Cherished (21 page)

Meanwhile, Baron continued to age rapidly and pathetically. The vet gave him six months to a year, maybe. When Baron had an encounter with a skunk one night, it took him three days to recover, and he was never quite the same afterward. He could no longer navigate the stairs, so he made his home in the atrium, lying on a thick lounge pad, still attempting to guard the gate. His coat lost its luster. His face was pinched and lean. The sheet that covered his pad was often smeared with blood, for he developed sores on his elbows that became ulcerated. Arthritis had settled in his joints. It hurt him to stand, lie down, and walk. No longer could he use his forepaws independently. He barely made it to the vacant lot next door to relieve himself. Sometimes he fell.

The question burned in my mind. What should we do? How long should we avoid deciding and watch the slow, agonizing process of deterioration? With death the inevitable end, must we wait until he had pain past bearing?

But did we have the right to judge life's rightful length or its quality? What made me the guardian of the fate of another creature, one who couldn't communicate his thoughts on the matter?

At Thanksgiving, when Dan came home from college, he was shocked at Baron's decline. He reproached us. “Can't you see he's suffering? How can you let him live this way?”

We talked about it, hoping the problem would resolve itself and Baron would die gently in his sleep. As December came and the weather grew cold, I knew I had to act. We decided that the vet would come to the house the following day and administer the shot that would end Baron's life. I wanted him to die at home, with us. Shari and I would be together for his last moments. The ASPCA would arrive precisely on time, to take away his body.

That night we took Baron for his last walk. It was crisp and cold and the moon was nearly round, like a big silver plate, seen between the leaves of our neighbor's gigantic eucalyptus tree. I wanted to show him the moon, but he kept his head down. Baron plodded along, unaware that this was a special moment, a last time. I stopped to pet him, to feel his rough coat and the knotty bones on his back. I wanted to convey by my touch how much I loved him. He sat down and scratched his ear, his hind paw thumping on the sidewalk. I almost laughed at the incongruity: the sentimental person, the practical dog. I think Baron would have said we were doing the right thing.

Since Baron and Barney, we have had other dogs, some “on loan” when our children were in new jobs or new relationships. Of course the temporary became permanent, and we liked it that way. We fostered Charlotte and Isabella, our children's dogs. Charlotte was undoubtedly the cleverest of the lot, finding her way home from two miles away in a rainstorm. Isabella was learning how to read, using uniform blocks with words stenciled on them. Dan, now a scientist, had begun this training, and I agreed to continue it. (I didn't tell Dan, but it never really worked.) Sometimes I go through my photographs heaped in various boxes. Most are pictures of our dogs.
Barney, who after many years drowned in our pool. (Dan insisted that incontinence had led him to commit suicide.) There was Bridget, a German shepherd so beautiful that her birth family called her “Pretty Face.” Bruno, our last shepherd, was so unruly that we took him to a dog whisperer, who suggested we send him to the army. We didn't. Then came Kinia, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. To this day I'll stop any owner of a Ridgeback to tell about my Kinia's intelligence, loyalty, and yes, sense of humor. Now we have Buddy and Shadow, two midsize black rescue dogs of uncertain parentage. They are less robust than the large breeds we used to favor, but then, so are we. We talk about our dogs as if they were our children. And in a way, of course, they are. They are part of our family lore, our laughter, and our learning.

We loved them all, but there is something about the first dog we shared as a family that was different. Whenever we reminisce about our dogs, as often we do, when we mention Baron we share a certain look, a special smile, and we conclude, “Baron was the best dog.”

T
he enchantment of riding is a mysterious thing that generates never-ending reflection for those who wish to understand the mild euphoria produced by the proximity of horses. This is not the province of equestrian recreationists alone; the evidence abounds that Native Americans, cavalrymen, cowboys, and farmers were vulnerable to this sweeping affection, which finds itself in close bonds on the one hand and insatiable accumulation on the other. Among the accumulators are buffalo-hunting Indians, Coca-Cola heirs, sheiks, oilmen, and soon-to-be-bankrupt professors. The Plains Indians were liberated from the midwestern forests by the horse, and the cruelest strikes against their civilization were the execution of their horses, as at the Sand Creek Massacre, where a Methodist minister named Carrington tried to put a whole people afoot by
killing their mounts.

That my house adjoins my corrals is one of the blessings of my adult life. I start very few days without taking my coffee out to stand among our horses so that we may contemplate the beginning of another day. When I'm stressful or troubled that I can't make a piece of work come out right, or a friend or family member has received unsettling health news, or some other unhappy or unpleasant feeling comes over me that won't find a quiet place of storage, a visit to the horses nearly always produces relief. Relief and perspective, which is perhaps the same thing.

When we had an irrevocably dying horse, my veterinarian told me that we had to change our perspective and try to understand that animals accept what happens to them. And it's not as if they don't know. They know. We humans, on the other hand, have evolved to accept nothing. We don't accept how fast we go, how long we live, how much we eat, how frequently we copulate. Our position is:
It's all negotiable
or
I'll buy my way out of this.
In the life of horses, grave things happen from birth to death and they never negotiate; their bank accounts contain only the memories of their race.

Back to my corrals: The gates to native grass pastures are seldom closed, but there they are to see us anyway. We've swindled them with treats but are flattered because they seem glad to see us, and affection must be dealt evenhandedly to avoid jealousy. The personalities are very distinct: the erratic yearlings striving, not always successfully, for acceptance; the old mare with the frozen ears who requires twice the space the others need; a daydreaming mother-to-be, the star cutting horse who declared at twelve, by refusing ever to get into a trailer again, that her days of competition were over; the foursquare and uncomplicatedly heroic cow horse who shambles around like Ollie the Dragon but breathes fire when working cattle; my wife's cutting horse, informal inspector of all ranch activities; my head-case saddle horse, who spooks at grasshoppers; the trusting young mare who among all our horses is alone allowed to transport the grandchildren; the tall bay mare, the stately mother of champions — and I'm afraid what some would say are too many others. The largest group is the pensioners, aged ranch horses living serenely in a riparian cottonwood forest; and, beyond, the burial ground where our old mounts, old friends, lie — most at the end of long lives but some that were too short: a fall that broke a neck, a lightning strike, a twisted gut.

In 1957, I loped across a Wyoming pasture trying to rope a calf. After three unsuccessful throws, my horse stopped suddenly on his front feet and I sailed onto the ground in front of him, useless lariat in hand. To this day, I remember the contemplative look on that horse's face as he gazed at me on the ground, and the quiet acceptance as he let me climb on again. We'd agreed to accept my limitations, and to jog on home together. It's unique to share a time, to share a job, with a partner who doesn't judge you, even over the span of years. It occurs to you that you might do the same. Long exposure to horses should teach tolerance. One accomplished equestrian said you'll never be a champion until you understand and
accept the limitations of each horse. Certainly horses accept that humans can't see very far, smell very much, or hear very well. Our lurching two-legged slowness must seem amusing to any horse that doesn't wish to be caught. Every day, a rider must be reminded by his horse how little he notices about the surface of the earth. Squirrelly as we are, horses tolerate us and our addled, sex-crazed, money grubbing, vengeful brains.

Apparently there are more and more horses, more than ever before, shaded up, switching flies, traveling in single file to water, bucking off cowboys, leading parades, amusing children, skidding logs, sorting cattle, climbing mountains, carrying supplies — another society, almost, invading human loneliness.

F
irst, he falls on a few stairs on the way down to the street, missing his footing. The lightbulb's burnt out on the landing, and he seems furious about it, trying to find the step; perhaps, to his dimmed eyes, that dim hallway's really just darkness. Then, a few days later, even with new bulbs illuminating the way, he stumbles going up, and actually tumbles down nearly a whole flight to the landing, scaring Paul half to death. Happily, Arden seems partly made of rubber, his limbs twisting akimbo without any apparent harm. But the day comes when the stairs to the apartment are impossible; that old right hind leg just seems a delicate, withering thing, and there's simply no way he can manage. We carry him, but it's ridiculous to try to lug him up and down every time he needs to go out, even when I remember to keep my knees bent. And it's doubtless awful for him, one of us trying to lug seventy-five pounds of dog up and down the stairs every time he needs to go out. He
does
feel light now, in the way that old men get stringier and less meaty, but there's still a lot of him.

Luckily, it's a semester when we're off work, more or less. We have freedom to move, and can take Arden up to the house in Provincetown much earlier than we'd usually go to our summer place. We arrive in April, when it's leaden and chill, and the house seems glad to see us, suddenly lit with lamps and fires and habitation. To be there is a huge, immediate relief: Arden can live on one floor and spend as much time outside as he likes. We don't have to worry about getting him quickly in and out, and if he doesn't make it outside one day, it's not a problem — these old wood floors have already seen two hundred years of action, and nothing's going to hurt them. Plus he's known this house forever. It's a fine, easy place to be old.

And, so, six weeks pass, as the calendar moves toward Arden's sixteenth birthday, sometime in April, then on into May.

D
R.
K
AISER IS GENTLE WITH
A
RDEN,
and wouldn't dream of doing anything invasive. I like him; he's soft-spoken, curious about the creature before him. Though he is physically large, he does not seem to think of himself as such — the way Newfoundlands, say, seem vaguely apologetic for their size, a bit of slow delicacy in their largeness. Dr. Kaiser thinks it's great that Arden's had such a long span on earth, and he knows how attached to him we are. He makes no unrealistic attempts or promises or offers at all. Now it's all about comfort; he understands that, at this point, whatever life is left to this old survivor is, as they say, gravy.

Arden, naturally, does not like Dr. Kaiser as much as I do. He puts up with him, though, and cautiously accepts the liver-flavored vitamins the vet holds out to him.

Now the nickname that Paul has always favored for Arden seems the best: Tiny. Brave fellow, huffing along, figuring out how to move that uncooperative body from spot to spot. “Where is that Tiny,” we say. Napping under the budding forsythia, out on the gravel staring at sparrows. Although we sleep upstairs, Arden soon abandons any notion of coming up with us: he's happy to stay downstairs on the living-room rug, or, if we've built a fire that evening, on the bare floor of the dining room, where it's cooler. As spring comes on, he's more and more in the garden, staying in one place for long stretches. We have some little outings: trips to the vet, followed by a drive to the beach. The last time we go, he's clearly too sore and tired to even get out of the car, but we leave the tailgate open so he can look out and breathe in that current of Atlantic air.