The Collie

Spirit has a gray snout, and his eyes are cupped by gray crescents. When the wind blows back his ears, and the sun fills his eyes with amber, his grin, with the violet flesh and yellow teeth, and lazy tongue which is so free, is that of a silver scholar. He is a sage, now that he hobbles over to sit on my feet. Then he rests his head which smells of the dirt of the garden where he had been rooting on my knee. With my arms around his neck, I kiss him anyways. Of course, it isn’t all so sentimental.

Though now that I only see him when I’m home from school, it is. I’m certain I’ve heard an uncle of mine, or a friend of my mother’s or father’s mention the pure childish sadness of watching one’s dog grow old. Maybe I’d been a kid, standing by the grill, watching the beef become maroon. It had been July, and despite my youth, I’d looked at Spirit. Imagination is so far from life itself. Perhaps because I had been so empathetic with whomever I had heard, that distant day, my sympathy with myself was fluent, and my sentiments unbridled. None of this was worth considering, as I patted his side.

I could not escape such disturbances. I took my face out of his fur, and blushed with a warmth which overwhelmed me. It was the feeling of the first man who gave the tired hound a bone to gnaw. Those large cedar eyes studied me, because I’d let the rhythm of my palm upon his side slow, and cease. The argent half-moons widened, and the wispy ears lowered, and I was helpless.

Before the family left Yonkers, and moved to that Putnam house by the lake, a blizzard’s snow was higher than me on the sidewalks, as I had lived scarcely three years. Now, I do not recall the day, but it is not a feat of imagination to think of the quaintness of a quiet city block, blanketed with white. As my parents retold it, while patting Spirit and looking proud, they didn't know how I got out into the street. Nor did they see me slip into a snowbank between the lanes. Just as they realized I had not been with either of them, and that I was not behind a curtain or hiding under a bed, they’d seen me hanging from Spirit’s mouth, by my collar. He had sat me at my mother’s feet, and brushed the powder from my little brow. She had not been taken by even an ounce of angst, but had been silent. Now was the point in the retelling when my mother’s eyes would become wet: she took me up, after I’d been cleaned, and turned towards the stairs. But she had paused, and sat instead on the cheap carpet in the foyer beside Spirit, the two of them looking at me.

Now I was alone in the house, under the changing sheaves of light, with him. I stood, for a glass of water, and he stumbled to his little mattress, in the corner. Somewhere, between the sweetly crimped plastic pages of an album, was a picture of him asleep on the porch. Two orange kittens were curled upon his tufted tawny side, and it was summer, so that in the background, vivid grass showed the yellow of the sun, and the motion of the wind.

He was attentive, even for a collie; he caught my eye before I had turned fully toward him, as I stood filling a glass. I looked out of the window. Now he gazed sternly out of the sliding doors at the horizon. For an instant, he had the melancholy smile of an old drunkard. He yawned and set his chin upon his paws. I’d nearly overfilled my glass, so I drank over the aluminum basin. I did not deserve such fineness. I had not earned such grand repose as that I took, in the afternoon, listening to the shutters shiver in the wind. Nor had I been so moral as to incur the vast unconditional love with which Spirit raised his eyes to me, before his nap. There could not have been a more humbling affection than that of one’s dog.

All of this I did not intend to tell, but did compulsively. Whether I or the telling of the story required such context I do not feel is necessary to ask. What I wanted was a straightforward telling of a walk I went on with my collie. What I made is an ode.

At thirteen, my loving, overbearing mother let me stray from the house. I could go nearly as far as I wanted, if I had the dog. So once I went down the barren, rusted railroad tracks with Spirit tentatively pulling me forward, because he knew the way so well. There, the aroma of the rotting ties, and pikes were so divine because they were my freedom. The sap which baked on the needles in the sun charmed the air as well, and I did not seek to comprehend the sadness I felt at the perfume of a distant bonfire. At the center was Spirit, reassuring me with those eyes which flashed bright amber. For no richness of the brown of his eyes could keep them from reflecting that sunlight, on such a day.

We came to an abandoned railroad bridge. Because the shade was supple, we could not resist sitting on a boulder, amidst the stones which tumbled over to the stream. I embraced him because he embodied all of the happiness of which I was capable in life; he was devoted only to loving those he loved, and diving for a frisbee, in the lawn.

Abruptly, he stood, his stare on a patch of grass by the stream. He did not see more, so he sat, still looking sternly at the blades, the stones, the trees on the other side. I thought that all had passed. He moved, again, to my right, scouring the stones without whining. A copperhead came out and snapped at him, and he wouldn’t stand down, so it aligned for another jab. I raised the largest jagged stone I could in time, and whether or not I killed that snake I do not know.

I took my Spirit onto my shoulders, as a fireman, and ran up the rocks, and the straw grass hill. I set him down, and pursed my lips to where the blood was from, spitting after each bitter breath. He was not complaining, but he could not help himself from wheezing. It was only his leg, but I saw a lot of red. I wiped my mouth, returned him to my shoulders, running so that I would be sore tomorrow. I should have tripped, and my mother said my balance had been stayed by Providence.

When I had made the mile home, I set him on the table in the kitchen, to no inquisition of anyone in the house. I had not known it was a copperhead then, so I had wasted time sucking a poison which had not been there. It took a pressure which was painful to apply to stop his bleeding, but he was bandaged and splinted without losing too much, though it had been enough for him to be weak. He stayed resting long, and was treated as a hero until his broken leg was healed, by the end of summer. He had saved my life, in his mind, twice. For I could have lived after a bite from a copperhead. But he was my dog, and he would have rescued me as many times as it took, if only so that he had someone to pat his side, and a lap where he could rest his head.