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Meetings and partings

Posted Monday, April 7, 2008

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I had a Big Adventure last week, involving a chance meeting and a bittersweet parting.

The meeting happened on one of my morning walks, early in the week. I had just turned the last corner on my mile, back onto our street and a couple of blocks from home, when a Very Large black Lab appeared in the middle of the street.

“Very Large” is a clinical term I use to mean, “a good four inches taller and at least 20 pounds heavier than Katy, our black Lab mix who weighs about 70 pounds and is, scientifically speaking, Large.”

I’ve written before about being confronted on my morning walk by a pit bull, which charged at me, snarling, and showed every sign of wishing to dismember me. That confrontation caused me to stand very still, speak in low tones, and, after a time, to ease away slowly. And call the police.

The dog that met me last week was twice the size of that pit bull, but not even half as scary—I suppose a Lab, like any other animal, could be made mean by being mistreated, but I’ve never met a mean Lab. And the one coming toward me down our street obviously harbored no ill will—he was galumphing.

“Galumph” is a fine word coined by Lewis Carroll, and means to prance victoriously. It’s probably a combination “gallop” and “triumph,” and Labs do it a lot. Even Katy, who is getting quite old, does it when she’s feeling particularly puppyish. It involves lifting her front feet higher than is necessary, moving forward with a sideways twisting motion, and waving her plumed tail like a flag.

So this Very Large black Lab came galumphing at me from a block away, grinning, his tongue dangling sideways from his mouth, and I tried to think how I could know this dog, because he obviously thought he knew me.

“Hey, guy, where’d you come from?” I asked when he was close enough. He stood up, put his front paws on my shoulders, and licked my face with great gusto. I backed up and caught hold of his collar, which unfortunately bore no tag. He wheeled in great circles, twisting my hand and making me let go, then leaped at me again and finished licking a couple of inches of my face he missed the first time. “Where do you live?” I asked him.

His answer, which he indicated by refusing to leave my side as I finished the last two blocks of my walk, was apparently, wherever I lived.

So I walked him around to the side of the house and opened the gate, and he ran into the yard and made himself at home. I had to go inside and face a sniffing inquisition from our dogs, Katy and Gladys. They knew immediately I had been trifling with another dog, but they didn’t know the full extent of my indiscretion, until they went out into the back yard later and discovered the horrible truth.

Katy kind of likes other dogs her size. She still likes to play and Gladys, a rat terrier, won’t play with Katy for obvious reasons. But Katy’s playful periods only last a few minutes, and are followed by naps. This new dog was very young, and didn’t see the point in naps. Katy had to speak harshly to him a few times.

Gladys, for her part, was completely unwilling to share her space with another dog that was 10 times bigger than her, and expressed her feelings by following the new dog everywhere he went, yapping and snapping at his heels. He thought this was fun, and responded by facing her, putting his head on the ground and his rear in the air, his tail wagging furiously, and barking joyfully back, spraying Gladys with spittle and further enraging her.

When our dogs gave up and came back inside, the new dog stood up at the back door and peered in the window, grinning. He alternated that behavior with mournful whining until I let him in. The cats’ reactions ranged from pretending the new dog didn’t exist, to pretending they would kill him if he came near. The more volatile the reaction, the more the dog wanted to visit with the cat. I decided to call him Doofus.

I called animal control and police, and went down our street asking people whether they were missing a Very Large black Lab. No one was, and I began to ask myself whether, if his owner wasn’t found, I could let the animal control officer take Doofus away. On one hand, he was young and strong enough to be really hard to handle—for me, and for our aging dog and cat population. On the other hand—well, Doofus seemed pretty sure he lived here.

I was still wrestling with the dilemma on the second day, when I got a call from a lady whose black Lab has gotten out of his fence, miles from our house, more than a week before. The descriptions matched, but black Labs do kind of all look alike. Doofus was missing a second collar her dog had been wearing. She told me her dog’s name and I went to the back door and called it. Doofus came galumphing across the yard at me. “But he does that no matter what I call him,” I told her. “I can’t tell if he recognized it or not.”

Neither one of us really thought it was her dog, but she said she’d come by anyway. I remembered when Katy was lost for three days, and how heartbreaking it was every time I found a dog that might have been her, but wasn’t. Both of us were preparing ourselves for that heartbreak.

When she arrived, we walked to the gate and Doofus was nowhere in sight. “You call him,” I suggested. She did. Predictably, he raced first to the back door, then saw us and galumphed over to the gate. There, I got to witness a joyful reunion, during which he stood up and put his muddy feet on her nice pink blouse, and licked her face thoroughly, and she told him what a pretty boy he was, and how much she’d missed him, and what a bad dog he was, and how much she loved him.

After they left, in a flurry of barking and licking and thank-yous, I discovered I had the theme song from an old sitcom in my head. “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name,” I sang to myself.

His name was Dakota.

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