Dogged Pursuit Read online

  It wasn’t as simple as that, I soon learned. With all the paperwork I filled out, I may as well have been adopting a Romanian baby. And then I had to be (excuse the pun) vetted. A pair of Sheltie-rescue volunteers came out to give me a good looking-over, all but checking my teeth and fondling my fetlocks. They inspected the house and finally met Carmen, who gave her best wiggling-bottom welcome and enthusiastically agreed to put on a weave-pole demonstration.

  Two days later I got the news: I’d been approved and could arrange a date to drive out and meet Dusty. At this point I was still telling myself that I didn’t have to adopt him. This was an exploratory errand only. No one could force me to take him. I was an American citizen, a taxpayer, and a college graduate, and I knew my rights. I don’t carry a gun, but I know several lawyers and can dial a mean cell phone when cornered.

  It was only after I’d made the date and was mapping my route that I realized that paying a call on Central Illinois Sheltie Rescue would involve actually driving to central Illinois. In fact I would be going to Bloomington, a good two hours plus from my home in the heart of Chicago—an awfully long trek for someone who wasn’t 100 percent convinced there was something waiting for him at the other end. But I reminded myself that once I’d gotten seriously into agility, I’d be doing a whole lot of long-distance driving. So I should just gird my loins, square my jaw, and start getting used to it now.

  Eventually, after an endless, enervating succession of highways, strip malls, and industrial parks, I arrived at Natalie’s house, tucked away in a placid, sunny little development like you’d see in a 1960s sitcom. It couldn’t possibly have been more white-bread. I’m half Italian, half Irish, yet suddenly I felt wildly ethnic. I rang the doorbell and heard a chorus of affronted barking, so there was no question that this was the right house.

  Natalie answered the door. She was a pleasant-looking woman in a pastel Sheltie sweatshirt, with a quantity of blond hair styled in a way I haven’t seen outside of John Waters movies. I tried not to stare, but I was fascinated, as though I’d suddenly descended on Laplanders in native dress. Her husband appeared behind her; he was barefoot, which I took as an indication that we would not be standing on ceremony.

  I was eager to get a look at Dusty—whose voice I presumed was one of those still yapping furiously a few rooms away—but first I was obliged to sit at the kitchen table (piled high with canine staples and accessories) and go through the contract, clause by clause. I was beginning to wonder whether it might in fact have been easier to just get that Romanian baby. Though I had my doubts about how well a little Constantine or Irina would maneuver the weave poles.

  “Well, I guess that’s it,” said Natalie as we came to the end of the last page. “Are you ready to meet Dusty?”

  “Darn tootin’!” I said. Being in the suburbs was clearly taking a toll on my speech patterns.

  Natalie’s husband opened an adjacent door, and a half-dozen Shelties tumbled in as though they’d all been listening with their ears pressed against it. They quickly righted themselves and started barking, circling each other, circling me, barking some more, and generally calling attention to themselves in the most intimidating manner possible, which, given that they were Shelties, wasn’t very intimidating at all.

  They were handsome specimens with bright eyes and bouncing coats. All but one. And when I saw him, my heart sank. When he spotted me, he reacted no better. He stopped short, backed carefully away, and took up refuge under a chair, from the shelter of which he glared out at me balefully. His pipe-cleaner limbs were poised to attack should I be reckless enough to approach.

  “That would be Dusty,” said Natalie, but I’d already inferred as much; who else could he be? A mutant horsefly, maybe, that slipped in while the door was open? To my surprise he was much scrawnier and odder looking than the photo had led me to believe. Was there an Extreme Makeover: Canine Edition they’d sent him to just prior taking his picture?

  Natalie’s husband fetched some American cheese slices from the refrigerator and handed them to me. “Offer him some,” he said. “Make him come to you.”

  “He likes cheese?”

  “All dogs like cheese,” he said confidently, as though it were a maxim.

  I tore away a quarter of one of the slices and dangled it toward Dusty. “Cheese!” I said. “Mmm, yummy! Cheese, boy! Hubba hubba!”

  Immediately, I was accosted by five other Shelties, all prancing and dancing on their hind legs and doing whatever else they could to prove that “I deserve it, over here—cheese for me me me me.” Mr. Natalie had to round them all up and usher them out of the house.

  This left just me, crouching on the kitchen floor, and Dusty, glowering at me from beneath the chair. I extended my hand a little farther toward him. My left hand—so in case I lost any fingers I could still hold a dinner fork.

  But Dusty showed no interest in the morsel, no matter how much I dangled it or flapped it at him or pronounced upon its nummy-numminess. I decided to change tactics: I shut my mouth, sat stock-still, and left my arm suspended in place—like a statue of Mao, pointing boldly into a future of universal comradeship and olive-drab pajamas. The muscles in my shoulder were just beginning to twinge a bit when, finally, he put forward one tentative paw. Then another. Keeping a wary eye on me lest I spring suddenly to life, he crept toward me, his belly nearly grazing the floor, till he was within reach of the cheese. He then snatched it from my hand like a Venus flytrap and scurried back beneath the chair.

  Emboldened by success, I waited till he was licking his chops, and then held out the next piece.

  By these painstaking measures, I was able, over the course of several minutes, to not quite make friends with him, but establish a mutually beneficial relationship. I had cheese I clearly wished to dispose of; he was conditionally willing to take it off my hands. Not an inauspicious beginning. I know of marriages based on less.

  It was getting late in the afternoon, and I still had a two-and-a-half-hour drive back to the city. Time to make a decision. I looked out the window at the other Shelties, who frolicked in the backyard as though convinced someone, somewhere, had a camcorder trained on them. They all seemed clever and ambitious and invincibly well adjusted. I could, I realized, take one of them instead.

  I simply couldn’t go through with it. The idea of once again bringing Dusty to the brink of adoption, only to toss him back at the final moment, was repellent to me. I didn’t know exactly what happened to rescue dogs that proved unadoptable, but I could hazard an unpleasant guess. And I really didn’t want that on my conscience.

  I could always play for time—tell Natalie I needed a few more days to think about it. But I knew, even as I considered this, that I would not be making the drive to Bloomington again (unless perhaps I were fleeing the authorities, in which case this seemed like a pretty good place to go to ground). No, I really, honestly had to decide whether I’d be signing that contract or not, and I had to do it right now. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and listened as expectantly as Natalie to what was about to pass my lips.

  On the long drive back home, Dusty sat beside me in the front of the car. Not the safest place for him, but whenever I placed him in back he leaped over into the passenger seat, so I decided not to bother fighting it. He sat bolt upright, his posture vastly more regal than the Wile E. Coyote skulking he’d done back at the foster house. He looked, well, handsome. Almost. Particularly if you gave him only a quick glance every now and then. And if you weren’t wearing your glasses. And squinted.

  He also drooled copiously and incessantly for the entire two hours and eleven minutes it took to reach the city—so much so that I feared he might drop dead from dehydration before I managed to get him home.

  But he did not die. In fact his life was just gearing up.

  CHAPTER 2

  What the Dickens

  When Jeffrey got home from work, he took one look at Dusty and said, “That’s the new dog?” When I nodded, he took another, longer look an
d said, “What happened to it?”

  “Nothing. What do you mean?”

  “Just . . . Is it always going to look that way?”

  So it wasn’t quite love at first sight. Dusty didn’t help matters by trying to dry hump Jeffrey’s Coach briefcase or snarling at him when he tried to take it back. “You are so on your own,” he said as he retreated to the relative safety of the TV room.

  The days that followed brought only marginal improvement. Dusty was wary of his new surroundings and took his time accommodating himself to them, with one exception: he immediately marked all four corners of the backyard and thereafter fiercely defended them as though anyone who approached, human or canine, represented the most vicious threat imaginable. He exempted Carmen, as she was already firmly ensconced when he got there; in fact he all but ignored her as he claimed the territory around her. All the while she watched him with a kind of quizzical tolerance, much as I imagine the Queen of England must have regarded Gandhi during his state visit to Buckingham Palace—and with, I’m sure, a similar question in her mind as to when this peculiar little string bean might be going on his way. In Dusty’s case, of course, the answer was, “Never.”

  As the days passed, he rapidly extended the boundaries of his turf to include the street on which we lived; then the entire block; then the neighborhood in toto; and finally, heroically, to anywhere in the city I walked him. We would descend on some new frontier, he’d urinate posthaste on the nearest hedge, and that would be that: ownership had been transferred, sovereignty reassigned. Regime change by bladder release. And oh, by the way: terror alert is at orange.

  He was, in fact, so viciously antisocial, so feral on our walks—I had to restrain him from attacking anyone who came within a dozen yards of us—that I e-mailed Natalie to inquire what, if anything, she knew of his history, which, in my blithe egoism, I’d neglected to ask about earlier. She sent back the bare facts of his prior life as she knew them. He apparently had spent most of his first year chained up outside a trailer adjacent to some train tracks in downstate Illinois, in which unvarying circumstances he survived driving rain, withering heat, and crippling cold until someone—presumably the neighbors who must exist even at this degree of isolation—either reported this case of naked neglect or simply took him from the premises without asking permission; Natalie wasn’t sure which. Either way, he ended up in the custody of the rescue society.

  For some time after learning this, I couldn’t look at him without lapsing into pity over what I imagined was a puppyhood of Dickensian privation. That he hadn’t come through it with the undimmed good nature of an Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickelby, I couldn’t really hold against him; after all it’s hard enough to maintain faith in human nature when you’re actually human. If you’re an abused dog, forget about it.

  And I believed he was abused. He had a special loathing of children; I quickly learned to shorten his leash whenever any of the neighborhood kids came barreling by. They would unfailingly ask, “Is he friendly?” and I would snap, “No!” a moment before Dusty himself snapped considerably more persuasively. When I first heard the circumstances of his early life, I had an aha moment, because, as I recall from my own childhood, there is nothing more irresistible to the prepubescent mob, no greater prod to its natural savagery, than a tethered animal. I was convinced that Dusty, when not enduring the brutal assault of the quixotic weather, had had to contend with the equally brutal assaults of underage gangs—their sticks, their stones, their slingshots and pellet guns.

  I suddenly realized that I was indeed writing Dusty’s story, but not the part that had inspired me to adopt him in the first place. It was time to work on that happy ending—and that meant fulfilling my role as his rescuer, in every sense. I was clearly his only hope. He had for so long guarded his little patch of ground and defended his life and limb against hostile forces that it was all he knew how to do; and now I’d brought him into an environment where he could magnify the scope of that task exponentially. He’d taken far too much responsibility on his bony little shoulders. I had to get him to cede that responsibility to me—to take my cues, look to me for direction—so that he could relax, could finally, and at long last, just be a dog.

  So I signed him up for the first available obedience class. This had the added benefit of paving the way to agility training. Obedience develops the basic behaviors—sit, stay, heel, down, and the like—which help establish the authority over your dog that you’ll need when you enter the agility ring.

  But I worried about bringing him into in a room filled with other people and their dogs. Given the ferocity with which he confronted any newcomers on his daily rounds, how would he react to such a quantity of them all at once? Would he become so overwrought, so deranged, that I wouldn’t be able to turn his attention back to me?

  As it turned out, his viciousness was in direct proportion to the vulnerability of the threat at hand. A single jogger, a woman walking her beagle, a UPS deliveryman—these kinds of stray wanderers into his field of vision sent him into a tailspin of lethal rage. But when faced with a dozen strangers, each accompanied by a canine of often impressive size, something in him short-circuited. He shut down almost to the point of catatonia. In fact I was a little embarrassed that first night of class; on my application form, under the question “What would you like to accomplish with your dog in this course?” I’d written, “To curb his aggression and put a brake on his hair-trigger temper.” When the instructor, a woman named Jan who dressed like a high school basketball coach, had each of us make an introduction to the rest of the group, she stopped after my turn and said, “This is Dusty? This is the savage man-eater you want me to tame?” In response, Dusty peered out at her from where he cowered behind my calves.

  It was a paradox, certainly, but I wasn’t about to question it, since it made him more tractable in class. So far from fulfilling my fear that he might lunge at anyone who came near to us, he pressed himself against my legs and darted terrified glances at the yapping multitude around him.

  While this certainly helped me control him in class—he willingly stuck by me and remained more or less attuned to whatever I said to him (though he was often distracted by the barking and brawling of other less-inhibited dogs)—it didn’t solve my original problem, which was his own highly selective aggression. It never failed that, after an hour of teaching him to sit, stay, and heel, all of which he mastered quickly and meekly, no sooner did he get all four paws into his own backyard than he would devolve once more into the beast of the Apocalypse, baying for the blood of innocent passersby.

  I expressed my frustration to Jan, who listened patiently if a tad dubiously. “Give it time,” she said. “He may not be exhibiting aggression in class, but he is learning to defer to you. You’re gradually becoming his alpha figure. There’s an alpha male in every dog pack who rules the roost. The more you work on obedience exercises at home, the more quickly he’ll learn to translate your authority to that area of his life, and then you’ll have the tools to deal with his aggression on your own.”

  So we practiced at home. I put him through the same paces we went through in class each week. I hooked him up to a ten-foot leash, and leaving it slack I allowed him the freedom of the yard. Then I called, “Dusty, come!” And when he ignored me, I started reining in the leash, physically pulling him to me—all the while reinforcing his approach by saying, “Good boy, good boy, good boy!” (which presumably he could hear over his guttural choking) and then giving him a treat when he finally reached me. And what do you know, it worked as well as it did in class: he eventually got the message that when I called him resistance would be both futile and unpleasant, whereas compliance would be pleasant and profitable. In no time at all, he was coming to me of his own volition; I no longer had to reel him in like a nineteen-pound mackerel.

  That is, except when some vicious threat appeared across the fence. Say, the mailman or a pizza-delivery boy or someone who had the sheer galling nerve to actually live next door.
In that case Dusty exploded into cacophonous fury, unable or unwilling to hear me shout, “Come, come!” and resisting mightily when I hauled him in, to the point of actually strangling himself. More than once his tongue turned black, and on one memorable occasion he actually blacked out—keeled over as if someone had shot him. (Fortunately, I’m not faint of heart about such things, having passed out a fair amount myself during my college days.)

  And all the while, Carmen lay several yards away, watching with sphinxlike serenity and a look in her eye that was almost mocking. “This is my replacement?” she seemed to say. “This is the future champion? Mm-hmm. Good luck with that.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Class Struggle

  I told Dee I’d be returning to her agility class with a new Sheltie, and when I walked in on the first night, she did a kind of double take. I suppose she was expecting another Carmen, whom she’d nicknamed the Diva for her habit of pausing in midperformance to glance approvingly at her reflection. Clearly, my new dog had no reason to be quite so fond of mirrors.

  “Well, hey there, Dusty,” she said after I’d introduced him. “You’ve got a lot to live up to; your big sister is pretty special.” She leaned down to pet him, and he backed away like she’d come at him with a blowtorch.

  This pretty much established the tone of their relationship for the next year and a half.

  Dee held three agility classes every Thursday night: a beginners’ session at seven, an intermediate at eight, and an advanced at nine. I’d worked my way up to advanced with Carmen, but now I was back in beginners, along with several other newbies and a few especially dense or difficult dogs who were returning for another go-round at the basics. (If I let myself sneer in derision at them, rest assured my karmic payback was not long in coming.)