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Hi there. Thanks for stopping by. Steve’s introduction went swimmingly. You’ve now met the two most important dogs I know. Here’s a story about both of them. Let’s all take a deep breath and direct our focus on some dogs for a moment.
As I write this Peggy and Steve are engaged in their evening joust. It appears to be an adaptation of the Greco-Roman wrestling style with a special dispensation set aside for putting one’s whole mouth around the others’ head.
The bouts come out of nowhere but we can expect them each night between the cooking and eating of dinner, when we retreat to a comfy chair to stare at the internet for leisure purposes with a drink. Steve saunters over to a lounging Peggy and places his face as close to hers as is allowed by standards of decorum. Tails wag furiously in silence. The first to break the detente sets off a fury of delighted snarls.
Peggy, missing a leg, is older and more cunning and inevitably finds the high ground on a couch or chair and fights from there. Steve stands on his hind legs and uses paws for leverage. If overpowered, he begins to snarl, initiating the same from Peggy. Teeth bared now, both participants declare a momentary truce. Steve dashes away, lithe as a ballerina to regroup. The tails wag furiously in silence.
I delight in the cadence of the whole thing and the strange, almost monstrous noises. But what I love most is what comes next. Once the joust is complete there is a pause and Steve lowers his head to Peggy ever so slightly. And Peggy begins to patiently groom Steve’s face with attentive, deliberative licks.
I love this because it is proof of a real bond — one that we mostly forced on these two somewhat different animals. We like to think of Peggy and Steve as brother and sister, which is a lie we tell ourselves. There’s no blood there. What we’ve done is forced them to become pack mates and negotiate all that dominance stuff (which they continue to sort every day).
It wasn’t always this way. Peggy and Steve’s bond took time. When Steve came home with us, Peggy was disoriented by the suspicious bread loaf-sized white blur that was constantly angling for her personal space. For two days, she stopped eating, perhaps in protest. I took her to her favorite beach, hurling tennis balls into the river for her to swim and fetch them while offering my best fatherly monologue. Each enthusiastic throw of the ball, I hoped, was a reassurance: We don’t love you any less, I promise.
Bonds take time. Each day she softened. Occasionally, Steve demurred, suppressing his puppy ways against all better instincts for her. But the day I knew came at the dog park, when a few newcomers spotted Peggy and her ball and gathered near to sniff thing out. Peggy seemed wary; Steve cut them off with an uncharacteristic, protective growl. On a walk a few days later, Peggy reciprocated, approaching Steve with a mischievous look.
It was a gesture communicated in a language that’s all but unreadable to us but Steve took the cue. For a moment they paused. Tails wagged furiously in silence. Then, the chase was on. I watched them run off together through the tall cheatgrass.
Your faithful correspondent,
Charlie
Becoming Family
Might there be a lesson here for all of us humans? Red vs. Blue? Lib vs. Conservative? Guns/No Guns/ Pro Life blah blah blah. Let Steve & Peggy be a lesson to us all. No matter what breed; we are all just dogs (er...) humans who need to co-exist.
Beautiful prose, beautiful photographs, beautiful dogs. I'm loving your blog already.