For the Love of a Hound

They say you don’t get the hound you want; you get the hound you need. There is no statement more valid than that to describe my Dazey. When my eldest left for college, our family dog died. Max was a great big lab chow mix and his absence, along with the absence of my eldest son was too much for my heart to bear. I adopted a dog about three months later. That was Ally. My youngest son and husband felt it was too soon, so she was my full responsibility. It didn’t matter, she still bonded with my husband more than me. I fed, watered, walked, and groomed that dog, but it was my husband she showered with affection. I had always had labs, but Ally was a bluetick hound/ lab mix. Her personality was not that of a lab, so I just assumed what I was seeing was hound traits, and I was in love with that.

Ally was almost two when a Treeing Walker Coonhound pup became available at a local shelter. I researched the breed and found that they were bred in the hills of Tennessee. They are the fastest, smartest, most determined of the coonhounds—much the way that Belgian Malinois are to German Shepherds; the suped-up version of the breed. We lived in Northeast Ohio. There isn’t much raccoon hunting done in the suburbs of Cleveland. This puppy had my heart from the moment I set eyes on her. When I filled out the paperwork to get her, the shelter asked if I had hound experience. I said I did and explained that my other dog was a bluetick/lab mix. I was given the okay, and we were on our way. I thought that hounds were lazy, Ally certainly was. Easy going and relaxed, smart and athletic on demand.

Dazey is timid and shy. She is extremely sensitive. She is also the craziest and smartest of all the dogs I have ever owned. Her tagline was adapted from Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s French taunting: “Your mother was a billy goat and your father smelt of elderberries”. There is not a puzzle toy on this earth that she can’t figure out, and that includes every cabinet, trash can and refrigerator. She can smell food from a mile away and if she wants it, she will find a way to get it. Nothing is safe. There are child proof locks on all my cabinets and my fridge, the good stuff lives in the microwave on top of the fridge. My trashcan is one of those really expensive metal versions that you have to step on the pedal to open the hydraulic top…Dazey learned how to use the pedal, so now there’s a brick that lives on the top. Her breed of hound has claws like a mountain lion. These dogs have been known to scale trees 80 feet tall. Dazey settles for standing on the coffee table in front of the TV to let you know she needs attention. I don’t expect these behaviors to ever change. She’s a hound. They are bred to be fiercely independent. Hunters let them into the woods to track animals, run them up trees and hold them there until the hunters can catch up. They are bred to lead, not to follow. But there is one trait, that makes all the trouble worth it.

Hounds are fiercely loyal. They have to be- when the hunt is done, they have to find their way home and they have been doing that since before the days of GPS locators. I always joked, that if hounds were less loving, their breed wouldn’t have survived- the hunter’s wives would have killed them all. It took Dazey about a year to trust me, even with all the training, feeding, walking, and grooming that I exclusively did. After a year and a half, she decided to trust my youngest son.

She has never trusted my husband. That makes perfect sense. The story of how our relationship ended is one that I am not ready to tell, but he ripped my heart out, put it back into my chest, healed it, and while the scar was still ugly, ripped it out again. I would not have survived the end of my marriage without my dogs, but especially not without Dazey.

Every night, she sleeps curled up on my right hip. While I work from home, she stays on the couch, where she can keep one eye on me, and the other on the front yard so she can warn me of dangers like the mailman and people walking their dogs. There are days where my dogs are the only thing that get me out of bed. On my darkest days, when I am wishing I was dead, it’s the thought that I am the only one that Dazey trusts anymore that keeps me moving. When I am wracked with grief over the 22 years of marriage that have been lost, my pack, Dazey and Ally keep me moving, they demand walks and playtime and make me laugh through the tears in my eyes.

It's been just me and the dogs for about a year now. My youngest son moved out a year ago last August. Last month, Dazey finally started sleeping on her back with her legs up. Dogs only do that when they feel safe and secure in their surroundings. After three years together, she finally feels safe. In my queen size bed, I have Dazey on my right hip, and Ally on my shoulder. The three of us forging a new life on our own.