A moment later Merle surged upon the coyote, striking it on its left hip with his right shoulder and knocking it off its feet. That's all he did. As the coyote regained its footing and fled with its tail stuck between its legs, Merle turned and sprinted back to me, cleared the irrigation ditch in a bound, landed on the road where I stood in amazement, and began to turn circles in the air, barking in wild paroxysms of glee. I hadn't heard him bark since getting off the bush plane in Salmon, Idaho. But this was a special occasion. He had finally counted coup on the coyotes, and in one of the most elemental ways that dogs can show their dominance—by pushing aside another dog with a blow of the shoulder or the hip.
I knelt by him and stroked my hands over his head while he stared into the field where the coyote had disappeared. Eyes aglow, he pulsed with elation.
"You are a big dog now!" I exclaimed.
The truth of these words became apparent over the next few days as Merle's demeanor changed. He had always been friendly to the other dogs in Kelly, smelling their butts as they smelled his, wagging his tail, and romping with them. But I now noticed that he took on magisterial airs with those dogs who tried to fawn over him. As they licked his lips, whined, and groveled for attention, he inflated his posture, tail stiff and arced over his back, and gazed into the distance. Giving them only a few seconds of his time, he walked on.
"You have certainly become the grandee, Señor," I told him.
Holding his head high, he pranced ahead.
At least with his very good friends, Zula and Jack, he remained unchanged, though I did notice that the three of them no longer tore in frantic circles after each other. Occasionally, they burst into a small game of chase and chew, but the high energy of their puppyhood was gone.
I was also happy to see that Merle's lording it over some of the village dogs didn't extend to any of his people—at least the adults. With children, he became more bold. From an early age, in fact when she was still in her high chair, Tessa had fed Merle tidbits, putting her entire hand in his mouth and allowing him to gently remove the food from her fingers. I had never seen him try to steal food from her or anyone else, but this now changed.
He was sitting next to one of Tessa's friends, a tow-headed four-year-old boy named Petey, who, along with Tessa and some other children, was watching the rodeo in Jackson. The children's eyes were fixed on the barrel racing while Merle gazed serenely into the distance, the epitome of canine sobriety, a being for whom the rodeo, even with its horses and manure smells, presented no attraction.
This was a façade, and it wouldn't be his last.
The moment Petey absentmindedly let his ice-cream cone dangle from his hand, Merle leaned toward him without moving a paw, and, with a quiet roll of his tongue, whisked the scoop of vanilla ice cream from the cone with such finesse that Petey never knew it was gone. Swallowing his treat, Merle drifted back to his studied pose, the guardian watching over his children.
A moment later, Petey raised his ice-cream cone to his mouth and found nothing. "Waaaa!" He burst into tears, and Merle glanced this way and that with a startled look on his face: "What?! What happened? Is everything all right? What can I do?"
This ability to feign disinterest while plotting a stratagem became one of his trademarks. Lying on the porch of the trailer, for instance, he'd ignore our neighbor's semi-captive raven, who was free to fly around Kelly. The bird would perch on our trailer's roof, cawing down at Merle. Chin on his paws, studying the aspens, Merle would affect deafness: "Raven? What raven?" On and on the raven would caw. Finally, unable to goad Merle into a response, the bird would swoop down and hit Merle with his wing. Like a coiled spring, Merle would leap into the air, snapping his jaws at the raven, who, equally clever, hovered just out of reach and flew off low and slow enough that Merle could chase beneath it, losing his gravitas and barking wildly in frustration—the third time I had heard him bark.
And, of course, there was still the white Shepherd to be reckoned with—or the memory of her. As we drove by her house in the car, Merle would stand in the back of the Subaru, the hair on his spine on end, growling deep in his throat while staring daggers at her front door. But she was never outside, though her companion sometimes was, and I finally assumed that Ms. W. had gotten rid of the troublesome dog.
We took to biking by her house again, and Merle would begin to pant violently as her cabin hove into view. But he never left my side—never even made so much as a dart toward the other Shepherd. One afternoon, though, as we came around the bend, I spied the white Shepherd herself, reposing on the grass in front of her house, her companion alongside her.
Stopping, I grabbed the ruff of Merle's neck, for he had already begun to speed up. He bolted from my grasp—ignoring my shouted "No!"—and flew at the white Shepherd. She launched herself at him, her teeth finding empty air as he arced within a foot of her and her chain jerked her backwards. Snarling ferociously, she lunged at him again. He turned around and executed a light two-step patter with his paws, staying just beyond her reach. Before I could shout "Come!" he whirled and raced to my side, tail beating as he laughed his head off.
Obviously, counting coup on the coyote hadn't distorted his sense of reality. The white Shepherd wasn't someone he was going to take on diente a diente.
"What can I say, Señor?" I shouted at him. "What can I say about you?"
He bucked up and down with glee.
Chapter 8
The Gray Cat
By the time I found a bank willing to give me a construction loan, fall had arrived and the building season was over. We moved completely out of the cabin and into the trailer and resigned ourselves to starting the house next spring—or at least I did, since Merle seemed quite content with our new sleeping arrangements. I rolled out a pad and blankets on the living-room floor near the woodstove—the back bedroom was like a freezer—and Merle curled himself next to me.
We were soon joined by someone else. He had the smoothest pewter-gray fur and a stunning white tuxedo bib, four white paws, and intelligent yellow-green eyes. A stray cat, he had adopted one of the women who lived in the yurts, and he knew Merle and me from the time this woman and I had been seeing each other. Merle and I had spent quite a bit of time at his place, but the cat had never come to the trailer before.
When the woman left town, leaving the cat behind to fend for himself, he wandered over to the trailer and came through the dog door as if he knew exactly where he was heading. Looking a bit wan and undernourished, he went to Merle's empty bowl and sniffed it before giving it several licks of his pink tongue. Then he curled his tail around his paws and sent me an imploring look: "I'd eat dog food if you had it."
Feeling sorry for him, I gave him a cup of Merle's kibble while Merle, ten feet off, head between his paws, watched the cat eat, one brow going up, the other down, expressing his doubts about what was happening—he had a grave suspicion of cats. Finished eating, the cat walked over to Merle, who visibly tightened. When the cat had tried to make friends with him on previous occasions, Merle would have nothing of it, backing away from him, his face creased with acute worry, his eyes never leaving the cat's white paws and their concealed claws. But, in Merle's favor, it must be said that he never chased the cat or acted aggressively toward him.
The cat now touched noses with Merle as Merle held his breath. Then the cat began to tenderly lick Merle's right ear.
"We can't kick him out after that," I said to Merle.
Ignoring the cat's overtures, Merle stood and walked to his dog door. Looking over his shoulder, he cast me a look that said, "You're not really going to invite him in here, are you?"
The gray cat watched Merle leave before coming over to me and doing figure eights around my feet. I picked him up. Despite his lack of food, he must have weighed fifteen pounds. He turned in my arms. Settling himself neatly, he stared at me with his yellow-green eyes and began to purr.
Although he was a male, he had been called Roxy by the young children of his former owner
. The name simply wouldn't do.
"Gray Cat," I said, capitalizing his coloration with my voice and turning it into a name. "I know it's not a fancy name, but we don't stand on ceremony here. Can you live with it?"
I put him down and went back to my desk. About an hour later, I heard the dog door slap. After taking a few more minutes to finish the paragraph I was working on, I turned around and had my answer. Merle and Gray Cat were sleeping butt to butt on the living-room couch.
The differences between cats and dogs have probably been noted since cats began to live with people in Jericho and Cyprus about seven thousand years ago: how cats are solitary and dogs social, and how cats share our homes but never lose their wildness whereas dogs become almost totally domesticated. As the archaeo-zoologist Juliet Clutton-Brock writes, "By their offerings of food, affection, and comfort humans persuade cats to share the same core area of their home range." In the case of Gray Cat, the persuasion went the other way: It was he who wooed us. Although I had had three cats before him, as well as two dogs, this was a novel situation—never before had I lived with a cat and a dog at the same time. It was now instructive to see how these two souls interacted with each other and with me.
When the first October snow fell, Merle burst out of his dog door, threw himself on his back, and rubbed in ecstasy on the cold white fluff. A minute later, Gray Cat lifted the flap of the dog door (now also the cat door) and peered out at the white landscape with a look of horror. Not believing his own eyes, he reached his paw to the snowy porch and immediately shook it off as if he had touched a toxic substance. He whirled and gave me a despairing look: "No! Winter's back!" He sprang upon the couch and curled himself into a ball.
Since he had no litter box, he was, at last, forced outside. If it was snowing and windy, he'd dash back within a minute, grimacing dramatically while he shook snow from his back. But if it was sunny, he'd actually sit on one of the porch rails. Fluffing up his fur until he looked like an enormous gray owl, he would send disapproving looks at Merle and me roughhousing in the snow. That's putting it mildly. Our clubbiness and never-flagging camaraderie disgusted him. However, I believed that Gray Cat secretly envied our friendship and wanted to join our team, for on many an afternoon, as Merle and I began our walk to the post office, he would meow enthusiastically and pad after us. After only two hundred feet, though, a look of doubt would cross his face, a sort of crushing knowledge that he was going against eons of cat evolution—cats like to slink and hide rather than march along. Poor Gray Cat; he would sit down and look at us plaintively, almost as if saying, "I tried, guys, I really did." And then he'd turn and make his slow way back to the trailer.
Sometimes, when the February weather grew warm, he'd slip outside and hunt among the cottonwoods, looking for rodents under the snow. Once or twice I tried to follow him, but he'd stop and turn, his eyes glaring at me and saying, "I don't want you along. Can't a cat have some privacy?"
Merle, on the other hand, was always pleased to have me track him down, his body language saying, "Great, you found me. Let's go!"
In a similar fashion, their reactions to my writing were totally different. Merle would come into my office, lay his chin on my thigh, and, by wagging his tail steadily, ask if I was ready to do something fun. When the answer was "not yet," he'd return outside and find something with which to divert himself. Gray Cat, by contrast, found being a writer's cat to his liking. He would jump on my desk and lie in the sun, just beyond the keyboard, occasionally putting his paw on my fingers to stop their tapping. Then he'd glide onto my lap while I was reading and bask in my stroking him. And, of course, each night he would sleep with us in the blankets on the floor, which, I gathered, did not count as clubbiness, but just a good snuggle.
We broke ground in April, and before the backhoe came, Merle and I walked over to our land and sat in the sagebrush where the house would rise. In the skiff of new snow lay bison prints. The animals had come through the previous evening and stopped to graze on the newly sprouted grass. This I took as a good omen, and I made a promise: I'd restore the native grasses around the house so the bison would still come and graze. Merle stuffed his nose into a print, blew out a snort, and looked at me with a wagging tail: "Ah, bison."
It took about a month to dig the hole, lay the foundation, and drill a well. All this involved big machinery—earth movers, cement-mixing trucks, the drilling rig—and even though Merle went to the construction site with me each day, he didn't like the noise, standing off a ways and bounding joyously through the sage when we left.
All this changed when the four-man log crew arrived and we put on our nail belts. Nose to the subfloor, Merle padded around the newly laid plywood, which stood several feet above grade. Walking to its edge, he adopted a heroic pose, staring across Kelly with a satisfied air. The house gave him a vantage above the sage.
As we scribed and laid each log in place, he smelled them, and when the interior walls went up he inspected each room. Many dogs don't normally like to climb stairs, especially exposed ones, but as soon as we had put up a skeleton staircase, with narrow treads and no risers—an airy affair even for people—Merle scrambled up it. I had gone to the great room for a Skil Saw and heard his pant from the balcony above. He was looking down at me, lashing his tail and grinning from ear to ear: "This is so cool."
He followed the electrician around. He pushed his nose into the plumber's toolbox. Mid-morning, when I'd have to return to writing, he wouldn't follow me to the trailer; rather, he stayed on with the crew. Sometimes, at the end of the day, the crew long gone, I'd wander over to see what progress had been made, and I'd find him walking around the house as if he were tallying the day's work. Occasionally, I even found him sleeping on the deck.
He had no bed at the construction site. He wasn't fed there. His dog friends lived across the field. Yet he became fascinated by the house. I wondered if he sensed my emotional investment in the project and had taken ownership of it as well. Perhaps he saw the house as an enlargement of our territory. Or maybe it was simply interesting: the smells of the new materials; our riding around in the pickup truck; the different people who came to work on the house; and the sense that here was something fresh and engrossing to explore.
That dogs may crave this sort of stimulation is not a notion we often entertain. Yet their wild cousins, wolves, can lope dozens of miles in a day, investigating from river bottom to ridge crest, and a pack will set off on an excursion of a couple of hundred miles, only to return a few weeks later to where they began their odyssey. All the while, these animals are watching, scenting, and learning new country. They're engaged, and it was clear that Merle was, too.
If he had an inkling that this might be our new home, it was sealed on the day we installed his new dog doors—one in the front door and, several feet beyond it, one in the interior door of the mudroom. No sooner had I tightened the final through-bolt and stood up, extending a hand to the outer door, than he charged through it and without pausing leapt through the inner one as well—slap, slap. Turning to greet me as I came in, he wriggled with delight and gave me a throaty pant: "Yes, home, sweet home."
The roof went up. The windows came. We stained and chinked the logs. Often, I made it up as I went along, redrawing a detail at night and bringing it over to the log crew the following morning. Luckily, the architect whom I had engaged to do the detailed drawings lived just down the road in Kelly, and sometimes when I couldn't figure out how many stairs were needed to reach the second floor or whether a log would carry a structural load, I'd bike my quick sketches over to his house, and he'd redraw them.
On just such a day, I had ridden some sketches over to him and he had drawn a few variations of the new porch I had visualized. None was exactly what I had in mind, and I decided to fetch a book from the trailer, which had a photograph of what I wanted. Jumping on my bike, I said, "I'll be back in a minute."
Off I went, Merle loping at my side. The architect lived about two hundreds yards down the road fr
om the white Shepherd's house, but I was no longer concerned about her. Her house had been vacant for days.
I saw their cars first, in the driveway, then the two Shepherds themselves, lounging before the front step of the house.
We were still fifty yards off when Merle broke into a sprint. The white Shepherd saw him coming and hurtled out to meet him. This time she wasn't on her chain.
Merle didn't stop or hesitate. He must have known that stopping was pointless. They met halfway across her lawn, going full-tilt, and she bowled Merle over, her momentum carrying her several feet beyond him. He sprang up as she turned and began to savage her around the neck. She roared and bit him back.
I jumped off my bike as Ms. W's boyfriend raced from the house. We each grabbed a dog's tail—I, Merle; he, the white Shepherd—and pulled them apart. Snarling, they tried to get at each other, and we dragged them off, calling to each other, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Holding on to Merle's ruff, I escorted him around the bend and gave him a quick glance—nothing damaged. Jumping on my bike, I said, "Come on, let's go."
He looked back down the road.
"Don't even think about it," I told him.
He wagged his tail hopefully. "No way. Let's go." I began to pedal, and he followed me to the trailer. As I tried to find the book, Merle drank some water and lay down in the middle of the living room.
"Okay," I said, "let's take the long way."