A Million Years with You (45 page)

Who could resist the appeal of this notion? No money, no travel, no training, no special instruments were necessary to probe the mystery—one needed only a dog, a notebook, and a pencil. I didn't even regret my total lack of formal training to begin such a project. In fact, because no biologists had ever hinted that they knew or even wondered what ordinary dogs want, my ignorance seemed almost a qualification. Anyway, I didn't feel I'd be ignorant for long. Turning out the lights so that the neighbors wouldn't see me flout the dog laws, at least not in this instance, I opened the door a crack. Out slipped Misha, with me right behind him, and thus our project began.

Again and again we did this, at least two or three nights a week for almost two years, not stopping even after Misha's owners came home to claim him, because by then Misha liked the work we were doing together and wanted to keep at it. Coming to collect me was not difficult for him—his community did not then have a leash law, so of an evening, after his owners let him out, he'd jump their fence and make his way across two cities to find me. Usually he would arrive after dark. By the light on our front porch I'd see him standing in the street, looking up at our windows like a captain looking for a sailor. I would turn out the porch light and crack the door, and Misha would slip inside for a brief visit with my family and also with his, for by then he had married my daughter's husky, the beautiful Maria, and was teaching some of his skills to the four children he had fathered on her. But eventually he would stand poised to go out again, looking back over his shoulder to see which of us would travel with him. Maria always volunteered, and if I wasn't going myself I'd sometimes let her. It was her or me, though, never both of us; if Maria and Misha were together, they traveled fast and wouldn't wait for me. Sometimes I took Maria on a leash, which kept us all together, but mostly I simply went alone with Misha. One by one, dog secrets were revealed through a series of adventures, some of them dangerous, all of them interesting. Misha was Odysseus, and Cambridge was the wine-dark sea.

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One of the most widely read American anthropologists, E
LIZABETH
M
ARSHALL
T
HOMAS
has observed dogs, cats, and elephants during her half-century-long career. Her many books include
The Social Lives of Dogs, The Tribe of Tiger
, and
The Hidden Life of Deer
. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

1. Bushmen are also called San.
Bushman
is to
San
what
Indian
is to
Native American. San
is a Nama word and is pejorative, yet despite its degrading implications (it applies to anyone who lives in the bush, has no livestock, and eats food off the ground), it was given to the Bushmen by well-meaning anthropologists who must have felt that
Bushman
was even more pejorative. But I'm in no hurry to follow their lead. According to Dr. Robert Gordon, a Namibian anthropologist,
Bushmen
is what the people call themselves, and so does everyone else in Namibia.

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2. There are five Bushman languages, all of which have clicks. The
!
in
!Kung
is such a click. The others are /, //, and ≠.

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3. I use the name Tswana throughout, which seems fairly customary, although in reference to people, Batswana is the plural and Motswana is the singular. Setswana is the language, and Botswana, of course, is the name of what was known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate at the time of our visit. I mean no disrespect by Anglicizing Setswana.

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4. Omitting the click, this word is pronounced “nor-ay.”

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5. A circus tiger is trying to mate with a tigress but she doesn't want him. “She let him lick her tail, though. She let him kiss her ass.” Hoagland. This later appeared in
Cat Man
, Ted's first novel. A mother gives her baby a bath in a tub but the baby drowns. The mother realizes that “the worst thing that could happen to anyone had happened to her.” Updike. This later appeared in
Rabbit, Run
, John's first novel, and caused me to bathe my infants in a special baby tub, not in the bathtub.

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6. Alhaji is the title taken by those who make the haj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca.

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7. Not counting Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, which is in Asia and in Europe.

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8. The name was later changed to MCI Cedar Junction because of the negative image the prison shed on the town of Walpole. But the prison was famous, and at the time of this writing many people continue to call it Walpole.

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9. What does
lineated
mean? It means putting down words
In lines like this
As poets do
For poems.

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10. Except in the Gir Forest in India. But that's a relict community of Asiatic lions.

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