A Small Furry Prayer (14 page)

27

In March I found a little work and Joy found a little work, and in the way these things can go, her work turned out to be harder than mine. She got an internship with Doc at the Cottonwood Clinic. The clinic is a couple of ramshackle buildings and a gravel parking lot tucked beneath a band of tall cottonwood trees, on the appropriately named Shady Lane. Inside is a waiting room, two examination rooms, a surgical theater, some storage spaces, a couple of offices, and a series of cages. Outside is a leaky roof and a clear view of Sikh Dharma, a religious compound home to men and women in white robes and white turbans who believe they are the spiritual descendents of an ancient warrior tradition and try to act accordingly. They also drive a lot of minivans, but this may be neither here nor there.

This being March, the season most animals give birth, the majority of the dogs at Cottonwood were puppies and the majority of those puppies had parvo—the results of more people unwilling to spend seven bucks on a vaccination. As Doc once pointed out, in Chimayo euthanasia has a season. Those euthanasias were frequent, five, six, seven a morning, and they were better than some of the other things that passed through the clinic.

Julia passed through the clinic at the start of Joy's fourth week. She was once a standard poodle, but street living and starvation had stunted her growth and matted her coat, leaving behind a dreadlocked mess. She had been found hiding behind the Jumbo Burger in downtown Española, trying to evade the group of ten-year-olds who were stoning her to death while waiting for the morning school bus. Stoning her to death? Ten-year-olds? Seriously, it's no wonder the problem of evil is considered central to philosophy, theology, and dog rescue.

This problem dates back to the Egyptians at least, but the Greek thinker Epicurus is traditionally credited with its first elegant summation: “Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?” Since then just about every major religion has since tried to solve Epicurus' paradox, as have most major philosophers. About this, the cultural critic Roger Kimball once wrote:

I do not propose to add to the oceans of ink that have been spilled over the centuries in the effort to answer that question. I merely wish to note that oceans of ink
have
been spilled in the pursuit of an answer. Whatever satisfactions we might take in the clever lucubrations of an Augustine or Thomas Aquinas to answer the question, we find in the end that the question is, if not unanswerable, exactly, at least it is perpetually renewed. The question of suffering, that is to say, is not susceptible of being “solved.” At bottom, it is not an intellectual puzzle (though thinking about it involves intellectual puzzles) but an existential reality inseparable from the adventure of human life. … In the end, the meaning of suffering must wait upon one's answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?

I left Los Angeles and moved to New Mexico because I loved Joy and Joy loved dogs and nothing else made much sense. I knew that dog rescue was going to involve getting up close and personal with Epicurus' paradox, but Aeschylus believed “wisdom comes alone through suffering” and I had Joy backing me up. What I hadn't counted on was how much suffering that would actually involve. What it would do to Joy. What it would do to me. Mostly, what I hadn't counted on was Elton.

Because there are so many dogs in need, rescuers tend to be very protective of their phone numbers. Not being protective means getting inundated with requests for help and, since space and time and money are supremely limiting factors, being inundated with the guilt that results from not being able to help. Which explains why, in early April, Joy got a phone call from a woman who refused to tell us where she got our number, but would say that she'd gotten an e-mail from a rescue organization in Albuquerque who was working with one in Roswell that heard from a vet clinic in Los Alamos of a woman in Chimayo who was excellent with small dogs with big problems. Joy was that woman and Elton was that dog, and things spiraled from there.

Hypothetically, Elton was some kind of Chihuahua with epilepsy. The current owners were too poor to be able to afford the twenty-five bucks a month in treatment, so Joy took the call and requested a picture. What showed up was young and brown and cute and cuddly. We were still short on money and short on time and I thought it was a bad idea. But Joy thought epilepsy treatable and Elton adoptable and anyway, she said, “this is what we do.”

So the meeting was set for the parking lot of Trader Joe's in Santa Fe on Thursday afternoon. We were told to look for a blue truck. Since Elton's owners had pled poverty, I'd expected a beat-up pickup. They were driving a brand-new Dodge Ram with aftermarket hubcaps and tinted windows. Nor was the dog quite what we had anticipated. In my experience, epilepsy was a disease that causes seizures, not paralysis, and Elton had no use of his hind legs. In Joy's experience Elton had distemper. Complicating matters, the owners believed that in rescuing him, we were agreeing to pay them for him. When they found out this wasn't the case, they still tried to get us to spring for gas money.

“But we drove all the way from Roswell,” they said.

Distemper, like parvo, is another incredibly painful, usually fatal, and completely preventable disease—that is, if the owners are willing to spend ten bucks on a vaccination.

“Yup,” I replied, “you sure did—in your brand-new truck.”

By Friday, the paralysis had spread from Elton's back legs to his torso; by Saturday his front legs were starting to freeze. The next day was Sunday, and our fear was the paralysis would reach his throat before his brain and he was going to starve to death or choke to death trying not to starve to death. Since we believe suffering is worse than death, on Sunday Elton went to the emergency vet clinic in Santa Fe and we spent next month's grocery money putting him to sleep. On Monday, when Joy went back to work at Cottonwood, she helped euthanize another half dozen dogs with parvo, and a few more with distemper. No one needed money this badly. By Tuesday I was begging her to quit, thinking that would solve the problem, just like Jonah thought he could hide from God. In such situations, it's helpful to remember there's often a whale around the next corner.

28

Pierre and Claudia were among the first friends we made in New Mexico. Connie was Claudia's close friend. Most of the time she lives in Florida, but she'd decided to spend the summer in a guest house at the tail end of their property. The guest house sits in the middle of an apple orchard, and Connie's dog, Rio, had big plans for that orchard: trees to mark, ball to play. Rio had been Connie's constant companion for the past eight years and would have been her constant companion for the next eight, except one afternoon the phone began to ring and she left Rio alone in the orchard for less than five minutes. Really, it takes almost no time at all for an anonymous stranger to sight a high-powered rifle over a small fence and kill a golden retriever for no particular reason whatsoever.

Connie cried for days. Claudia cried, and Joy too. Pierre had to be talked out of a killing spree. I had to be talked out of joining him. “It happens around here,” the police said, “happens far more than you can imagine.” But no, actually, I think this one's my limit, I think this is the thing I can't imagine.

As it turned out, there were a few other things I couldn't imagine as well.

At most puppy mills, they pack the dogs into wire cages, usually for the entirety of their lives, often in pitch-black conditions. There are waste collection trays beneath these cages, but they're rarely emptied. Flies are a constant. With no air-conditioning in the summer and no heat in the winter, dogs freeze to death or die from heatstroke with regularity. During the hottest months, when the cage metal heats up, puppies have been known to cook on the wires. The food is poor and veterinary care infrequent. Open sores, tissue damage, blindness, deafness, ulcers, tooth decay—even rotting jaws because the tooth decay has gotten so bad—are more the rule than the exception. The animals are often fed mechanically, so their only human contact comes, and this is only in the case of breeder dogs, in the form of artificial insemination and, nine weeks later, a pair of hands snatching babies away. If Dante Alighieri were adding a maternity ward to his inferno, puppy mills seem to strike the right note.

Maus was a Chihuahua, a breeder dog, rescued from a puppy mill. For two years, Joy worked with her on a daily basis, though
work
is something of an euphemism. By the time we got her, Maus was mostly deaf, completely blind, and seriously damaged. Open spaces were too much for her to bear, as were the company of people, especially men, other dogs, sunshine, loud noises, and any sort of affection. To get around these things, Maus lived at the back of a closet. The door was always left open, but she never left. Her world was a bed, a water dish, and a couple of pee pads.

Doc thought Maus had the worst case of post-traumatic stress disorder she'd ever seen, and it was hard to disagree. To work with her, since holding her was an impossibility, Joy would scrunch under a shelf that ran along one side of the closet and stay still. After six months, she got Maus to accept a scratch on the neck. It took nine for her to allow her head to be rubbed. That was as far as things went. Anything else and Maus would begin screaming and shaking and not stop. We tried every drug on the market and a good dozen other therapies—nothing did the trick. In the end we decided that prolonging her suffering was the worst of our available options.

Not only was Maus my first experience with an incurable case, but the timing of our decision to put her down couldn't have been worse. Three days before Rio was shot, Maus was euthanized, Vinnie alongside her. Vinnie was an old schnauzer from Los Angeles whose owner had died of AIDS. Someone heard the story and stepped in, and Vinnie ended up on the rescue circuit. At the time, we were babysitting a couple of young Chihuahuas for the Española Humane Society. Since finding young Chihuahuas homes in Los Angeles is significantly easier than finding an old schnauzer a home just about anywhere, a trade was engineered. The Chihuahuas went to Beverly Hills, Vinnie came to New Mexico.

Vinnie seemed to quite like life in Chimayo. He had a stump for a tail, but that didn't stop his self-expression. In most cases, tail wagging is an innate display of happiness for dogs. The case not to be trusted is when the tail is held high and the wag tight and rapid. Otherwise, according to Steven Lindsay's
Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training
: “The friendly, confident tail wag is a loose sweeping motion from side to side with various undulations and shifts of direction.” Lindsay also says that a proper wag involves motion of the rump, an inclusion that's important since the portion of the tail wag lost on most humans is the “transmission of various cues emanating from the anal and supracaudal glands.” Every morning, never mind that he was over eighty in dog years, when Vinnie first went outside, he would glance up and see wide sky and open fields and run big laps around the property before flying back to the porch to wag that stump. The wag started at his head and ended at his butt and looked not unlike a freight train trying to break-dance. Thus the phrase “schnauze that ass” came into heavy usage around our house.

About the time we decided to euthanize Maus, Vinnie's heart started to fail. His liver as well. So we made another tough decision and forty-eight hours later both Vinnie and Maus were put to sleep on our back porch. Maus died in Joy's arms and Vinnie in mine. He was the first living thing to die in my arms—but not the last. A few days later, Chow started coughing around six in the morning; by seven her lungs had filled with fluid; by eight she became the second creature to die in my arms. The following week we lost Jerry, for reasons still unclear. Then Otis, our beloved bull terrier, went by stroke three days after that. By now, the count was eight dead in two months.

Move to New Mexico to save dogs had been the plan—who was going to save me became the problem.

PART  SIX

Nothing

could put

Humpty Dumpty

together again.

But there was a war on

so they had to try

all those other things.

—Richard Fariña

29

Webley Edwards was an Oregon State University graduate who moved to Hawaii to become an auto salesman, instead developed an interest in local music, and created the
Hawaii Calls
radio program. It ran worldwide for forty years on more than seven hundred stations and always opened with the sound of the waves breaking on the beach in Waikiki and Edwards proclaiming: “The sound of the waves breaking on the beach in Waikiki.” Edwards was also on the air when the bombs began falling on Pearl Harbor, though what he proclaimed that December morning carried a different message. “This is an air raid,” he repeated over and over. “This is an air raid, take cover, this is the
real McCoy
.”

By most accounts, the real McCoy was a Prohibition-era rum runner named William McCoy known for a high level of craftsmanship in his wares, but this may be beside the point. Perhaps the boxer Norman Selby, dubbed “Kid McCoy,” who invented the rope-a-dope and once—after taking a heavy beating before bouncing back to TKO his opponent—caused the announcer to ask: “Which is the real McCoy?” This too may be beside the point. The point is that when I was living in Los Angeles the phrase “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” stayed with me, but after those dogs died, around the time I found it impossible to move from the rocking chair on the back porch, “This is the real McCoy” were the five words that replaced it.

These words became my mantra, a way of reminding myself that despite all evidence to the contrary, this was in fact my life. The problem, beyond the obvious—well, there was no getting beyond the obvious. Too many dogs had died and they'd taken too much of me with them. Of depression, in his classic work on the subject,
Darkness Visible,
William Styron once wrote: “The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. … It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” I'd say that about covers it.

As it happens, the view from that chair is South Truchas Peak, both the second-highest mountain in New Mexico and what my friend Tadz—pronounced “Taj,” short for Thaddeus—wanted to climb. He called in the late spring to find out if I was interested. “It's mostly a walk up” was the extent of his sales pitch. Since Tadz had spent a decade working for Outward Bound, his definition of a walk up is a little different from that of a guy who spent his winter wallowing in a chair, but I had to do something, and maybe this something would do some good.

At thirteen thousand feet, Truchas Peak is a bit of a haul. You can do it in a single shot; most don't. The only guidebook I've seen recommends three days for the trip. That seems excessive, but even that book didn't account for the storm that washed out the fire road that added five more miles to our circuit. Tadz saw the destruction, realized our long day had just gotten significantly longer, and wanted to know if I was still up for it.

“After the past few months,” I said, “what's a few more miles?”

Not much in the beginning. We parked and let out the dogs. Tadz had brought along a pair of big, tough mutts. I'd only brought Bella. Together, we chewed up that fire road and plunged into the forest. Around us were stands of conifer and clusters of columbine and dogs happy to play among them. Bella, who had filled out over the winter, adding weight to her frame and broadness to her shoulders and now looking mostly like the kind of all-black, thick-necked, iron-jawed pit bull that makes people cross the street when they see her coming, had some kind of primordial respect for these flowers. She would crash through whatever was in her path, but those columbines were off-limits—which was how we found the stream.

Bella was chasing one of Tadz's dogs through a meadow, jumped sideways to avoid some flowers, and ended up splashing into it. The water was clear and cold. There were trout in there, flashing silver and brown in early morning light. In Japan, the mountaineering sport of
sawanabori
is played by tracking streams back to their origins. The writer Tsunemi-chi Ikeda believes it originated in hunter-gather days, possibly as a way of remembering short cuts on game trails, but the urge is still with us. All it took was one glance and immediately we knew which way we were going. The dogs knew as well.
Truchas
is Spanish for “trout” and slang for “dagger,” and we were all in for the New Mexican version of
sawanabori
: follow the flash of trout up the dagger of the mountain.

A few hours later, we were somewhere between the end of the dagger's hilt and the start of its blade when the route got steep. Deep pillows of snow started to appear, white dots in a green world, turning into thicker blankets the higher we climbed. The snow was melting into our stream, and our stream was turning into a torrent. We switchbacked up a small cliff and heard the telltale sound of thunder, rounding another bend to find several hundred feet of waterfall roaring toward us. Past the waterfall and through an amazing high meadow and over another ridge, and finally the summit in sight. Normally, the way up there was over a high saddle and across a knife-edged ridge, except both were covered in snow. We decided to scramble up a small cliff, traverse onto the saddle at its halfway point, then dash for the top. A couple hundred feet up the snow turned to ice and I couldn't keep my footing. Tadz wasn't slipping, the dogs weren't slipping, but I'd sat in a chair for two months and, well, I needed a new plan.

I decided to head diagonally across the saddle to a large rock wall. The wall looked like easier climbing, and was, for about eighty feet. Then the rock turned crumbly and the angles treacherous and one bad idea led to another, and pretty soon I was rammed into a crevice on the underside of a boulder, not really sure how to move. There were two hundred feet of nothing between me and the ground. My left hand was hanging on a thin shard, my right trying for a firmer purchase. I couldn't find firmer purchase, so instead tried to hook my left foot on a rock. My shoe hit a pocket of snow and started to slip. “Have fun, don't die” was all Joy had asked. It seemed this was yet another promise I was about to break.

I was seconds away from falling when scree started raining onto my head. All I need now, is what I thought, and looked up to see Bella seventy feet above me, charging down at full gallop. A few months after this happened, I saw David Attenborough's documentary
Planet Earth
and the rare footage of a snow leopard hunting a mountain goat in the mountains of Pakistan. It remains the only comparison I have for Bella's gymnastics. She was bounding from rock to rock, dropping ten feet at a stretch, realigning herself mid-air, changing direction by dragging a paw against a boulder here, a tree trunk there. And just as she looked sure to drop clear past me, to keep falling straight to her death, she skidded sideways and stopped, her body wedged below my slipping foot, her paws dug deep. She gave me a look that said, “You're not going anywhere,” and then clamped her teeth around my pant leg for good measure.

According to psychologist Carl Jung, the dog is the archetype of unquestioning loyalty, but it's one thing to read this in a book and quite another to encounter it in the raw. It was potent, all right. Everything I had poured into the dogs, and here, finally, was a bit of reciprocity. I was grateful, both dumbstruck and awestruck. Immediately I felt better. You want proof? My curiosity returned. It was almost silly. Even before I was back on terra firma, questions began forming in my mind. Joy has long believed that our animals know what's happened to them, that they understand they've been rescued and have a pretty good idea of why. I was never so sure. While it's true that when we get a new dog, once they figure out it's not a hallucination—they really do get to romp with the others and sleep on the couch and these humans keep on feeding them—the reaction is a long bout of puppy love. So whether dogs feel gratitude is not my question—how long that feeling lasts is another question. Does this experience stay in their memory in the same way it would stay in ours? In their dotage, do they sit around and bark about how they got sprung from prison, in the way that my grandparents used to talk about their flight from Russia? In other words, when Bella saved my butt, was she saying thank you?

To explain canine memory, Stanley Coren, director of the Human Neuropsychology and Perception Lab at the University of British Columbia, tells a story about a terrier named Kraus who lived in Vienna. Kraus was trained to take a quarter in his mouth, trot down to the local store, trade the money for a small pouch of pipe tobacco, and trot back home. Then the dog and his owner moved to Prague. After a few weeks there, the owner found another tobacco shop, told them about Kraus's abilities, and set up the same kind of exchange. He spent a few days training Kraus on the route and then gave it a try. The dog took the quarter and went out the door, but didn't come back for four days. When he finally did, his paws were bleeding, his coat a mess, but he had a pouch of tobacco in his mouth. Only it was from the shop in Vienna, 120 miles away.

Is this a true tale? It's certainly not out of line with thousands of others. Coren heard it from a woman in Belgium and doesn't know for sure. “I'm certain the woman who told it to me believed it, but I don't have any evidence one way or the other.” However, he also says that dogs are extremely social creatures and there's a lot of evidence they remember people they've associated with, including those who abused them and those who loved them. “Those memories are very strong and enduring,” he continues. “I don't know if the dogs remember the specific situations they were in when they were with various people, but through the process of classical conditioning it is clear that each person is associated with, and can trigger in the dog, specific emotional responses.”

When we got back down to solid ground there was no proof either way. My heart was pounding, my clothes soaked with sweat. Bella was the opposite. She just wagged her tail a few times and lay down on her belly to eat some snow. She was acting as if nothing had happened. I'm sure something had happened. And whatever else was true, that something, it was the real McCoy.