I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (13 page)

Idler came to me in 1994 from the late Mrs. Paul Summers, Jr., MFH, of Farmington Hunt Club in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jill and I both revered Bywaters blood, a special type of foxhound bred before the War Between the States for the difficult soil conditions of Virginia. After the late Unpleasantness Between the States, this special line was refined, raised to new heights by a veteran of the war, last name Bywaters. The blood existed before, but now it had a name, and the succeeding generations of Bywaters, all fabulous hound men, carried forth the torch.

I hasten to add that American foxhunters
chase
, we don't
kill
.

The Bywaters blood fell out of fashion in the sixties, and by the seventies a few special masters preserved it, Jill Summers, a genius at breeding and I mean genius, being one. Hounds and horses, like hemlines, are the victims of fashion.

When I revived Oak Ridge Hunt in Nelson County, Jill generously gave me six couple of hounds, Bywaters blood. Hounds have been measured in twos, couples, since the pharaohs. Consistency has its virtues. So, I had twelve hounds, six couple, and very good hounds they were, Idler being one.

I built a temporary kennel dubbed the Taj Mahal. The best I can say for my skills is it kept them warm and kept the rain out. But Idler enjoyed it because, having no running water, I carried it out of the north branch of the Rockfish River in buckets. Twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit the river ran once you waded beyond the ice parts, so there was always water, but I turned blue. Idler accompanied me. Sweet fellow, if I stepped into the water, he stepped in with me.

He liked to watch the smallmouth bass (rockfish), the minnows, crappies, and crayfish. Once I had a proper kennel constructed with the help of the late Jack Eicher, a professional huntsman, Idler liked his new quarters. They all did, but Idler still wanted to go down to the river. Every day, we'd take our walk. No leash. Just the two of us. He noticed squirrels, hawks, the direction of the wind. As I pay great attention to these things, we had a lot to discuss. But with his fabulous nose, he could smell weather coming in half a day before I knew it. If he returned to his sleeping space, made a burrow in the straw, I knew when I reached the house to turn up the heat.

Tidy, clean, Idler never ripped up a thing. He greeted every guest to the kennels, willingly showing them his quarters. If you brought a cookie to reward him for the tour, he was blissfully happy.

He was six when he came to me, in great shape, had earned his Ph.D. in hunting, too. The other hounds deferred to him. I learned to defer to him as well.

Idler taught me with exquisite patience.

Growing up with a great-uncle who was a kennelman at Green Spring Valley Hunt Club, a grandfather who hunted his own small pack on foot, and men and women who adored hunting on horseback, on foot, with hounds, with gundogs, I thought I was well educated. He forgave me my misconception.

My grandfather, PopPop Harmon, not a talker, did preach to me: Trust your hounds. If you don't trust them, don't hunt them. I trusted Idler. His senses, much keener than I can imagine, picked up scent, changes in the temperature and humidity, before I did. When you're hunting a fox, an animal who can process information at warp speed, you need to pay attention. Every second counts, really. And Idler, great though he was, couldn't think as fast as a fox, but he had drive, unbelievable drive, and once he found the scent he was on.

He taught me to trust him in the field the first day of cubbing, the first year Oak Ridge was reborn. Our territory, rough, tried the patience of all the giving saints. It takes years to properly open territory in this part of the world, clear trails, build jumps, find fords. Out I rode, cast the pack on a high rise. Cubbing, the beginning of hunting, starts in Virginia in early September. Oak Ridge goes out at seven thirty a.m. The heat comes on fast, and you're finished by nine or nine thirty a.m. Scent has evaporated. I cast on the west side, for the sun had yet to kiss those pastures. However, a breeze blew in from the northwest. The pack dutifully began to work.

Nothing.

Idler came up to me, stood, opened his mouth for one deep yowl.

I said, “Get 'em up.”

Now, the hounds and the horses know the verbal commands and the horn calls, for foxhunting is a musical sport. On a good day for sound that horn call can carry over a mile.

Idler heard the command and saved my bacon. He didn't disobey me. I said, “Get 'em up.” He crossed the farm road, dipped down to a little stream, the pack followed him.

Sitting on the now retired Toma, I had a moment because that wasn't what I intended. Before I could call them back, Idler opened his mouth, his basso profundo voice sending shivers right up my spine and everyone else's, too. Then the whole pack sang in chorus. I hung on.

He knew where there was a chance for scent. He didn't disobey me, but when I opened the door he took his own line and we had a lovely day. That was when I realized truly what PopPop meant when he said, “Trust your hounds.”

If scent had vanished and someone had an involuntary dismount, Idler, if in the vicinity, would trot over to offer solace. If scent was hot, he'd give the human a sideways glance but kept on.

All the years I'd hunted in the field and loved it hadn't taught me a thing about being the huntsman. Thanks to Idler, I was on the fast track with recalled wisdom from PopPop and Jack, both of whom I still miss terribly. If the horn is in your hand, the hunt is, too. Thank God for Idler in those early years.

A powerfully built fellow, he weighed eighty pounds. Foxhounds run between fifty-five and eighty pounds. There's always variation, but that's the basic range. Ideally, one would like a pack the same size and the same weight. It can take decades to breed that and many never do. However, what really matters is can they hunt, the hell with how they look.

Idler had a strong face, large expressive eyes, and bowlegs. Running, you didn't notice. Walking, he resembled a sailor deep into the rum. Sometimes you had to laugh, but he always forgave you.

The years rolled by. I'd learned his lessons: Get on terms with your fox quickly; if it's a middling day swing into that wind every chance you get; watch my tail first. Not once did he call me too dumb to have been born, but he must have thought it.

The season came when he couldn't stay up front, then a later season he fell to the middle and finally behind. He hated being behind, and I knew it was time to retire him.

Up to the house he came. When I opened the door and told him, “Kennel up!” there, in his path, was a gray cat, Pewter, who would never have that high school senior superlative “Best Personality.”

In short, she was a hateful bitch.

She lived with house dogs and bludgeoned them daily. Idler listened to her abuse, refused to reply, and walked by her. She then followed, screaming obscenities. The other dogs ran for cover. He walked into the living room, spied the sofa, and jumped up. She jumped on the back to lean over and continue acting in a non-Christian manner. I petted him, and he went to sleep.

After a week, Pewter and Idler were the odd couple. She even rode in the truck with him, curling up on his back or in his front legs. Maybe this isn't on par with the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, but it certainly impressed me.

His perfect manners transformed my harpy into, well, a pussycat. Now it was the three of us who went everywhere together. What a sight we must have been, “a seventh seal” minus all the humans but one.

You know, he always rose when I entered a room.

By the time he was fourteen, he had to take medications for aching joints. Long walks became short walks. Pewter would minister to him when we'd come back to the house. He'd drink water, flop down, and she'd lick his face then purr as she curled up, two souls content in one another's company.

One day, I came home and he struggled to rise.

Always the gentleman; I knew his time had come.

The vet made a house call, and he passed away quietly with Pewter and me by his side. It's good to be with an animal or human when they cross over. At least, I think it is.

Poor Pewter mourned her friend for months. She finally revived. She no longer attacked the other dogs, but she never selected one as a special friend. He'd worked his magic on her as he had with me.

I owe that hound so much, but most of all I still always smile because he knew how to take care of a lady.

The Little Rascal

Beth Harbison

He was as black as coal. His eyes were soulful pools of shadow and light, promising love, devotion, loyalty, but a little hint of trouble. Classic Bad Boy stuff. His smile was so white, it was as if it was luminous. He was strong, built almost entirely of muscle and bone, and created an impression of danger with every powerful movement.

At two feet four inches, his physique was undeniably slight, but what he lacked in height he made up for in energy.

His name was Rascal.

He was a one-year-old black Lab.

In the year before we met him, my family had lost both our beloved golden retriever–Lab mixes, Zuzu and Bailey, at the ripe old ages of fourteen and fifteen. Zuzu had gone first, even though she was the younger one. I'd always had a special place in my heart for her: since the moment I'd brought my infant son home from the hospital, she had slept every night by his crib. Her devotion was so clear that we began to refer to her as Auntie Zuzu, the name our son had come to know her by, occasionally to the surprise and confusion of guests.

We had gotten Bailey when our daughter had started kindergarten, and she died two weeks before that little girl went off to college for the first time. The melancholy was enormous.

Over the years, I had looked for the breeder we had gotten Bailey and Zuzu from, to refer her to friends, but never with any luck. After Bailey died, I saw an ad for the golden-Lab mixes a few towns over from ours and, by a stroke of luck, it was the same breeder (she just had a new name and new farm). We were thrilled, and we rushed out and got two new puppies for way too much money because we were so excited to have dogs from the same bloodlines.

And they're wonderful dogs. They love us, and they love each other. Yes, perhaps they are a
little
cliquish (my sister calls them “the blondes,” with more than a little snark, because her desperate little dog bounces around them like a superball that flies out of bounds in a game of jacks, and, still, they never pay any attention to him). But they are good dogs.

However, before we'd found the breeder and decided to go that route, I'd vowed that any and every dog I got subsequently would be a rescue. So I worried that buying the blondes gave me bad dog juju. And of course, after we had them, adding a rescue would have been unfair to all three, so what we decided to do was foster. We could still help, but it wouldn't be a long-term commitment on our part that might upset the canine balance in our house. A few weeks caring for a dog that would otherwise have ended up euthanized in a kill shelter was
nothing
! Why, we probably wouldn't even notice a difference!

Enter Rascal.

He came from a kill shelter in North Carolina. His family had inexplicably given him up, even knowing what his fate would be. How does anyone get a puppy, raise him for an entire year, see how he loves them and depends on them, then just give him up to a cold, impersonal prison filled with other frightened and doomed animals? The selfishness that goes into that decision is completely beyond my comprehension. The fact that he was a beautiful, healthy, black English Lab—a breed that is constantly in demand and quite costly—just makes it even more puzzling why they didn't choose one of many other simple options in order to find him a family.

But they didn't. And as a result, I was the last leg of his long relay from North Carolina to Maryland. I met the older gentleman who drove the second-to-last leg of the relay in the parking lot of a California Pizza Kitchen about thirty miles south of my home.

As soon as I walked up to the black Mercedes, I saw a shadow inside start bouncing around, white teeth flashing with joy at seeing
another human
. I opened the door and loved him instantly—his optimism was startling. Bless his heart, he didn't know what he'd been through and that he shouldn't trust us all so openly. He was just ready to love anyone.

We did the handoff, and Rascal sat on my lap quietly all the way home.

Apparently, he's a fan of the car. Like babies who fall asleep in the car seat, he was lulled to sleep by the drive, and I was lulled into a sense of complacency with him. He was an angel! Just a quiet, sweet boy in need of love! Maybe, somehow, we could even keep him. . . .

I didn't realize his particular level of energy until we got home.

I had understood that he'd been neutered the day before and, having had only female dogs in the past for whom the equivalent operation is major, I believed he would need some TLC for a few days. Perhaps he'd lie quietly on a blanket while I brought him shallow bowls of homemade chicken noodle soup. We'd sit before the fireplace, him dozing and me content with the knowledge that I was a crucial link in the chain of his life.

I love dogs, his well-being was of the utmost importance to me, but doing a favor—no matter
what
the favor—never comes without at least a little bit of self-satisfied smugness on my part. It's one of the darker, more shameful parts of my character. Yes, I wanted to save this dog, I wanted to help at all costs, but I also wanted to be viewed as kind of an angel of mercy, if only by him.

Anyway, my visions of tenderly nursing him back to life and happiness were shattered immediately, along with two flowerpots on my porch, when I opened the car door and he shot out like a bullet, flying up the steps to the front door and flailing around, sniffing wildly at everything in front of him, knocking over everything behind him, and depositing a good amount of viscous saliva onto the wood decking, onto the house siding, and onto the clothes of everyone who was trying to catch him in order to calm him down and take him inside.