Chicken Soup for the Cat & Dog Lover's Soul (21 page)

Humphrey pulled his head back and squinted. Behind the still-extended paw his face wrinkled. Shep continued growling and snapping his teeth. Humphrey moved in closer and reached one of Shep’s exposed toes. Shep jumped to his feet and crowded against the closet wall, growling and glancing nervously about. Humphrey moved in quickly and began hitting at the backs of Shep’s rear legs, like an elephant trainer at the circus.

Shep trampled some high-heeled shoes and bellowed uselessly as he beat a hasty if not honorable retreat. Humphrey sat down in the middle of his conquered territory and proceeded to wash his ears.

In some corner of the universe, I’m sure a scoreboard lit up: Cats—1, Dogs—0. Cats may not be macho, but just ask Shep if they’re sissy.

Joe Kirkup

The Day We Almost Didn’t Go

A
ny glimpse into the life of an animal quickens
our own and makes it so much the larger and
better in every way.

John Muir

Almost—almost—we didn’t go. The afternoon was right for it: clear, not cold, a veil of sand blowing off the dunes into the restless sea along our strip of Georgia coast. All the three youngest children wanted was for me to take them across the river and through the winding tidal creeks to the deserted beaches where they could look for shells, gather sea oats or watch for wild goats.

Just a fifteen-minute run in our little outboard skiff. But the tide was out, and getting the boat into the water would be a struggle.

Besides, there was a televised football game that promised a degree of entertainment with much less effort. So I had said, “We’ll see,” in the vague tone that parents use. And the children knew from long experience that this means
no.

But then I saw their forlorn faces, huddled in a sad triangle.

“All right,” I said, feeling noble and self-sacrificing.

“We’ll go. But just for a little while.”

Faces brightened. “Can we take Tony?” Tony is a Shetland sheepdog, unacquainted with sheep, who loves boats.

“I guess so,” I said. And automatically, “Wear something warm.”

We dragged the boat to the water, getting muddy feet. The engine coughed morosely for a while, then picked up with a splendid roar and drove us through the waves so fast that spray soaked everyone, including the sheltie, who stood in the bow, ears pinned back by the wind, tongue waving with delight.

For three minutes, the skiff pranced and bucked in the river. Then suddenly we were in the sheltered network of creeks, skimming around the silver corners, flying down amber aisles of marsh grass where black birds flared in silent explosions, finally into a broad estuary where the engine bellowed happily at full throttle.

The skiff eased into a quiet cove. I cut the engine, and at once the surf thundered in our ears. The dog sprang ashore and sank to his astonished chin in damp and porous sand. The children floundered after him, carrying the anchor. A fearsome crew, really. Kinzie, thirteen, was wearing blue jeans scissored off raggedly at the knee, and on her head a once-white sailor hat with down-turned brim pulled low. Dana, eleven, wore an old cashmere sweater of mine, full of holes, with sleeves so long that she seemed to have no hands at all. Mac, eight, wore a sweatshirt with a bulldog stenciled on it. As always, he needed a haircut.

They raced away through the sea oats, so many things to find or do: fiddler crabs to catch and carry home; marsh swallows’ nests, skeletons of rowboats resting their weary bones against the dunes; starfish and sand dollars, conchs’ eggs and horseshoe crabs, all flung carelessly by the lavish hand of the sea.

I watched them go and was tilting the engine to keep the propeller out of the sand when I heard the sheltie barking, hysterical high-pitched yelps. A moment later Mac came rushing back, eyes dark with excitement. “Daddy, come quick . . . a bird, a big one . . . he can’t fly . . . he’s hurt or something . . . hurry!”

Through the soft sand, into the dune grasses, up over the shallow rise, and there on the beach, the two girls and the sheltie surrounded a strange, penguin-like silhouette that lurched and flopped awkwardly, long neck and javelin bill lunging defiantly at the dog. I came close and saw it was a loon, feathers matted into a hopeless, tarry mass.

Looking at it, I felt something wince inside me: The worst that can happen to any creature is to be made incapable of doing the thing it was created to do.

“What’s wrong with him?” cried Dana, not far from tears.

“He got too close to civilization,” I said slowly. And I told them how sometimes a ship discharges fuel oil that makes a heavy slick on the ocean, and how a diving loon might come up under this deadly film and have its plumage so saturated that it could not fly.

“Will he be all right?” Mac asked fearfully. “What will happen to him?”

I knew that after sundown a roving raccoon would answer these questions, but I could not bring myself to say so.

“There’s a towel in the boat,” said Kinzie, the practical one. “Maybe we can wipe him off.”

“He’ll bite us!” cried Mac with delight and terror.

“Not very hard,” I said. “Get the towel. We’ll give it a try.”

But the towel made little impression. “We need something to dissolve the oil,” I said finally. “Mineral spirits, maybe.”

“There’s some at home,” both girls said at once.

“Let’s take him home!” shouted their brother deliriously. “We’ll clean him up and put him in the bathtub and feed him some dog food and make him a pet!”

“He’s a wild bird,” I said, parental resistance rising up in me. “He doesn’t want to live in a bathtub and be a pet. Besides, I’m not sure we can get this stuff off.”

“But we
found
him,” Kinzie said a little desperately. “We can’t just leave him here to die.”

We found him, that was true—or perhaps he found us. Either way, out of all of the millions of possible space-time curves, something had caused his and ours to intersect in this unlikely place. Chance? Of course. But still . . . “Who’ll hold him?” I asked a bit grumpily. “I can’t run a boat with one hand and hang onto a wild loon with the other.”

“I’ll hold him,” all three of them said instantly. And they did, the bird wrapped firmly with a corner of the towel over its head (which seemed to quiet it). The sheltie crouched, disapproving and dejected, at my feet.

“We’ve got a loon!” Mac shrieked to his unsuspecting mother as we entered the house. “An oily one! We’re going to wash him in the bathtub!” He hesitated, his masculine radar picking up dubious vibrations. “But then,” he added more quietly, “we’re going to let him go.”

The next hour was chaotic. Preparations were immense: sponges, cotton pads, warm water, cool water, soaps and elixirs. Theories were advanced and demolished. Advice was endless. The loon, unappreciative, bit everyone at least twice. But finally, when the last rinse disappeared from the stained tub, the dark feathers were parallel and distinguishable.

We took him, wrapped in a clean towel, to the ocean’s edge. When we put him in the water, he bobbed uncertainly for a moment. He turned his head and raked his back feathers swiftly with his bill as if to align them properly. Then he started swimming strongly out to sea, toward the distant sandbar where shorebirds were settling for the night.

“Why doesn’t he fly?” Dana asked worriedly.

“I think his feathers are too wet,” I said. “When the sun dries them tomorrow, he may be all right.”

The sheltie, spirits revived, went bounding off, and the girls followed him. The boy and I turned back toward the house. “He would have died, wouldn’t he, Daddy?”

“Yes, he would.”

He shook his head slowly. “And we almost didn’t go, remember?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll try to remember.”

Arthur Gordon

5
CELEBRATING
PETS AS FAMILY

T
o get the full value of joy, you must have
someone to divide it with.

Mark Twain

“Bless my pork chop and my rice and Spot's broccoli.”

Reprinted by permission of Martha Campbell.

Letters from Vietnam

One of the least pleasurable aspects of a military career are the extended family separations. The agony of saying good-bye to mywife,Mycki, and my son was compounded by the fact that I nearly always had a favorite dog that required (or at least I thought so) my sitting on the floor and explaining that Dad had to go away for awhile, but would surely return. Such was the case in 1970 when military orders directed me to Vietnam and I had to break the news to Roulette, our one-year-old miniature poodle.

Non-dog people raise their eyebrows when I tell them that dogs understand more of our speech than animal behaviorists give them credit for. Roulette understood. I watched her eyes and expression as I told her I was going away and she showed a sadness that I didn’t see again until the final days of her life. When I promised to write often and return in a year, she acknowledged this with just one slow and deliberate wag of her tail. Then she sighed deeply and laid her head in my lap. That moment remains indelibly imprinted in my mind.

After my arrival in Vietnam, I wrote home two or three times a week. But Mycki soon began to complain that I wasn’t writing very often. She told me that at first my letters arrived at intervals of a week to ten days, but now there were often no letters for two weeks at a time.

I was puzzled and began to imagine all sorts of things, including the idea that the Viet Cong were shooting down all mail planes carrying my letters.

My wife knew from previous experience that I was a pretty faithful correspondent. Even when sent to remote areas, I always managed to find a postal drop somewhere. So she was as puzzled as I was about what was happening to my letters.

Over time, Mycki began to notice something odd. It became clear that if she was actually at the front door of our house when the mail came through the slot, the probability of a letter from me was greater. Puzzled, she decided to experiment by monitoring the front door more closely around mail delivery times. Things began to fall into place when she noticed that a little four-legged critter seemed very irritated when “momma” got to the mail first.

Our postman usually arrived between eleven o’clock and noon, and the next time he came up the walk to the front door, Mycki hid behind a partition where she had a good view of the front door and the floor of the entryway.

As Mycki peeked around the edge of the wall, she saw Miss Roulette saunter up to the several pieces of mail that had fallen on the floor beneath the slot. Roulette sniffed at a couple of items and then gently, with one front paw, pulled an envelope out from the stack. She gave a quick glance around and then scooped up the letter in her mouth. With a mixture of mild outrage and stifled hilarity, Mycki followed Roulette into the living room. She was close behind the pom-pommed tail as the poodle rounded the end of the couch and slipped in behind it with the letter.

“The game is over, Missy—get out from behind the couch,” Mycki ordered. But Roulette was not a dog that responded immediately to orders. Moving the couch away from the wall, Mycki sternly requested, “Come on Rou, out of there.” Reluctantly, like a momma dog protecting her pups, Miss Roulette rose and cautiously left her clandestine lair, revealing a number of letters where she had been lying.

The mystery was solved, but for Roulette, the game wasn’t over, not by a long shot. With each subsequent mail delivery, it became a race to the door between Mycki and Roulette to pick up the mail. If Roulette won, a chase ensued, unless of course, Mycki was busy or not at home when the postman arrived. Then it became a matter of search and seizure.

Roulette tossed in another twist that made the game even more interesting. Whenever Mycki received a letter, she would retire to her recliner in the living room to read it. But if she left the letter on the end table afterwards, the artful dodger would strike again. Even when Mycki left the letters on the kitchen table where she did much of her writing, Roulette managed to appropriate them as soon as Mycki’s attention was elsewhere. No place Roulette could reach was safe for my letters. Mycki finally resorted to storing them in a shoebox and putting the box inside her armoire.

Roulette retaliated by attempting little hunger strikes. Mycki really became concerned until she found out that Roulette was actually conning her—our son was sneak-feeding the little letter-napper at night in his room.