Natural History

The Old Man didn’t know where the time had gone. All he knew now was that six years had passed since he drove home with a Neapolitan mastiff puppy, which he had named “Brutus.” And the little cropped-eared hippopotamus of a puppy had matured into a massive creature. It took the beast three years to reach 146 pounds, and for two years, he was a fell stallion among dogs.  But in his sixth year, Brutus was starting that ascent in old age, which comes awfully early for dogs in this breed.

In his prime, Brutus was slate gray and wrinkly.  He woke with the Old Man each day, and after his morning turnout, the big dog would trundle back into the house. The Old Man would prepare a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage, and he would talk to the mastiff dog as if he were human. For as an old bachelor, now living fairly well on his pension, he had little company to entertain him, so he allowed his big dog to be his comrade at arms, his confidant, and his dearest friend.

The tunnel of the years was growing closer and closer on both Brutus and his master.  And the master knew it was coming sooner for Brutus than for himself.  So he knew now was the time enjoy the dog as best he could. He doubted that when the time came that he would be able to get another dog.  It took two years of hard core obedience training to turn that sloppy pup into something that society would deem a respectable dog, The stubbornness of Neapolitan mastiffs, especially plucky males like Brutus, meant lots of leash pops and shouting. The Old Man was not an expert at dog training, but he was an expert at exerting his will. That’s how he’d made a killing in the insurance business, and how he’d also gained many admirers and enemies– and not a single true friend.

He had owned dogs all through his life, mostly poorly-bred over-sized and oversexed male Labradors, but when that time came to collect his pension and go off and lounge in the world, he felt an aching for a real dog. He bought a few books on dog breeds and then became infatuated with the lore of the Roman Molossus, the dog of legend that is said to be the ancestor of all the European mastiffs. “Said to be” is, of course, dog world speak for a wondrous flight of fancy. But the Old Man was not an historian or a dog expert. However, he loved movies and novels about the Roman Empire, and he thought that somewhere along the line he might own a piece of Old Rome.

Within four months of retirement, he was on a breeder’s waiting list. Six months after that, he picked up Brutus and brought him home, and the two had begun their six year odyssey of training a ham-headed mastiff into a civilized guard dog.

His neighbors thought he was insane for bringing such a beast into the leafy green neighborhood. They feared for their children, their carefully manicured lawns, and delicately cultivated flower gardens.  But the Old Man made his dog obey, and he never left him outside to bark booming warnings at traffic or passersby.

He knew that he had a real dog on his hands, and that he had better make that beast listen.  And so he did.

He made civilizing Brutus is full-time avocation, and for a man who was used to working long hours, this project was the perfect thing to keep his life occupied. Twice a day, he marched the big mastiff down the quiet suburban lanes, popping leash corrections if the big boy stopped to sniff the grass or even hazarded an attempt to growl at barking dogs that cursed the pair as they passed by their fenced yards.

And Brutus responded with all that work by becoming intensely loyal. Indeed, the two began to develop a relationship of such intensity, that the big mastiff came to respond to clicks of his master’s tongue and the casting of his eyes. They were bonded man and dog, and no one could separate them.

So tightly were they bond, that the Old Man decided against taking that big European vacation that he’d always dreamed of. He couldn’t find anyone who could care for the big dog anyway, and what’s more, he couldn’t bare leaving his best friend.

So the Old Man lived out the first years of his retirement as a full-time dog keeper, and he felt better than he had in all those years of selling insurance policies, setting up new insurance offices, and generally being a successful businessman but a failure as a human being.

He smiled more. He laughed a lot.  He lost weight and gained muscle.  Brutus’s had given him so much more than he ever could have dreamed.

But now that Brutus was turning six, the reality of owning a dog such as this began to set in. Brutus began to limp with a bit of stiffness on cool October mornings. The vet put him on an anti-inflammatory medicine for arthritis.

The next month saw the Old Man get surgery for his cataracts.  Then a colonoscopy revealed a few nasty polyps that had to be excised.  The Old Man wasn’t that ill, but he wasn’t getting any younger. That realization was hitting him harder than before.

And then Brutus started becoming more tired on his walks, and the Old Man cut them shorter. And big dog gained weight. Within two months, Brutus tipped the scales at the vet’s office at 163 pounds.

And it was at that point that the vet intervened and told the Old Man to cut back on the daily ration of scrambled eggs and sausage.

But the first day he cut back, Brutus glared back at his master with sad but rheumy eyes, and the Old Man knew he couldn’t do it. He gave him his usual ration.

He knew intellectually that he shouldn’t do it, but he couldn’t refuse the old dog. He knew the dog’s life wouldn’t be too much longer, and life was too short to be rationing away all the goodness.

It is this sort of rationalization that leads to so many fat old dogs, but it is one that is hard to argue against, even with all the facts and reasoning on one’s side.

So Brutus grew slower and fatter all through the winter. The Old Man did much the same. His belly hung back out over his pants, just as it had done when he worked ten hours a day at the office.

Very little snow fell that whole season, so all Brutus and the Old Man woke up to was the decaying grayness of winter all around them. The sallow rays of the winter sun cast ugliness upon the skeleton trees. It frosted hard enough that one would worry about the plants, but the temperature would soon rise in the daylight to make the land nothing but ugly mud.

In late March, when the trees finally showed signs of budding, Brutus collapsed on the kitchen floor. The Old Man let the dog out for his morning urination and defecation run, and when the dog sallied back into the house for his daily rationing of sausage and eggs, he dropped to the floor.

And he would not rise.

The Old Man called the vet’s office, and the receptionist told him to bring Brutus in right away. The Old Man wanted to, but Brutus could not get up.

What is a man to do when his dog is too big for him to lift on his own?  The first thing most would do is call out to the neighbors, but he didn’t know any of the neighbors.  And he didn’t want to trouble them.

But in his panicked state, he realized that he’d have to swallow his introversion and ask for help.  Within a half hour, he’d assembled a crew of neighbors, including one particularly macho man whose main hobby was body-building and used to work for the local high school as a strength and conditional coach for the football team. They lifted the big dog onto a thick sheet of plywood and then hoisted the beast on this makeshift litter into the back of the Old Man’s SUV.

And off he sped to the vet clinic.

For two hours, the Old Man waited in complete silence in the reception area. He watched the various people passing back and forth with their golden retrievers and Labradors and pit bulls. He could not make a smile grace his face as he sat there staring into the foreboding, for he knew that nothing good was going to come of today’s events.

A receptionist called his name, but he did not hear it. She called it ten times, but the sound did not register upon the Old Man’s ears.

But then he heard his name, and it pierced him like a knife.  And he rose and entered the examination room. He waited there for twenty minutes, when a young veterinarian with closely cropped black hair and slender build slid into the room. His face was stubbly and grim, and his eyes had that look of sorrow mixed with professional dead seriousness of a medical professional.

Cancer of the spinal chord, probably quite malignant. Brutus would never walk again, and now was the time to have that serious talk about mortality.

The Old Man wept as he had never wept before. The tears rushed down the sides of his face and the skin of his cheeks flushed deep red. For twenty minutes he cried and cried and tried to catch himself.

And when he finally reached that level of composure to talk, his only words were.

“It is time.”

He then asked to see Brutus off on his final journey, and he was led to another room, where the great gray mastiff lay prone and still.

He stroked the old dog’s wrinkled head and sobbed out some goodbyes and a sweet little musing of “good dog.”

And then came the euthanasia, and Brutus’s hours of not being able to rise were ended.

The Old Man wept deeply, kissing the dead dog’s brow as he held the beast’s head in his lap.

And so the Old Man’s six year tenure as a mastiff keeper were ended.

A month passed, and the Old Man made arrangements to travel to Europe. It would be a six month vacation, traveling all over Europe.  He did make a special point to see the Coliseum in Rome, where he stood still and wondered if Brutus’s many, many greats grandfather had grappled with a lion there. All through Italy and especially the countryside around Naples seemed to sing the song of that old mastiff.

He couldn’t quite let go of the majesty and love that he had once known, and feeling such sadness when he finally left Italy for tour of the French Riviera, he didn’t know much what to do with himself. Sure, the sunny seashore should have raised his spirits.

But it didn’t.  At a simple French cafe, he met an English woman, a lecturer of literature who had a simple country home in the Devon Countryside.

A bit reluctant to talk to her, he suddenly felt at ease, and spoke to her about his life, about his hopes and dreams.

They met every evening for a week, and then she invited him to come and visit her in Devon. He spent a month there, and in his odd way, he fell in love with her. She fell in love with him.

And he fell for the lush countryside and for this wonderful woman, who somehow assuaged all his sorrow and made him feel complete as a man for the first time in his life.

And he knew the next step would be to move. He returned to the US, sold all his property there, and moved to that Devonshire cottage to be with his love. She was in her 40s, and he would be 70 next year. But it didn’t matter.

He was in love, and he knew it.

Every day, he walked along the country lanes of Devon, eyes open for the spying the hares and pheasants that popped out along the hedgerows. He walked every day, and some times he thought of Brutus and his old life. He missed that old dog so much. He wondered what he would think of walking freely in the beautiful countryside.  He figured the dog would have loved it so much.

One rainy April day, about a year after he had moved to England, the old man came trundling down one of his favorite country lanes, when a dog suddenly came bursting out of a hedgerow.

It was lurcher, blue merle and short-coated, and so gaunt even for being a lurcher that it was obvious that he wasn’t being fed well.

The dog approached him cautiously. It sniffed his hand and wagged its tail. Its eyes possessed that silly sighthound seriousness, which was bit offset because one was flecked with blue.

It was a female dog, and the Old Man didn’t know what to do.  He could take her to the animal shelter in town, but that would mean a long hike back to his car.

So he continued his walk, half hoping the dog wouldn’t follow and half hoping that she would. She followed. Indeed, she followed so closely that it almost appeared as if she had always belonged to him.

And when he turned to go back to the car, she followed him just as closely, and almost without thinking, he let her in the backseat, and drove back home.

At first he thought he would take her to the animal shelter in town, but as he drove, he felt strangely good to have a dog back there.

And by the time his wife arrived home from the university that evening, the lurcher was sprawled out on a blanket by the fireplace. There was no real discussion about what needed to be done.

The lurcher was to stay, and his love pretty much had to accept it.

And so the lurcher was named Bracken, and every day, she and the old man walked the countryside of Devon. She might have been a poacher’s dog, but she was now the pet of a transplanted country squire.

In her smooth flowing paw steps into the grass, the Old Man could sometimes hear the whisper of Brutus passing by. No, she wasn’t a Neapolitan mastiff.  She wasn’t broad-headed beast that needed to be made to obey.

Bracken was easy and light and soft, the perfect dog for an aging man who missed exquisite existence of being a dog keeper.

And so the two marched along those sweet country lanes. Man and dog together as one team.

Just as it once was, it was to be again.