100 Dogs Who Changed Civilization (11 page)

The great composer Richard Wagner enjoyed a lifelong love affair with dogs, two of whom actually helped him work. The first, Peps, was a furry muse. Wagner would pound out notes on his piano, then glance over to see if Peps, who sat on his own stool, approved. Wagner noticed that the dog showed distinct reactions to certain musical phrases, giving him the then-new idea of associating particular melodies in his operas with specific characters, settings, or moods.

Armed with this dog-given insight, Wagner began the composition of his masterwork, a collection of four operas known collectively as
The Ring of the Nibelung
. But before the great maestro finished, Peps sickened and died. Wagner was devastated, but he soon acquired a new dog named Fips. One day, as he continued his work on the Ring cycle, Wagner took Fips for a walk in the park. As the dog darted back and forth, rustling through the dry leaves, the composer discerned a catchy
rhythm in Fips's steps, which he decided to incorporate into his music. Thus, in the opera
Siegfried
, the passage denoting the title character's journey through a forest is derived from the footfalls of Fips.

Plenty of novelists take on collaborators. Such was the case for John Steinbeck, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath
, and many other important books. It was 1960, and Steinbeck, in his late fifties, was recovering from a stroke. But he didn't want to start acting like an invalid. Instead, he went on a road trip. He bought a customized motor home, which he named
Rocinante
, after Don Quixote's horse, and he and his traveling companion—his black standard poodle, Charley—hit the road on September 23, 1960. The two of them rambled for twelve thousand miles (19,000 km), through thirty-seven states plus parts of Canada, before returning to their New York home in January 1961.

As it turned out, Charley more than pulled his weight on the trip. The big poodle was a tremendously helpful icebreaker when Steinbeck sought to strike up conversations with strangers. If he wanted to chat, all he had to do was walk up to someone with Charley in tow. The dog was also a sympathetic listener; during the long drive the two apparently covered a lot of ground, discussing everything from the foibles of small-town life to racial discrimination. This more than made up for
the fact that Charley's violent reaction to a bear he saw in the road forced their quick departure from Yellowstone National Park.

Steinbeck's account of the trip, appropriately called
Travels with Charley
, was published in the summer of 1961 to great popular and critical acclaim. Steinbeck passed away in 1968, but his chronicle of life on the road with his dog lives on. The trailer he used on his journey is preserved for posterity at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. And his traveling companion, the faithful Charley, is likewise preserved in Steinbeck's prose. “He is a good friend and traveling companion, and would rather travel about than anything he can imagine,” he wrote. “If he occurs at length in this account, it is because he contributed much to the trip.”

For as long as humans have inhabited the swath of English coastline now known as East Anglia, tales have circulated concerning a gigantic black dog that haunts the countryside. Alleged eyewitness accounts are all chillingly similar. A lonely traveler, out on a cold, dark night suddenly hears the padding of giant paws behind him. He turns to see an enormous black dog materialize out of nowhere and stare at him with glowing red eyes. Most of the time the specter makes no effort to physically harm its victim—at least not right away. The story goes that anyone who sees Black Shuck will die within twelve months.

There are several theories, none of them very comforting, as to how Black Shuck, also known as the Black Dog, got his unique name. Many believe it comes either from the Anglo-Saxon word
scucca
, which means “demon,” or from Shukir, the war dog of gods Odin and Thor in Norse mythology. His most infamous appearance was on August 4, 1577, when Black Shuck invaded two Suffolk churches. One was in Bungay, where the hellhound allegedly caused the church tower to collapse, killed two parishioners outright, and caused another to shrivel up “like a drawn purse.” The same day he
reportedly invaded another church in the nearby town of Blythburgh, leaving scorch marks on the front door that can still be seen today.

Sightings of Black Shuck were reported almost through the present day. During the 1890s, sailors picked up a boy in the open ocean who'd supposedly swum there to escape a demonic dog that was chasing him. In the 1920s and 1930s, fishermen regularly reported hearing the baying of a hound coming from somewhere onshore. And in 1970, British newspapers reported sightings of an unnaturally huge dog bounding along the beach at Great Yarmouth.

Is the local legend in any sense real? Maybe, maybe not. Let's just say that if you're caught out on the moors late at night, it probably can seem very real indeed. The legend certainly fired the interest of novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who first heard the stories of East Anglia's demon dog in 1901. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had just returned from serving as a field doctor in the Boer War, during which he contracted a persistent fever. Deciding that rest and diversion were the best medicines, he took a golf vacation in Norfolk with a journalist friend named Bertram Fletcher Robinson.

When the two men weren't on the course, they relaxed in comfort at the Royal Links Hotel. There, Robinson acquainted Doyle with the local stories of Black Shuck. The demon dog, he said,
liked to run down nearby Mill Lane, right past the very hotel in which they stayed and onto the grounds of nearby Cromer Hall—a place Doyle already knew well, having stayed there as the guest of its master, Lord Cromer.

Not surprisingly, the tale provided useful grist for Doyle's mill. In no time he produced a new Sherlock Holmes novel about a spectral canine that haunts the lives of an illustrious family living in a huge, Gothic home. The family is known to history as the Baskervilles, a name allegedly borrowed from the Cromer family's carriage driver. The novel's four-legged villain got a name change, too—like the book itself, he was called the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Today the world's most exalted collie is undoubtedly that wonder dog of TV and film, Lassie. But for a couple of decades at the dawn of the twentieth century, the most well-known member of this four-legged Scottish clan was a male, American-born purebred named Lad. His mostly true adventures were made famous by author Albert Payson Terhune, without doubt the greatest writer ever to devote himself almost exclusively to collies.

Terhune was born into a moneyed, privileged New Jersey family. Originally a newspaper journalist, he soon retired to Sunnybank, the family's summer estate in Wayne, New Jersey. There he acquired Lad, the first and, by his own estimation, most remarkable of the many collies he would own during his life. Terhune wrote that his friend “had a heart that did not know the meaning of fear or disloyalty or of meanness. He was immeasurably more than a professionally loyal and heroic collie. He had the elfin sense of fun and the most humanlike reasoning powers I have found in any dog.”

Lad, who was born in 1902, lived for sixteen years before passing away in 1918. One year later, Terhune published a memoir of sorts—a collection
of short stories called
Lad: A Dog
. The book became a bestseller, and remains in print today. Nowadays, with everything concerning collies overshadowed by Lassie, it's interesting to recall that several generations of children were raised on tales of Lad. A
Peanuts
comic strip once mentioned that the only stories Snoopy wanted read to him were those by Terhune. And in the 1960s TV series
Please Don't Eat the Daisies
, the family sheepdog was facetiously named Ladadog.

It's safe to say that Terhune's work helped elevate the rough collie from just another dog breed into the very symbol of canine heroism, intelligence, and fortitude. Even prior to Terhune's death in 1942, Sunnybank had become a place of pilgrimage for dog lovers from around the world. Today, generations after its owner's passing, the estate remains a public monument. Thousands of visitors stop by every year to visit the graves of Terhune's beloved collies, including that of Lad. It sits off by itself, located on what was, in life, the dog's favorite sleeping spot.