Debra gets home after I do on Tuesdays and Fridays now,
which means I feed our beagle, Sam, when I get home. He has been in the house,
with doggy door out to a small yard for the day, which combined with some
pretty swanky sleeping arrangements constitute the criteria typically imagined
when invoking the phrase, “a dog’s life.” Still, from the dog’s perspective, it
must bear some equivalency to an open-air prison of sorts, a kind of Palestine
in the Los Angeles suburbs, weirdly lorded over by an irreligious Jew and a similarly
disposed Catholic. By the time I park and get to the door, his toenails are
tapping a novel in Morse code across the vertical panes of glass that flank our
front entance. He doesn’t stop until I am inside the door, at which point he
launches himself at me in a series of corkscrewing trajectories and emitting a
river of continuous yelps. I bow to him and extend my arms, and he calms enough
to place his front paws on the insides of my forearms and we bury our heads
next to one another and we wriggle in calm nonsense for a moment. He breaks our
clinch and darts toward the kitchen. He will be fed.
He eats a half of a can in the morning and a half of a can
at night, and after dinner (about fifteen seconds later), he begins a second Saint
Vitus dance, one that cajoles me to get the leash and climb the local hills to
a dirt mound with a view, a journey with incline enough to get us both panting.
The trip up those hills, while largely single or double story suburban ranch
houses with drought-resistant lawns, stone arrangements and cacti, also
features a few sudden small conifer groves with dirt patches, and it was in one
of these that Sam found a dead rat tonight, probably having staggered away from
a nearby house in his death throes after eating the D-Con, a front paw on an
opposite breast, tearfully sparing his family the piteous sight of him dying, “Ma,
they got me, they got me good this time ma, take care of the kids, ma, I can’t…let
them…see me…like this!”
I had been letting Sam lead the way to that point, rushing
when he rushed, having picked up a scent, and stopping when he stopped, having
lost it. So he had his snout well into the maggoty rat by the time I figured
out what he was onto and drew him away with the leash. He launched a loud,
focused hound bleat and I praised him for his excellence as I led him away from
the carcass. I had a tissue so I scrubbed his gob of death bugs and we
continued on up the hill. The next adventure in the mighty quest for a tired beagle
was the dump. And of course I had forgotten the bag. But what this animal did
for me, what this magical creature did, was to pull over into the next little
miniature pastoral area between houses for his sworn duty. He chose a spot in
loose dirt below, with an ample supply of more loose dirt and fallen leaves
right nearby. There was a steep embankment that tumbled down a good fifteen
feet just another foot away. I covered the Los Angeles Steamer in loose dirt
first, then in fallen leaves and gave it a sweet little boot over the lip of the
ravine. 100% biodegradable, and with an El Niño predicted, I guarantee that
thing will not see the springtime. On we went.
Sam went berserk at the next little forested area, and it
was something really special. Another dog’s shit. Here he had just made some,
so it was only natural he review the work of his peers, see where he might need
to sharpen his game a bit, maybe get some ideas about style or content. Who knows
what goes through a dog’s mind? Not me, certainly, as I have never had a dog call
me Dad so I’m pretty new to all of this. I have a suspicion though about the
opinion dogs have regarding the way things smell. They don’t qualify them per
se. They identify them, but even though their sense of smell, especially
hounds, is around forty times more sensitive than a human being’s, they don’t
establish nearly the spectrum of nauseating to intoxicating that humans ascribe
to smell. The difference between suddenly presenting someone with a fly larvae-ridden
rat corpse and a cup of freshly brewed coffee is dramatic. The beagle makes no
such value judgments. I see the beagle’s sense of smell as being able to
differentiate what a thing is and where it is with a stunning accuracy, the way
most people see colors or the way Mozart heard music, vividly, in great detail,
without question. What does not particularly exist within the beagle purview is
much of a qualitative assessment. The gradations boil down to good, better,
best.
Better would be what food smells like, best is what people
food smells like, and good is everything else. I don’t think anything smells
bad to a dog. Shit smells like shit, dead rats smell like dead rats, and both
can be filed under “good.” Sam is a not only a good dog, he is a springboard
for endless ruminative amusements.
