Natural History

He was the kind of dog you get not because you’re looking for him. He was the kind you get when some neighbor up the road had a litter and soon found himself in a tizzy trying to find homes for them. He was the kind brought home on muddy April afternoon to wait leaping and screaming for the farm kids to come home from school, where they would behold their new prize.

Yes, Jocko was that kind of dog. The above paragraph was his childhood autobiography, and like most farm collie-type dogs in the foothills of West Virginia’s Alleghenies, he wandered the land most of the day. He learned not to chase chickens or worry sheep, but he knew how to jump a rabbit or grouse for the shotgun. He knew how to tree a squirrel or a corn-raiding raccoon, and he could put the cows out of the big vegetable patch or the apple orchard.

Every farmer in the little hamlet knew Jocko and new him well. He was the dog you called on when you gut-shot a deer and needed the expertise of a fine tracker to follow its death course through the briers and brush. He was the dog that lined your hound bitches, and though you coursed the crossing, you half-hoped the collie-ish genes would add a bit of sagacity to the mongrel pups.

He would roll in cow-pies with reckless abandon, but he savored the road apples of horses, savoring their sweet stink as he downed them through his collie maw.

When the coyotes howled at night, he gave back his domestic cursing barks. “Dare not tread here, you wild fiends!” the surliness in his voice seemed to say.

When he spied their scat on forest trails, he’d lift high his left hind-leg, piss out a few drops of urine, and then kick up the leaves in territorial disgust.

Every weekday afternoon, he’d mosey to the bus house where the farm children were dropped off. He’d wag and lick their hands softly, and then follow them back to their homes. He knew that his domain ended where the black-top began, a bit he learned through only his collie intuition and nothing else. So though he came to take the children home, he never once wandered into highway where the cats and opossums perished by the score.

For twelve years, this creature served man in his own way. He lived the life of a domestic servant but was still wild and unknown. He was the way dogs were not so long ago, before we turned them into caricatures of what they really are.

In the winter of that twelfth year, his ears and eyes were failing him, and now he felt the weakness that comes from cancer of the spleen.

And they euthanized him beneath the sweeping veil of the old ash tree, itself dying hard from the work of those invasive borers. In a year, a summer storm would make it fall to the ground, but for now, its shadow would the lawn where the old dog was put to rest.

A few old farmers came by to pay their respects. They’d tell his owners about the groundhogs the old boy had killed or how they’d loved the way the dog had walked their little girl home from school. They tell these stories and choke back a few gruff tears.

But so few came to mourn the old dog. The children of the farms had moved on to what they thought were better things. They worked in factories, sailed ships, tried cases, and treated wounds in hospitals. They didn’t work the cattle or feed the chickens as their mothers and father had.

And with their removal to the newer world, the community of farms began to die. Progress can be a cancer in the spleen of a collie, but it can be the uplift to a higher plain of human conscience, one that sees us as united with all the rest of humanity and all the rest of life in a common purpose of survival.

And so we do not keep dogs like Jocko this way anymore. We have leash laws and dog wardens. We keep them in fenced yards.

A few of those transplanted farm people keep a collie or even an English shepherd in the suburbs and dream that this dog would somehow become Jocko. But try as the dog might, it will never be Jocko. It will be a mere facsimile of what was once and will never be again.

Better in some ways. Worse in others. But not ever the same.