Portrait of a Dog

Back when I had my first dog, I used to like to take him down to my grandpa’s house and let him loose to run in the yard there. My grandpa used to keep hunting hounds there, so the place was ripe for a dog-- though it had been a right couple of years since the last canine resident had set paw to earth there.

In the yard next to his backyard proper-- a mostly wooded empty lot that my grandpa had been using for ages-- he liked to keep goats. When I was a kid, there used to be a good herd of goats living there, and my brother and I used to feed them leaves from the big tree that grew in the middle of the front yard. ‘Course that was before my grandpa decided that he had a few too many goats and killed and et a good number of them. However, he did keep two, because the lady who rightfully owned the property he was keeping them on was only inclined to let him keep use of it on account of his goats providing a free lawn service. On account of those goats he was able to keep hold of his property, the one he kept the goats on, and the abandoned lot next to his for good measure.

The two goats that he kept alive and which lived next door at the time I used to bring my dog round were a nanny goat and a great big billy goat. The nanny goat didn’t show much of a personality and mainly liked to keep to herself over by the metal house that provided them with shelter. Her Bill, though, he had a right personality.

My dog took to him right away, on account of he thought the goat was someone to play with. He used to chase that billy goat up and down the fence line all day, barking and rearing at him, delighted when the goat did the same to him and thinking that it was just a game and he was making friends. For Bill’s part, well...that goat had nothing finer in mind than to kill that dog of mine. He used to ram the fence so hard I oftentimes thought he’d run right through it, and I had to make sure the latch on the gate that connected the two yards was padlocked at all times, since my dog was smart enough to nudge up a latch, and he’d have been a real goner for sure if that goat ever had a clean chance at him.

It was sort of funny all the same though. Just imagine-- a young, seventy-pound German Shepherd-- large, lumbering, over-eager and a complete doofus-- and his best pal, an eighty- to eighty-five pound billy goat with a set of horns on him hard as steel, raising hell together on opposite sides of the fence-- one trying to play and the other bent to kill! And it’s not just fancy that makes me think that goat would have gutted my dog six ways ‘til Sunday. You see, that beast had a history, and a rap sheet of bad deeds as long as any goat could have.

He was the most mean-tempered goat I ever did meet, and he was more territorial and aggressive than he had any right to be. And all, it would seem, on account of his nanny.

Whenever I heard tell stories of Bill, or saw the two of them together, I always liked to fancy that poor Nanny really got the raw end of the deal, and was as long-suffering as it’s possible for a goat to be.

Her Bill was the jealous type, you see, and he would run off anybody and anything he saw even looking at his Nanny. And he didn’t run just to scare. When he came at you, eyes a-blazing, hoofs a-thundering, and a great set of horns aimed straight at you, you’d be a fool not to beat a retreat triple-time and take yourself well out of eyesight for good measure. People who wandered unwarily into the goat pen often had to jump the fence to make good their escape, and they never made the same mistake a second time. And of course when Bill had set everyone to running or didn’t see nobody to set to, he’d harangue his poor Nanny with a lot of unwanted but much tolerated attention. And that isn’t even the worst of it.

Old Bill, he’d like to spend a lot of quality time with poor Nanny, doing the things that billy goats and nanny goats do, however, he would get so jealous of her that come birthing time, if he wasn’t forcibly separated from her (no easy task), he’d kill his own kids in a fit of jealous rage.

When my grandpa told me that sordid little detail, I asked him why out of all his goats he hadn’t killed old Billy when he was picking and choosing certain ones for his dinner plate. He replied: “Old Bill’s too mean to die.” By which I guess he meant it would be too much trouble and too dangerous to try to get one over on that goat.

So’s anyway my dog-- Berend-- and Old Bill would have at it every day, for hours at a time, and once the two of them got going there was no stopping them. People used to give me flak about how short my dog’s attention span was, but if those people could have seen the way he focused on that goat, they’d have known better.

I was supposed to be training him at this point-- teaching him to sit at doors, come when called, focus on me when told to and the like-- but with Old Bill around that just wasn’t gonna happen. I had a dog that was heavily motivated by two things: his toys and his stomach, but he wouldn’t listen to either of them so long as Old Bill had him on the line.

Every Wednesday when I’d take him over there and we would spend the day hanging out, my biggest challenge was figuring a way to get him to let that goat alone. Or, equally challenging, driving the goat off the fence so’s he’d leave Berend be. To that end I employed a variety of methods ranging from yelling at my dog to “Leave it!”, threatening to employ the hose (which actually didn’t reach that far), and, finally, banging a great metal pole against a part of the fence my dog couldn’t get to and thus diverting Bill’s attention. That last method proved the most successful, and by it I was able to achieve time to actually work on those things we were supposed to be doing, and we made good progress on them too-- until Old Bill decided that his attention was needed over on my part of the fence and he’d get Berend at it again. There’s only so much provocation a body can take, and to a dog-- particularly my dog-- whatever’s out of reach is always more interesting than what’s in it.

The distraction was so bad that a couple of times I resorted to absconding with my dog to another yard, where the goat would be out of sight and hopefully therefore out of mind.

He was a good dog when he could focus properly—the problem was in getting his attention long enough for him to mind. And he was smart too. Not the sort of smart where he’d instantly know and obey everything you told him. But the sort of smart where he knew just what he could and could not get away with, and exactly what and how much of something he had to do to get what he wanted. He was the sort of dog who wouldn’t sit at a door when he knew it was going to be opened, but if he wanted to go somewhere and knew that you didn’t, he’d sit by that door for hours on the off-chance that you’d see he really was a good boy and give him what he wanted. Cunning, I suppose you could call it, or craftiness. Me, I prefer to regard it as intelligence—and not just because he was my dog.

I was always the first and the most vocal at calling him out as a doofus, but that’s only on account o’ him acting such a darn fool all the time. This dog knew pretty much everything it is that a dog’s got to know (and a few other things besides), but what made him smart wasn’t blind obedience to someone else; it was him thinking for himself, and figuring out how to get things done with minimal effort on his part. Occasionally, I would call that ‘being lazy’.

I already mentioned that this was a dog who liked his toys-- right possessive over ‘em, he was. And his all-time favorite game was tug-o-war. He was always comin’ up to me, shoving his toys in my face and asking me to play a game with him. So naturally I thought it would be fun to teach him to tug on things for a practical purpose, and set about to doing so. But wouldn’t you know, as soon as that dog realized it wasn’t a game, he refused to play an’ waited all patient-like fer me to do all the work I was tryin’ to get him to do. So not stupid, just... a doofus.

Berend was also very fond o’ cars-- we couldn’t pass one by without him putting his big paws up on the window and peering in, with this look on his face like he was just beggin’ me to bust one open and take him for a ride. He was a man’s dog, all right.

One time, my dad was getting home from somewhere, and as he was leaving his car, my dog just jumped right on in and sat perfectly in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead and ready to go. My dad being my dad, he got real mad about that and made me take the dog out, but I always think of that moment whenever I remember my dog.

He had a real personality, and I hope that wherever he is now, there are plenty of cars to ride around in.