Sam

Had it not snowed that cold November day almost a decade ago, I never would have seen the abandoned puppy some heartless fool had left to God's mercy off Route 55 outside of Lebanon, Kentucky. Nothing is as soothing as whipping past endless miles of land covered with pine and poplar, sun-bleached grays and greens wearing a vast silken bed sheet – evidence of God’s promise worldly things would somehow turn out for the good.

I stopped to water a fence post, having not seen so much as a taillight since sunset, when a black spot on the snow wiggled in the distance. Now larger as I walked closer, two brown eyes caught my headlights and burned with a fire that ignited something deep inside me. Without a second thought, I slipped off my coat and wrapped it around the pup and carried him back to my car.

I found my old classic 1976 El Dorado convertible the same way I found Sam, weather-worn and beat-up along a roadside. I was driving an import sheathed in steel so thin it would dent if you looked at it too hard and made sounds like a weed eater if you gave it too much gas. I swore I would ditch it at the first opportunity. When the bearded old codger ambled from his trailer, I knew we could cut a deal.

His name was Erasmus Miller and he had maintained his outpost for three decades as a protest against runaway technology he said was "designed to swallow a man in his own ignorance." He was a small man, wiry and flexible as pignut hickory. He sold varmint skulls decorated with pop rivets, snake skin belts, stuffed raccoons, fox tail vests, an assortment of oddities he had crafted out of an environment that gave up nothing without a fight.

Erasmus freely poured shots of black Jack into jelly jars as I checked the points and plugs and tinkered with the carburetor. His interest in the "old gas-hog" that didn't run faded in direct proportion to the falling level of caramel liquid in the square bottle, as did his appreciation rise for the dependable vehicle that brought me by chance to his lonely backroad hideaway. I unclogged the jets with a generous dab of Jack on the corner of my shirt tail, freed the choke plate and adjusted the mixture. When it finally roared to life, Erasmus said the old Caddy and I were destined to be together and traded it even for my tinny foreign sedan.

He smiled widely when I drove away, like I had relieved him of a great burden, though I knew I had gotten the best of the bargain. It was like trading a pastured gelding for Secretariat.

My orphan pup was no thoroughbred. He was a black-and-white hound of dubious ancestry, shepherd mixed with American pit bull terrier and a dash of retriever that added silky curls to his ears. I called him Sam because he was a true American, a melting pot of the best of many bloodlines that combined to create a singularly formidable package.

Sam slept at the foot of my bed in the modest house I maintain on a forty-acre farm outside of Paris. It's not a fancy place, but has big uncluttered rooms and a wide porch that runs around four walls made of native fieldstone. Thick rough-hewn tulip poplar beams span the ceiling under lengths of first cut tongue-and-groove pine. It's a simple solid house, built on a small rise that affords a panoramic view of the countryside; perfect for a man on his own who prefers thoughts to money and privacy to fast empty talk that never amounts to anything.

I found it pointless to do any landscaping and left the yard to the designs of nature. Abundant deer roam freely over the property and assure that any efforts spent planting bushes or raising vegetables came to naught. Deer have a predilection for soft cultivated leaves and tender shoots, and the day you wake up and find your garden shredded you learn a valuable lesson about how things operate and what things are best left alone.

Sam was a born guard dog with instincts of a desert reptile, yet with the kindred compassion of warm blood. He never hurt the deer but sure scared the hell out of them, dashing back and forth inside a herd, nipping front hooves or leaping up against their sides to push them away with his paws. Routing deer was good sport to Sam and provided me with solid evidence that he was my partner in managing our domain.

The spring after I found Sam I planted a garden out back within view of my kitchen window. I had been preparing the soil for years, tilling in vegetable scraps, lawn clippings and fireplace ash in anticipation of one day mastering the deer problem. The plot was purposefully located over my drain field to reduce water needs. I elevated the garden into beds held in by weathered railroad ties and planted a Spartan mix of beefsteak tomatoes, yellow crook-necked squash, corn, radishes and a variety of herbs. A tomato plucked at the peak of flavor is well worth the trouble as is steamed fresh squash, or lamb chops seasoned with just pinched rosemary.

In the mornings Sam would clean up whatever was left of my breakfast, then trot off to take his constitutional. I kept a bowl of dry Purina next to his water bowl on the back porch for him to snack on during the day, but at night Sam wanted to feast. Year round, bright summer sun or overcast February night, Sam knew when it was supper time. He would find me, wherever I was, in the den pounding away or off on the perimeter clearing brush, and would dog me relentlessly until I gave him his due for being a faithful servant and best friend.

And thank God he did.

I was removing some cockspur hawthorn with a chain saw one cool December evening about dark when Sam came from behind and grabbed my shirt in his jaws.

"Stop it, Sam," I said. But he didn't stop and kept pulling. "Fool dog. Let me finish this and I'll feed you. It won't be five minutes, I swear."

Sam persisted, his teeth notched into the flannel, his paws steadfast in the dirt and bluegrass. I turned off my chain saw bent upon delivering a severe reprimand when I heard the rattles. My efforts had uncovered an unseen nest of timber rattlesnakes, the mama curled and ready to strike. I backed away in the direction Sam was pulling me, lowering the long metal tongue of my chain saw like a shield. Mama uncoiled into a biting lance in a split second. I can still hear her fangs ringing against the steel blade.

I had been marinating a big Porterhouse and threw it over charcoal after pumping several shells through the breech of my trusty Winchester to eradicate the problem. Sam looked surprised when he got the big T-bone with half the meat still attached. If he realized he had done something special that day, Sam didn't show it. He had just done what he was supposed to do. I had saved him once and he had saved me. We were even.

Sam also fished like an equal. I developed a pond out back from a natural topographical depression and lined the bottom with clay. I borrowed a neighbor’s herd and spread hay a foot deep over the clay. When the hay was gone, the cattle had hard-packed the clay so well it held the spring rains year round. I stocked the pond with enough brim and crappie to balance my annual take with their procreation and have never since had to run into town for food when the cupboards got bare.

Sam thought it odd when I skewered a worm on a hook and dangled a line from the cane pole in the water at the end of my little wooden dock. But once he got the taste of beer-battered crappie it all made sense. Sam noticed the crappie would surface for cornmeal scattered on the water. He would watch them feed, still as a stone, forepaws curled over the end of the pressure-treated fir. Sam would never take the first one. He waited for the big one. At the right instant, Sam would leap, catch the crappie in his mouth, swim it over to the shore and drop it up on the bank. If it tried to flap its way back to water, Sam would hold it with a paw, or flip it up higher, much like a cat would tease a mouse.

Sam was also an excellent bird dog, though unorthodox, as he would crouch rather than point, then spring forward and out dash the other men's dogs to retrieve felled game. If it was ducks, Sam would wait in the blind and leap when he saw one fall, dogpaddling out through the reeds, his eyes keen on the floating bird past the decoys. We'd gather around a wood fire, swap stories and melt big blocks of paraffin in oil drums, then dip the limp ducks in the hot wax so their pin feathers would rip away in sheets after the wax cooled in the marsh water.

There's a lot to be said about the camaraderie of men on a hunt with their dogs, of the rough talk and tribal intelligence that reduces the most civilized of us to a primal common denominator. Nothing will recover a man to himself quicker than trading a corner office for a duck blind, or a Hickey-Freeman suit for jeans and a cotton flannel shirt. All the money in the world can't buy the sensation of that first drawn breath in a pine forest on a cool clear morning or that first tug on fly rod when standing in a backwoods stream.

Sam knew all this without having to think about it, and could explain it more eloquently with a low growl or a glance than any human could in a hundred pages of written words. Sam was aware of certain subtleties of the human condition that escape a lot of people. Things like waiting to eat until everyone is served, or allowing another person to go first, or willing to sacrifice himself to save another. Sam practiced common courtesy to his fellow creatures and that, in my book, made him a first-rate soul despite his imperfections that finally did him in.

After the last mass of cold air stalls in its trek down from the Arctic and rains began to release wildflowers along the roadways, the big Spring moon exerts its pull on warm-blooded creatures everywhere. Atop the rocky ridge outside Paris, Sam listened to the haunting melodies howled by every dog within earshot. He sat at attention emitting sympathetic groans, his head cocked side-to-side, until a particular voice made him take his feet. He'd go to the edge of the porch, add his rich baritone to the cacophony and wait.

About the third spring Sam began to ramble. The other dogs came for him in the night and where he went I’ll never know for sure, though it must have been far and involved females in heat. One year Bill Grimes told me he saw Sam west of Lexington heading toward Versailles. Another year Eliza Elkins swore it was Sam in a pack of mixed breeds who rustled a chicken from her hen house in Mt. Sterling. Reports in later years placed Sam in Cynthiana, Carlisle, Clintonville, even over at the Blue Licks battlefield twenty-two miles away.

No matter where he went or what he did, Sam always came back. It might be days or weeks later when Sam would drag himself up the gravel road, drink his fill at the bowl and crash smooth out. He'd sleep for two or three days, arising only to gulp some more water or nibble at the dry food. He'd dream and twitch during the night and sometimes would howl at the top of his lungs in a trance, or moan laying on his side with his eyes closed. And, sometimes Sam would come back hurt.

I learned to look him over real good while he slept. He'd receive nasty gashes around his neck and on his flanks and I’d clean them with peroxide and dress them with a healing salve. I often had to stitch the bigger wounds closed until they got a grip. One year Sam limped in so badly I took him to a vet for an x-ray. Little dots stood out around the bones of his back legs and were pronounced inoperable. The vet said to remove the buckshot might cause more trouble that he had already. Maybe it would slow him down some, the vet said. And it did until the next spring, until that last spring, when Sam didn't make it home.

That was three years ago and I keep hoping to see him limp up the drive toward the house. I fill his bowl every morning with fresh water and set out dry food, but it stays there until rot sets in from moisture or mice carry the pellets away. The deer are back in my garden and I don't even bother to plant any more. I can't breach the thought of getting another dog, though friends and neighbors have offered. Every once in a while I go to look over their litters, but none of the pups seems worthy. They just don’t possess Sam’s potential. I leave empty handed, always hoping.

Sometimes late at night I'll be sitting on the porch and see Sam's silhouette running to catch the moon on a distant ridge across the valley. I'll call out at the top of my lungs: "Sam! Sam, come home!" And I'll wait up all night, only to find myself asleep in my chair, awakened by the rude dance of deer hooves on rocky ground. Or, I'll be driving a back road and see Sam swimming a stream or chasing a fox in the cedar bush or running a coon up a tree. I'll pull a big Porterhouse out of the marinade and throw it on the grill and watch the smoke rise up to the heavens.

Sam is up there somewhere. Hunting with Orion or diving after Pisces, or roaming the back range of some galaxy trying to get home.