves.” What was a backyard fence to a dog like that?

  All contemporary border collies trace their lineage back to two dogs, says Larson. “Old Hemp,” a champion of the late 1800s, w
as a sensation. He began hitting the sheepdog trials when he was a year old, Larson recounts, and he remained unbeaten for his entire life, a record unequaled by any other dog. Old Hemp was tough on sheep, nor was he so easygoing where people were concerned, exhibiting certain ancient border collie traits—a rough nature and a strong dislike of strangers.

  But the other ancestor of the breed, “Old Kep,” raised in the early l900s by a breeder named James Scott, had a kindlier disposition. He’s credited with improving the temperament of the breed—at least some members thereof.

  “Today,” writes Larson, “there is not a border collie alive that does not carry the blood of these two great dogs.”

  How might Old Hemp have reacted to a middle-aged man with a pooper-scooper telling him to stay in the yard? Whenever Devon acted up, I began invoking the ancient names. What would Old Kep do? If those two were in his bloodline, maybe he’d get the message.

  Meanwhile, I nailed the loose fence slat shut. Over the next few days, Devon found another loose one, then another, then half a dozen. I nailed them all in place, while the Labs dozed in the backyard and he watched every single hammer blow on every single nail. “Fuck you,” I said as I hammered. “You are not getting out of this yard.”

  Devon cocked his head whenever I spoke directly to him. Just natural dog behavior for this breed, I knew, but I had the sometimes creepy certainty that he was listening carefully. I also took note of the fact that I was babbling to a dog.

  Later that day, I returned from walking Julius and Stanley and found Devon waiting for me on the front lawn. He had, I later saw, learned to open the porch screen door with his left paw.

  It dawned on me slowly that Devon and I had entered upon an epic and intensely personal conflict, a contest of wills and wile made all the more interesting by the fact that only one of the principals understood just how brutal and protracted it was going to be. Devon became bored with trying all the slats, so he tunneled underneath the fence. He could produce amazingly large holes in what seemed like seconds.