Good Dog: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Loyalty

Introduction:

My Life in Dog Years

As I write this, my five-month-old son, Sam, is lying on a blanket in the living room, surrounded by toys. He’s cooing and babbling and kicking his legs. Of course, I’m watching his antics with delight, marveling at the changes each day brings to his coordination and personality. But my eyes are not the only ones on Sam. Just off the edge of the blanket my Boykin spaniel, Pritchard, lies with her head on her paws, tuned to the action.

Like most dads, I have big dreams for my son. Sam’s youth will be filled with love, encouragement, and exploration. He will also never be without a dog. I believe nothing builds a kid’s confidence and sense of worth like caring for a canine.

Thankfully my parents weren’t cat people. The first dog of my childhood was a mutt named Flap Jack. He came by way of a family friend who lived well beyond the city limits of our Savannah, Georgia, home. The product of a tryst between local strays, Flap Jack was flea ridden and frightened of a human shadow when we picked him up. My oldest brother, Bob, who had valiantly lobbied my parents for a dog, couldn’t get close enough to pet Flap Jack for a week. And though my parents had given in to Bob’s pleas for a pup, there was no chance the animal would be allowed in the house. I watched as Bob, with the help of our next-door neighbor, built a run and a doghouse, complete with a shingled roof. And I watched as the frightened little pup eventually learned his name, found trust in those who fed him, and became a dog. I followed the two of them around as little brothers do. And I remember the day, some years later, when Bob told me he was going to college and that Flap Jack would now be my dog, my responsibility. I recall exactly where I was standing in the yard and the sound of the cicadas and the feeling that I had become something altogether different than I was.

A few years later, when I graduated from eighth grade, my parents gave me a yellow Labrador retriever I named Salty Dog. I had dreams of running Salty in field trials and wading into duck swamps with him in the predawn darkness. But when Salty was just over a year old, he developed a dangerous habit. He would often bolt from the yard in the middle of a training session and not return for hours, sometimes days. Our vet suggested that neutering Salty would solve the problem. But a few weeks after the big snip, I was tossing a ball for Salty when he lit out for parts unknown. I went running after him, but my legs were no match. As usual, my mom and I piled in the minivan and went looking for him. We had no luck. Back at home, there was a message from the vet on the answering machine. Turns out Salty had shown up outside his office door—a two-mile trip that involved traversing a busy road—slobbering on the glass until they invited him in.

We picked Salty up and returned home. A few days later, he hightailed it yet again, and about an hour later the vet called. A couple of weeks after that, the same scenario played itself out. This time my dad drove me to the vet. On the way home, I asked my dad why a dog would be so intent on running to the vet’s office when most dogs hated going. With a bit of hesitation, my old man answered, Maybe he’s looking for his balls.

Salty never lived up to my field trial hopes, but he did live up to his name, accompanying me throughout my youth in a jon boat on the coastal waters. He died many years later after I had graduated from college and moved to New York City to become a magazine editor. Even though his Houdini-like escapes had long since stopped (initially curbed by an electric fence and later old age), I had decided that an NYC apartment was not the place for a dog used to napping in the warm sun and tormenting squirrels at his leisure. The teary phone call from my mother not only left me crying but also dogless for the first time since I was a child.

That void would not be filled until the arrival of Pritchard. I had left NYC for a position at Garden & Gun in Charleston, South Carolina. My bride to be, whose roots ran centuries deep in New Canaan, Connecticut, was unsure about the move, but her spirits were buoyed by the promise of a dog (and warm winters). We quickly settled on a breed, and not long after we had six pounds of wriggling puppy. Pritch was the first being that we loved together. And we spoiled her rotten. I once again dreamed of training a world-class gundog, but Pritch had other ideas (mainly sneaking onto the bed for a nap when no one was watching). Still, she loves to be in the field. And one day soon, if I’m lucky, Sam and I will head outdoors together, following Pritch into the woods.

Around the Garden & Gun offices we often joke that the magazine’s Holy Trinity is bourbon, dogs, and barbecue, but dogs truly reign supreme. Since the magazine’s first issue (Spring 2007), we’ve included a column called Good Dog, and from the start it’s been an overwhelming reader favorite. The concept is simple: Find great writers who want to tell stories about their dogs. The canines can be purebreds or mutts, good or bad, living or dead. And some of the best writers in the country have answered the call. I challenge you to get through John Ed Bradley’s tale of his smelly, drooling bulldog without shedding a tear. Or finish Bronwen Dickey’s paean to pit bulls without changing your tune on the breed. Or make it through just a few paragraphs of Jonathan Miles’s essay about his failed bird dog without laughing so loud you’ll make sure no one is looking. For this book we compiled the best of the best and added a bunch of great new essays too.

I’m hoping my boy, like most of the writers in this book, will grow up to be a dog person. And if he calls me one day to ask whether I think he should get a dog of his own (or one for his kids), I’ll tell him what my friend Guy Martin wrote in these pages: "It’s simultaneously never the right time for a new dog, no matter what, and always the right time for a new dog, no matter what." In other words, get the dog. I hope he listens.

David DiBenedetto

Editor in Chief

Garden & Gun

Charleston, South Carolina

CHAPTER 1

The Troublemakers

Appetite for Destruction

BY T. EDWARD NICKENS

She marked the beginning of our marriage, arriving just a few months after we walked down the aisle, during that heady time when life seems so full of hope and possibility. But no way were we having a kid, not yet, so Sweet Emma Pearl curled up in a little yellow ball and rode, whimpering, in Julie’s lap the entire four-hour drive home from my buddy’s house. Seven weeks old. She slept in our bed and lay down beside the tub whenever either of us took a shower and laid her head in Julie’s lap for every meal we ever had at home for close to a decade. It’s not dirt if it came off Emma’s paws, Julie liked to say, even when the dirt was swamp muck or the red clay from a Piedmont dove field. We loved that dog as only a young couple starting out in the world can love a dog that’s all their own. So to us it was only a charming part of her canine nature that she had the appetite of a goat.

We’ve all heard about hounds that can’t stay out of the garbage or refrain from chewing the television remote to bits. But Emma’s gustatory excesses went way beyond a lack of self-control. She was hardly a year old when we realized there was more to her munching than a puppy’s normal and expected oral fixations. Her first serious meal of something that only marginally resembled food was a three-pound bag of self-rising flour. We came home to find her on the kitchen floor, panting, face dusted as white as a mime’s, muzzle caked with marble-size globs of Martha White’s best. She was panting from thirst, and we fed her teaspoons of water at a time, fretting about the giant loaf of bread rising in her belly.

And it was on. Over her nine years, no amount of yelling, pleading, or chasing could keep her from ingesting whatever struck her fancy. She would cower at my thunderous ovations of rage, licking her lips. I doused the trash can with cayenne pepper, which she enjoyed immensely. I mined the kitchen counters with mousetraps to snap some sense into her paws. Nothing doing.

She ate onions beyond counting. She would hide them under her dog bed and gum them in the middle of the night.

Used Q-tips were a treasure not to be rushed, but slowly gnawed on like cud.

She could pick individual blackberries with her lips.

Once, I took a frozen smoked turkey breast out of the freezer, set it on the counter, then ran to the grocery store. When I returned, less than twenty minutes later, there was no turkey breast to be found. Just one tiny corner of a plastic bag and a single sprig of rosemary on the floor. Emma looked as if she’d been blown up like a pool toy. In the time it took me to buy a box of rice, she’d eaten close to eight pounds of turkey breast, bone, and plastic bag. All of it frozen hard as granite. She didn’t even break a tooth.

At the time, this was all a funny sideshow, but as Emma’s tastes were emboldened—and once we had kids—her feats of ingestion became more problematic. Our children learned to walk around the house like gibbons, arms stretched overhead, fingers grasping crackers out of Emma’s reach. Our solution to dirty diaper storage would have passed the security protocols at Fort Knox. She had a love for beaver poop that was undeniable. This was a particular offense to my hunting buddy, who often shared a seat with Emma on the odiferous ride home from the duck swamp.

Perhaps her most impressive infraction occurred the year I started fly fishing for striped bass. On my Christmas wish list were dyed bucktails, flashy tinsels, and strips of glittery foil—just a few of the ingredients for Clouser Minnows. It never occurred to me, my wife has said, many times since, that the dog would be the least bit interested.

When Julie walked into the house, she thought she’d stumbled onto a murder scene. In the middle of the living room, Emma had feasted on a five-pack of bright red bucktails, grinding the crimson ink into a three-foot circle of carpet. Elsewhere, blue and green orbs of color marred the floor, and everywhere was the shrapnel of chewed-up tinsel and foil. We had to rip up the Berber carpet. For a week I shoveled brilliantly ornamented poop from the backyard.

I’m absolutely convinced that Emma’s garbage-hound habits led to her ultimate demise. The official diagnosis was pancreatitis, and we never wondered what might have caused that. The first time it hit her hard, I was in the Alaska backcountry, unreachable for two weeks. Julie rushed Emma to the veterinarian with a request that he was all too willing to grant. I don’t care how much it costs, Julie told him. But keep this dog alive until my husband gets home.

She held on for another week and a half, then collapsed on the living room floor. This time Emma curled up in a big yellow ball, and lay whimpering, once again, in Julie’s lap. We sat there together, the three of us on the floor, just like in the old days, marveling at all the love we’d managed to hold since Sweet Emma Pearl came home.

The next morning I had to cook seven pigs for a church barbecue, and once I got the coals started I carried Emma to the car, and Julie and I drove her to the vet. I dug Sweet Emma’s grave while bawling like a baby, hands slicked with hog fat, the vinegary tang of barbecue sauce wafting over the backyard.

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of her headstone in the backyard under the tulip poplar, and I get the urge to take a greasy paper towel or the cut-off ends of onions and toss them on the grave. Some might figure that for a sacrilege. But I’m pretty sure my Emma would appreciate the gesture.

Sadie, the White Devil

BY ALLISON GLOCK

I grew up with outdoor dogs. This was the way it was back then, where I was from. Dogs were beloved, but not welcome on the couch or in the kitchen. The dogs of my youth were thus matted, sandy, and often drooling. Dogs with mud caked in their fur and flea-bitten noses. Dogs that rode untethered in the backs of flatbed trucks. Dogs that wouldn’t know a canine sweater if they swallowed one. Dogs that, when injured, were not taken to the vet for $3,300 hip-replacement surgeries, but left to adapt or, if they couldn’t, walked one last time out behind the garden shed.

My mother’s West Virginia family had no dogs, as even a free dog costs money. So when I was allowed to adopt my first puppy—a mutt I named Taffy in an unusual fit of girlishness—I also got a long lecture about finances and responsibilities. Taffy was more than just my first dog. She was an extravagance. Even so, Taffy was mostly relegated to the yard. As were all the dogs that followed. My parents were not what have come to be known as dog people.

You don’t want to deal with the havoc of an indoor dog! my mother would advise. The mess alone.

It wasn’t until I graduated from college that I adopted my first real dog, which is to say, the first animal I would truly raise on my own. Indoors. The way real dog people do.

I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a friend told me about a shelter just outside of town that specialized in hard to place animals. Why I believed I was equipped for a hard to place animal having had essentially no experience with pets beyond refilling the outside water bucket and picking poop out of the yard can only be chalked up to the willful arrogance of youth.

On my initial visit to the shelter, I met several adoption candidates. The volunteers, who were not unaware of my limitations, steered me toward mature dogs that seemed really, really tired.

Buttercup is a sweet old girl who is happiest in her bed, one said as I stroked Buttercup’s wiry chin. And we also have Jake, she continued. He is almost blind, really gentle, very passive.

I liked Buttercup and Jake. I did. But while I was weighing the pros and cons of a blind dog versus an inert dog, another candidate announced herself. She did this by lunging at my thigh.

The volunteers gasped, quickly pulling her off, breathlessly asking how she got out and ushering her back to her special place far from other dogs and visiting strangers.

What’s her story? I asked.

The workers shot each other panicked glances.

Oh, Pandy is not for you. She has some unique challenges.

Like what? Her name? I joked, eyeing Pandy, who was vibrating with hostility in her pen, staring at me as if I were raw hamburger in a people suit.

She was badly abused, a volunteer said. And it has left a lot of emotional scarring. She will be a handful for even the most skilled dog trainer.

And there it was. The gauntlet.

Can I make an appointment to see her again?

The volunteers conferred in the back of the room like car salesmen. Eventually, the head shelter worker emerged with a ream of forms.

Fill these out, then we’ll see.

Apparently adopting a potentially life-threatening dog required additional paperwork. I went home and dutifully penned in every line. If they thought they were going to put me off adopting Cujo 2.0, they were sadly mistaken. I was stubborn. And strangely drawn to Pandy. She was beautiful, as many crazy females are. Her coat was white with black patches, her nose long, proud. She was an Australian shepherd mix, a narrow, tall dog, nearly my five-ten height when on her hind legs. Her eyes sat wide on her face, making her whole mien shark-like. She moved in the same spirit, determined and fierce and breathtaking to observe. It didn’t deter me that she had snapped at me on first sight. Many of history’s most enduring love relationships began just that way. Besides, I knew no one else would ever adopt her. And the shelter folks knew it too.

I took Pandy home a few weeks later, after a labored approval process and several more visits, some more harrowing than others. Once home, Pandy became Sadie, a fresh start for her and for me.

I’d like to say that after she was settled and nurtured and taken to many, many obedience and canine behavior modification classes, Sadie chilled out and became the sweet companion I craved. She did not. Sadie stayed insane. Just as with humans, some damage cannot be undone, only managed. So I adjusted. I quickly learned to handle her quirks and complexities, to jump through countless hoops to avoid causing her even a whiff of distress, lest she explode. At times, I felt like I was dating Naomi Campbell.

We avoided things, like backpacks, and tinfoil, and loud noises, and other dogs, and bright light, and Christmas trees, and sticks, and wet grass, and my mother, and squirrels, and my roommates when they’d been drinking, which was pretty much all the time.

Sadie was a deeply cynical dog. She wouldn’t accept food from a stranger. She didn’t like unfamiliar people touching her. And she was very clear about her boundaries. You could be stroking her back without issue for two minutes, but once Sadie decided it was enough, you’d better stop or risk losing your ring finger.

Regrettably, there was no way to know every time Sadie was ready to freak. With mental illness comes a certain level of built-in spontaneity. One afternoon she charged a potential suitor because he was wearing a baseball cap. Sadie had met the boy before, but the cap triggered her madness, and in an instant, she went after him, teeth bared, an attack that sent all six-foot-three, 280 pounds of him tumbling into the protective cover of a nearby hedge.

It was the hat! I said, running after him. She hates hats!

I apologized, but the damage was done. My suitor (and his hats) stopped coming around.

Which was probably for the best, because Sadie had other troubling habits. Like nervous pacing around the perimeter of the room. And growling outside the bathroom door whenever anybody besides me was inside.

Sadie never bit anyone, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. So legendary were Sadie’s freak-outs, my friends dubbed her the White Devil. Describing her as high maintenance would be like calling Bravo’s housewives of New Jersey repugnant—a description woefully short of the mark.

And yet.

I loved that dog more than any dog I have shared my time with before or since. I had to earn her affection, but once I did, Sadie was loyal to a fault. She was protective. And smart. Sadie appreciated my efforts to give her a better life and never forgot the abuse she’d survived before. More simian than canine, she was like a research chimp clever enough to realize the crappy hand she’d been dealt. No pushover, Sadie knew the score. Life is hard. People can’t be trusted. Vigilance is key. Be wise about whom you love, and when you do love, do it with every fiber of your being. Till death do you part.

And so it was with Sadie and me.

A few months after my second child was born, Sadie became ill. We’d been together for more than ten years, and she was suffering greatly. In our last photograph, taken hours before she died, I am on the floor, wrapped around her like a blanket, my one-year-old reaching her tiny hand toward Sadie’s barely open mouth. (Sadie was never aggressive toward children. She knew, I think, where goodness lived.)

When the vet told me I had to put Sadie down, something inside me broke. Well-meaning friends suggested maybe I should be relieved. She was, after all, a lot of work. Which was true. But I was not relieved.

I have had more dogs since Sadie. Right now I live with two rescue pit bulls who are joyful and goofy. They chase balls and frolic and never snarl at anyone. They are normal, good-natured dogs who don’t cause me a moment’s worry. And I love them too. But it isn’t the same. My pits will never break my heart. That distinction is reserved for Sadie. The White Devil. The first dog I dared to let inside.

The Canine Criminal

BY C. J. CHIVERS

When some people remember the dogs in their past, they remember play and affection and hunting trips. Me? I remember a felon. Max, we called him. He started out with promise but in a few swift years evolved into a lean, one-eyed, battle-scarred epileptic with a record of time served and a list of enemies earned.

Time erodes memory, and certain details of Max’s crime spree are lost to the decades. When exactly was he born? No one can say. It was the mid–1970s, and our parents had decided that our family was due for a dog. So we drove one day in the station wagon to a veterinarian’s office outside of Binghamton, New York, where we lived. There the vet—we called him Doctor—ran a small kennel. The doctor sold puppies cheap: ten dollars a head.

In a stinking room, boxed off with fencing into separate cells, were scrums of small, yipping dogs. Among them was Max—a skinny mixed-breed hound, mostly black, with a whippy tail, a white neck, and brown spots above his dark eyes. He had an underbite on one side, which gave him a world-wise air, as if he had already done time. And he could leap—higher than the other dogs competing for attention. We selected him immediately, struck by his electric energy. He was also small—destined not to top thirty pounds, but rippling with muscle, even as a pup. He seemed the canine equivalent of a lightweight boxer. This was the first of many deceptions. Max had not, we would learn, acquired the build of a disciplined prizefighter. He had the rough-hewn frame of the inmate, the reprobate training for escape.

We brought him home.

My father had been raised with hunting dogs, and later, because his father had been blinded in a hunting accident, he had lived with Seeing Eye dogs, too. He expected rules. Rules were imposed. Max could not venture upstairs. He could not put a paw on furniture. He was quickly house-trained. Binghamton had a leash law, and a dogcatcher, and so Max was expected to stay home, fenced in the yard except when out with the kids, when he was to be kept close.

Like many rules,