Born to Bark (25 page)

None of this caused any problems until the attack of the giant rats. A film whose title I don’t remember involved scenes in which rats were occupying an abandoned structure or tunnel. When close-ups of the rats filled the TV screen, Flint froze. A low territorial growl started, and he began to quiver with excitement. At that moment in the movie, the rats became frightened, massed together, and dashed madly toward the camera and past the hero of the film. As the rodents swarmed, with all of the accompanying frantic rat sounds, Flint could contain himself n
o longer. He launched himself off the sofa and attacked the wooden stand on which the television stood. Growling, barking, slashing, chewing—desperately trying to grab the table leg and shake it to death. In moments the wooden leg was gouged and splintered, the rat squeals stopped, and the rodents were gone. Flint backed off and looked up. He snorted once or twice, and then with tail erect and legs stiff, proudly walked out of the room, pausing only once to glance quickly at the screen to make sure that his job of saving us from the onslaught of vermin had been well done and was truly finished.
“And stay away!”
his voice said.

At first I chuckled at his fury, but once I saw the savage gouges he left on the wooden television stand, I stopped laughing and rotated the TV stand so that the damaged leg was against the wall where it would not be visible. I really didn’t want to have to explain this new episode of genetically generated terrier behavior to Joan. Over the next several days I surreptitiously sanded, stained, and varnished the chewed piece of furniture, and Joan never noticed the initial damage or the subsequent repair. Flint watched me at work and that silly voice assured me
“Those rats aren’t coming back
, but if they do I’ll finish the job this time.”

Later that winter I got to see more of Flint’s terrier hunting behavior. It doesn’t often snow to any significant degree in Vancouver, but that particular winter we had a massive snowfall that piled up to nearly 2 feet. I dragged a snow shovel up from our basement and opened the front door of the house with the idea of clearing snow from the stairs and walkway. As I opened the door Flint dashed past me and disappeared into a drift of snow. For a moment he stopped, startled, then glanced back at me and started to dig.

Flint rapidly threw plumes of white behind him as he dug a tunn
el through the snow. In total defiance of the known laws of physics and engineering, the snow did not cave in on Flint during his excavation. He simply disappeared into the snowbank, leaving an open channel behind him. I could mark his progress by the sound of his intermittent barks and his heavy breathing which, muffled by the snow, sounded like the distant chugging of an old-fashioned steam engine. Minutes later, a foot or two in front of the trunk of a pine tree, his head popped up through the snow, looking for all the world as if he were part of a Whack-a-Mole–type carnival game.

At just that moment a woman and her young daughter came by, trudging through the snow. The little girl, dressed in puffy pink winter clothes, caught sight of Flint’s head rising through the snow. She started to laugh, with a high-pitched attractive little-girl laugh sounding like the tinkling of crystal. At the same time she pointed her pink-clad little arm at Flint. The woman contrasted sharply from her child both in terms of the gloomy look on her face and somber, colorless clothing she wore—dark coat, dark scarf, and dark knitted cap. But she clutched a brightly colored pur
se that had two rows of large, multicolored, woolly fringes gathered in bunches at its top and bottom.

By the time her mother looked where the girl was pointing, Flint had already disappeared back under the snow. This time there was virtually no evidence of his presence or progress
through the snow except for the faint sound of that invisible steam engine. He was probably moving toward these pedestrians, because Flint always found the sound of laughter—especially that of children—irresistible. Whenever people gathered he would single out and hover around the people who giggled and guffawed the most. Sure enough, only moments later, Flint’s head popped up again, only about 2 feet from the mother and daughter. The girl burst out in a loud peal of laughter, but the mother seemed not to know what to make of Flint’s snow-covered head, pointy ears, dark eyes, and bl
ack nose suddenly emerging in front of her. She yelped in alarm and held out her purse defensively in front of her.

Of all of the things the woman could have done, this was probably the one thing most likely to trigger the final step of Flint’s dig-hunt-kill sequence of behavior. The fringes flapped vigorously in the winter breeze. The woman’s high-pitched squeal could well have sounded to him like a frightened or wounded rodent. In any event, Flint launched himself from the snowbank toward the purse as if he had been hurled by a catapult, arcing up in the perfect trajectory to reach his target. The instant he made contact with the purse, the woman dropped it and turned to clutch at her daughter protecti
vely. I watched in horror while Flint “killed” the fringed monster by whipping it back and forth in his mouth. As he did, the contents of the purse flew out and disappeared in the high snow.

When I got over my original astonishment, I shouted at the top of my voice, “No! Stop it! Get away!” and dashed toward my little dog. As I hurtled down the steps, I lost my footing and toppled forward into a large snowdrift.

Because I do not usually yell at my dogs or charge angrily toward them, Flint was taken aback by my behavior and broke out of his frenzy. In his mind, I must have looked as if I had just gone berserk, and he most likely concluded that the safest place for him might be the interior of the house. As I toppled forward
I caught a glimpse of a grayish object scooting past me toward the stairs and into the open front door.

The woman had turned away to gather in her daughter and had not seen Flint’s exit. To her it seemed that I had dashed forward to save her from the attack of some monster. She looked around fearfully.

“What was that thing?” she asked in a shaky voice.

It dawned upon me that she had probably not gotten a clear view of Flint during the incident. He’d poked his head out of the snow for only a second before leaping at the purse, and she had immediately dropped it and turned away toward her daughter.

I struggled out of the shabby indentation I had left in the snow, which appeared much like a bad attempt at a snow angel, and started helping her retrieve the contents of the purse. The purse itself was undamaged and no one was hurt but me. Later that day I would find that my impact with the snowy ground had left me with a long, painful bruise down my body. I was worried that if I admitted that the whole distressing situation had been caused by my little terrier, I would soon see an animal control officer on my doorstep. But just then the little girl solved the problem.

“It was a raccoon, Mommy,” she said. “I saw his pointy ears and he was all gray except his face, which was mostly black. My teacher says that we should stay away from them because the ones that live in the city aren’t afraid of people anymore and they might bite.”

The mother nodded, as if accepting that explanation, and thanked me for chasing the animal away.

“I’m glad no one was hurt,” was all I said as I picked up her car keys and some cosmetics for her. A few minutes later she and the little girl in pink were safely trudging down the street again.

I returned to the house, where Flint was sound asleep in his crate, and poured myself a hot cup of coffee with a slug of whisky. I sat down to warm my hands on the cup as I sipped and
gratefully felt it warm my belly and relax my muscles a bit. At that moment, Joan appeared.

“I thought that you were going to shovel snow,” she said.

“I was,” I replied. “However, I just learned that an applied genetics experiment that I am fond of has the potential to go dangerously awry.”

“I didn’t know that you were doing genetic research again.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I just watched the results of someone else’s genetic manipulations.”

Flint’s head was resting on his front paws and I could imagine an artist adorning that image with a halo of complete innocence, but Flint opened his eyes just a crack and his voice in my head completed my thoughts:
“The devil is in the DNA.”

Joan and I had been living together for a few years by now. It was a good and comfortable relationship. That is not to say that we never had any friction. Two people living together for any period of time without having an occasional spat suggests a lack of spirit and independent thinking that would not be admired even in sheep. Flint was the cause of more of Joan’s harsh words than any other single source, but she recognized my feelings for him and would usually end any dispute over him with her by-now-traditional, “Well, he’s your dog!”

Late one afternoon, my friend Peter and I were sitting in the Faculty Club with some male colleagues sipping scotch and musing about life. Somehow the conversation turned to our personal lives and the merits and shortcomings of our wives, lovers, and the concept of marriage.

One of the people in the group was the well-respected personality theorist Jerry Wiggins. Someone turned to him and commented, “Well, Jerry, you should know a lot about marriage. After all, you’ve been married four times.”

Jerry laughed. “I suppose that marriage is just one of those things that you have to keep doing until you get it right.” He
took another sip from his drink and then added philosophically, “Marriage is a lot like a circus. It is not as colorful and as exciting as is represented in the advertising, but there is still enough pleasure to be had to justify the cost of admission.”

At that moment Peter leaned over to me and said, “Well, Stan, your Joannie is a good, sweet person. She certainly deserves a good husband. Maybe you should marry her before she finds one!”

It was a light conversation, but it left me thinking. Joan craved stability, tradition, and conventionality. She had difficulty describing our relationship to other people, and she would be much happier if we were married, since the role of “wife” is more easily understood and accepted than the role of “woman living with …” Joan’s mother was still alive, as were both of my parents, and they all seemed to expect that sooner or later Joan and I would get married. Because of the hurtful nature of my divorce I had been avoiding remarrying, but my more rational side knew that neither of us wa
s inclined to be anywhere else.

One evening Flint was resting next to me and I turned to him and said, “I’ve been thinking about getting married again.”

The voice that still had faint traces of the Cowardly Lion answered,
“I believe that it was Lord Byron who observed, ‘All tragedies end in death, and all comedies end in marriage!’”

“Since when have you become a philosopher?” I asked. “Anyway, do you think Joannie and I should make our relationship respectable and get married?”

Once more that silly voice responded, this time giving the opinion
“Seems like a good excuse for a party—as long as I don’t have to be respectable, too!”