Something About the Dog

Last weekend, I was at the home of friends with a group of friends. We had brought our knapsacks and were preparing to hike from their house down into the nature reserve for a picnic, and while we were awaiting the last arrivals and, in fact, petting the host family's dog while chatting about our own dogs at home, the man of the house exclaimed: "What's that?!"

A big brown heap of something, not obviously alive, lay on the lawn outside the picture window. It had not been there a moment ago.

It turned out to be a dying dog, a mixed breed of chestnut brown. A smoke-colored stripe scorched into the fur across his throat indicated that he had spent his life roped. He was all spine and ribs, as if you were looking at the skeleton of an upturned hull in a shipyard. One hind leg was badly injured. One eye was clouded over. The other eye was clear, dark brown, and responsive to human attention, but the socket was bloody.

Although usually I conceive of God as a source of compassionate energy that can be tapped, and not as a micromanager, in this case I could imagine God's having carried this creature in the palm of his hand and gently deposited him on this particular patch of grass in front of this particular gathering of people, as if to say: "Now, what will you do about it?"

For obviously the animal, which must have dragged himself up from the valley before collapsing in my friends' yard, was possessed of a powerful will to live. He was brought some kibble, and although he could barely raise his large, sculpted head, he ate. He was brought three bowls of water, one after the other after the other, and drank. He made no overtures, he didn't beg, but he took food and drink and was calmly responsive to kindly attention. I would even say that he had dignity.

I am used to petting the top of my dog's head. In fact, the professional who helped me to train her told me that dogs understand this gesture as praise. Leaving aside how he came to that psychological insight, or why it works, when it was my turn to make the dog's acquaintance, I patted and stroked the top of his head. His one clear eye looked up at me unafraid. "Oh," I crooned, "who is a beautiful boy, who is a good boy, who is a good and sweet and lovely dog?"

We did not go on the planned hike and picnic, but instead made phone calls to vets, and when one of them agreed to open his clinic for us, two of the men in the group carried the dog, large and unresisting, into a car and drove him there. The men came back with the following report: hospitalization and feeding, care for the dog's infected eyes and an operation on the dog's abscessed hind leg could come to a thousand dollars and even more, although past the thousand-dollar mark, the vet would absorb the cost.

The group put the issue to a debate and then a vote (which was not unanimous) – would we work with the vet to try to save the dog, and divide the cost of his care and feeding among ourselves, or would we choose to euthanize? One of the couples in the group volunteered to act as the dog's foster family until an adoptive family might be found for what might, after all, end up to be a three-legged, one-eyed dog.

I haven't stopped thinking about that dog ever since last weekend and, given that his new name has become the subject line of a growing e-mail thread among us, apparently the others haven't either. At some point this week, I realized that I am falling asleep every night with the image of the dog's handsome head in my mind.

None of us in the group has a lot of money. I for one owe the bank and the grocer and the pharmacist and! and! and! Yet when I marched to the money machine and withdrew my share of the dog's whopping, approximate hospitalization costs, I felt an additional surge of affection for him.

Yesterday, I went to visit the dog, who lay prone in a hospital cage on a clean blanket with his food bowl licked clean and his water bowl licked empty. He raised his heavy head to my fingers, which I could poke about a third of the way through the grating, and let me stroke the top of his head. The crooning started: "Oh, who is a good boy, who is a beautiful boy, who is a loved, loved dog?"

I put my fingertips to his soft muzzle and warm nose, and he licked them, once. His tail didn't have the strength to wag and, I realized, it will probably be a long time before he rediscovers his bark. But the vet says that he is eating seven or eight times a day and that his will to live is huge.

I blurted out to the vet, who is a stranger, about the dog, who is a stranger, "I love the dog!"

Afterwards, I thought about what that might mean. Because while sweet-talking the dog, and despite seeing his skeletal body and the sores distributed on it, by some trick of selective vision, I don't really see them at all. His beauty registers and not what mars it. When I see that dog, or imagine him and wish for his well-being, apparently I access distilled essence of dog, which is wholly beautiful. Which must mean that this dog has something to teach me about the nature of love.