Mirror Of My Mood

In those, his younger days, unless requested to do otherwise, Dain ranged widely on purposeless walks. He would gallop through the brush, taking canine pleasure in the sounds and scents he encountered. On this New Year's morning, being so preoccupied with myself, I did not pay much attention to him. Then I looked down and saw him walking quietly at my side, head and tail down, a figure of depression. "My God," I remember thinking, "he has a sympathetic hangover."

A companion dog responds to mood by imitating it, functioning as a kind of living mirror. As the years have passed there have been times when Dain, by his behavior, has shown me how I felt. I might not know how high or low, elated or ornery I was feeling until I happened to catch the manner and mood of the dog.

Love, someone said, is the desire for knowledge of another. By this definition, claims that dogs love men are not so maudlin as they sometimes seem. This old red dog knows me in ways and to degrees no other living thing ever has or probably ever will. A dog cannot counsel or argue or criticize. There is no way for him to express such a thing as "You feel bad because you drank too much and are a damn fool. You will not die: you just think you will." There are times when being the object of uncritical love is probably a very bad thing, but also times when it is most pleasurable.

The responsiveness of dogs is not mysterious. The domestic dog is the product of selective breeding, a prime purpose of which has been to produce ever more responsive animals. In part it has been a practical matter. The more sensitive a dog is to man, the easier it will be to teach him to do useful work. However, emotions must have entered in as well. Responsiveness attracts. So it has gone for thousands of generations of dogs.

As with any friends, the more experiences they share the closer man and dog will be. Since Dain was a pup there have been few times and places we could not be together. For the better part of four months when we walked the Appalachian Trail, we were never apart. We drank from the same springs, ate the same food from the same pan, slept in the same place, often close together for warmth. Day after day we saw the same things.

A dog is in some respects the best companion to have in the boondocks—better at finding trails in the dark, keeping varmints out of food sacks, turning up wildlife, than a human companion. Dogs do not complain, rush or delay you or spend hours discussing the merits of health foods. They have their own ways of stimulating, comforting and entertaining. One way has always pleased me. An energetic, confident, curious dog will get up several times during the course of a night and wander off to explore. Lacking the proper sensual equipment, you cannot do what he does, but it is possible to enjoy the night through his senses. By way of example: we bedded down one night 7,000 feet up in the Huachuca Mountains of Arizona in a grove of ponderosa pines. It was cold and the full moon was brilliant. About sundown we had surprised a young mountain lion at a stock tank a quarter of a mile below us. When, after sleeping an hour or so, Dain got up to ramble, I thought about keeping him back. He was a fair hand with bears, coons and woodchucks but inexperienced so far as lions were concerned. He went off up the canyon. By and by he barked in such a way as to indicate he had met up with something moderately formidable, of medium size. It may well have been a ring-tailed cat scurrying in and out of limestone crevices. Whatever it was, he must have soon lost it for I heard nothing more for 15 minutes or so. He must have crossed and descended along the far rim of the canyon for soon he was below our camp, running through the pines with the moonlight glinting off his red coat. He came up and sat down beside me, tongue lolling, tail thumping, grinning as dogs do, telling me as clearly as it can be said that he had had a hell of a fine ramble. I rubbed his ears and told him I was pleased for him.

All canines have well-developed territorial feelings; to a considerable extent what might be called their psychic certainty seems to depend upon their sense of having a homeplace. A dog that has strayed is usually a terrified, confused animal. Possibly because of the nomadic months Dain and I spent in the Appalachians, my person and possessions became his homeplace. Ever since he has held to this notion. So long as we are not far apart he is serenely confident that he is home. This overview has enabled him to retain his cool in many extraordinary places: a jailhouse in New Mexico, a bear hunters' camp in North Carolina where a pen of hounds was howling for his blood, in the midst of a girls' track team, on foreign streets and trails.

A man-dog pair is an intricate craft product that cannot be bought, ordered on demand or mass-produced. Each pair is a unique creation into which has gone time, patience and feeling. But less and less we have the time, patience and feeling for this work. Each year fewer and fewer men and dogs have the opportunity or inclination to walk together for thousands of miles through the mountains, hunt wolves together, go back and forth together between the house, barn, fields and shop.

We go on breeding, buying and keeping dogs for reasons and under conditions that do little justice to either party. We have come to have some 50 million dogs, an inordinate number of which cannot function as evolution intended for them to function and therefore are a kind of aggravation, reproach, even menace, to themselves and to men. Too often we use dogs as keepsakes, to promote nostalgia. We have changed the world, changed ourselves to the point where it and we are not generally fit for a dog. This is not necessarily bad. What is bad is that we cannot face the fact that we and the times have changed so that dogs are becoming obsolete.

This is not a manifesto in support of rural chauvinism. The country is no better, nobler or more truthful place than the city or the suburbs. Rural living does not make or attract more perceptive or kindly people. To decry the passage of the country life-style because it upsets traditional arrangements between dogs and men is as nonsensical as deploring nuclear weapons because they threaten the survival of the whooping crane. Nevertheless the fact remains that the domestic dog is a creature created over a vast span of years principally by and for country men, for country pursuits and pleasures. It is the place where they have scope and range in which to develop.