Walking an old dog home

The gravel road north of us is quiet enough and crooked enough that I can go for a walk at 7 in the morning and not be bothered by traffic. Only a handful of people travel this way toward town for work or to take children to school or camp. They slow down as they pass, considering the dust, and wave from their Toyotas and Suburus. It’s a familiar road, one I’ve known going back at least 25 years, long before I moved here. It was the place in the country close to the north end of town where I could go for a long run, a route with hills.

What I didn’t know until we moved here this past winter was that it is a neighborhood of dog lovers.

None of these dogs is a guard dog. Not a single barking dog comes at me in a three-mile stretch of road. Two routinely come out to greet me along our lane, and four who follow, ignoring my half-hearted commands “go home,” have accompanied me for miles. One of our neighbors has told us their names, where they live, and the names of the humans they live with. We have met some of these people. Like children, dogs can help you meet new friends. But the best part of knowing other people’s dogs is that they come in their semi-wild state as secret friends themselves.

This morning as I watched some heavy equipment operators from Kansas City digging out a pond about a mile and a half north, a lady pulled up in her blue Prius and rolled down her window.

“Just wanted you to know there’s a dog not far back.”

“Yellow?” I knew the house and the dog.

“Brown and white.”

The picture in my mind didn’t match any dog I knew, and I tensed up a little as I went on to the sheep and goat farm, my turnaround point.

Homeward again, I was heading in the direction of the unfamiliar dog, and as I came to one of the three blind curves that keep traffic slow on this road, there was Brutus, almost a mile from home. At this corner, another neighbor had set up a memorial for a dog that had been shot, during an off-leash walk, so the story goes, after running through the gate at the opposite corner. The memorial consists of a laminated larger-than-life-size photo of the lost dog, a concrete urn with fabric flowers, and a sign with an arrow pointing across the road and the words, “Shoots dogs”—so there is an exception among the dog-loving neighbors, and I worry about the dogs, all pets, that roam past this corner on their own.

Brutus, a mostly brown medium-sized mongrel with a grizzled chin and a white neck and legs, wears no collar. He is stone deaf and stiff in the joints but makes his rounds daily, shuffling through the junipers along our northern boundary to drink from our garden pond in great gulps, avoiding the lily pads, the goldfish, the frog. His thirst is excessive. For all I know, his kidneys are failing. He stops briefly to be petted and has no interest in our cat, Pearl.

At the dog memorial corner, he lifted his chin at me and continued west, and I didn’t try to stop him, reasonably sure he knew where he was going. But I turned to watch him, and he looked back. The morning was hot. I leaned my head toward him and he considered. Then came toward me.

I wanted to get him to water. We kept to the east side, where the woods shaded the road, and I slowed my pace as he panted more heavily. There was no creek or pond in the ravine. Orioles and indigo buntings called. No cars passed. I patted Brutus on the shoulder, thought I felt a tick, couldn’t get him to stop and let me check.

We walked another quarter mile to his yard. Ahead I could see deep puddles in the gravel driveway, but Brutus stopped under a tree, scratched his back on the ground, then paced up the drive without drinking, ignoring the younger dog and the gray cat playing together near the house.

I have no photographs of any of this. I purposely leave my phone at home when I walk. (I have only been able to catch a photo Brutus as he’s heading back up the driveway after a stop at at our pond.)

Probably Brutus cut straight through the woods, through the swarm of newly emerged hackberry emperor butterflies, to drink from our pond. Then made it back home before I finished my own walk, which takes me the long way around, another mile. Coming down the path, I found my house quiet except for the butterflies, and inside Pearl was asleep on a soft chair by the window.

The dogs rest through the warm days and wait for evening, and probably we will see Brutus again tonight. Someday this old dog will stop coming to our pond, and I will be sorry.

Previous
Previous

Miss Lizzie

Next
Next

Magicicada