Good Dog

I grabbed one end of the pull toy and she latched on to the other with her strong teeth. Both of us shook the toy back and forth, which made her whole head move. It might have seemed like I had the upper hand, but not so. In no time at all, this wonderful 80-pound puppy had dragged me several feet across the shiny wooden floor. My 105-pound body was no match for the concentrated strength she held within hers. But I was not frightened—I felt sheer joy over the exuberance of this wonderful brown body with its black shadings on the eyes, ears, and nose and the white star on her chest.

Was it love at first sight? Oh, I don’t know. In some ways I was still mourning the loss of our old miniature sheep dog look-alike Mason, who had died a grueling death of congestive heart failure. I wasn’t sure I was ready for another dog, but Jim said that it wouldn’t hurt just to visit our friends who had this foster pup named Frankie. But being foster parents to several dogs, Gina and Mindy were good at persuasion—after all, it was their job to get these dogs from the no-kill shelter permanent homes.

And so we brought Frankie home for the weekend. By the next day, we were sure we wanted to keep this lovely great big puppy forever. We re-named her Babe (she just didn’t look like a Frankie to us), purchased a crate for her safety, procured huge chew toys and a blanket or two. Babe was ours to keep!

It takes a while to learn a dog, just like it takes a while to learn a friend. We found out fairly quickly that this dog would be super-protective. The postal worker and the newspaper delivery person could not come up on the porch without our hearing about it from Babe with her big gruff bark. We found that we had to be careful when any delivery person or service provider came to the door—Babe would race from the foyer door to the front window and back again, skidding as she rounded the corner, just to make sure she kept sight of the person coming and going. She hated any kind of uniform and any kind of hat or helmet.

We found out enough about her history to know that she and her sibling had been abandoned in a warehouse when her owner was arrested. More than likely her fear of uniforms and hats came from that early bad experience with police officers. From the same source came her fear of the outstretched hand. Whereas most animals respond to the gently offered hand to smell, Babe would back up, bare her teeth and snarl at the person. She did that both to my son and my sister—I was rather embarrassed by her lack of politeness, but, fortunately, she learned to love all family members—even son-in-law Brett who wears a police uniform.

Her protection took other forms, too. In our multi-level home, there were times when three of us—Jim, my son Geoffrey, and I—were on three different floors. In order to make sure she could take care of us, Babe would go to one of the landings between floors to make sure she could “cover” the territory. But, if, by chance, Jim and I were in the same room, then Babe was definitely going to be in that room. And as she got older, she was only happy if both Jim and I were present to walk her, even if was only for a potty break. If one of us stayed home, Babe would look over her shoulder to the back door to see if the other was coming outside; if not, she was going back in, regardless.

The longer Babe was a member of our family, the more we came to realize how intelligent this Labrador-German shepherd mix dog was. We never kept count of the words she knew, but they were many. Names of rooms, parts of the yard, particular foods and toys, different areas of our neighborhood park—she knew them all. And, of course, she learned to spell them, too, so we couldn’t keep our intentions from her unless we used hand and face motions. Even those she sometimes picked up on.

And, of course, she had the internal clock within her that kept us on her schedule. Regardless of place or activity, at a little before 9 p.m. Babe would show up or raise her head if she had been sleeping to indicate that it was time for the last walk of the evening. I have to admit that the switch between daylight and standard time always put her off a bit—why would anyone want to change all the clocks forward or backward at a whim of some government agreement?

As Babe got older and smarter, we realized that we no longer had to tell her to go to her crate in the basement if someone she didn’t know was coming to the house. The sound of the doorbell or a knock set her rounding the corner into the kitchen hallway, nudging the basement door open, and trotting down the steps into her crate. There was never a need to lock it—she would stay in the crate till the coast was clear of all “stranger-danger.”

This past year, when Babe turned 12, and we could see she was wearing down, we discovered another new thing about her. After years of warning her against chasing squirrels and small dogs, we found that we could take her off the leash in the park and let her stalk every squirrel she could find. She was no longer fast enough to catch one, but she did enjoy the hunt. Her body went into stealth mode, gliding silently forward with her ears flat to the side of head. Every once in a while she was able to run a few steps to “almost” catch a squirrel as it reached a tree or a fence. Those fence jumpers were the best of all—Babe just couldn’t decide where that squirrel had gone from the top of a fence.

And through all these days, we loved her more and she loved us more. This living, breathing, snoring animal was such a part of our family that we could hardly imagine life without her. But she had a tumor and she had bad legs. I went to the hospital on Monday (after we had walked Babe in the park that morning) and I came home on Wednesday evening. She was dragging a swollen leg and could barely move from her mat that we carried to the main floor. For two nights, the three of us held vigil, hoping against hope that this almost 13-year-old dog would miraculously turn into that wonderful 11-month puppy. But instead we had to say good-bye to a dog why was just as good at dying as she was at living—patiently, kindly, gracefully.

John Updike long ago wrote a poem about the death of a young dog who was just learning to be good and obedient to use newspapers for her potty training. Although the circumstances were much different with Babe, she was the same way—always wanting to earn that phrase “Good dog” when she did what we wanted her to do. She never would let her guard down—she would be “good dog,” no matter what. And she was.

Updike, John. “Dog’s Death.” https://hellopoetry.com/poem/10222/dogs-death/