The Last Word On Nothing

Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. 

A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in the woods. He ranges forward and back, and side to side, sniffing and sussing the hilly woodlands.

Not every day is it a mountain lion, or a bear pawing the ground. Most days I see only piñons and juniper trees, maybe a jay flying by, or a deer staring back at me. High mesas in Western Colorado each have their own daily surprises. Today is the dog.

I am not used to traveling with a domestic animal, unless you count my kids who also clobber the ground and run from side to side. I’d just moved with my family into a house tucked into a geographic platform extending above the North fork of the Gunnison River. The morning’s walk is unfamiliar, these hills new to me. Having a dog tickles an old sensation in my head, going somewhere new with an animal at your side.

We come up a pointillist hill slope of melt, freeze and a skim of fresh snow. He weaves in and out of my aimless path, and I become aware of why we domesticated dogs in the first place. His presence increases the range of my own senses. His nose feels its way along the ground. He pauses, and I pause. He lifts his ears and looks dumbly, but alertly, at seemingly nothing in the distance. Equally dumb and not quite as alert, I join his gaze.

We’ve used dogs as companion tools since as far back as 18,000 to 30,000 years. They’ve helped us migrate, joining in with the hunt, leading us to prey, delivering us from predators, and barking at the edge of our camps when we were too unaware, our minds elsewhere, cooking, sewing, grinding, and cutting while the dogs watched out for us.

Having a dog with me on this fine, snow-cast terrain, I worry less about an unfortunate encounter with a mountain lion. I don’t know the nearest ravine or rim-rocked mesa edge, and I don’t know what lives here. The dog will see it before I do.

It’s a young dog, not accustomed to being too far out in the woods. I sense its nervousness. And I don’t know the dog well. So, we’re both experimenting.

Dogs were no fools coming along with us for this evolutionary ride. You might say we were the ones coming along with them. The presence of dogs may have been a critical factor in human arrival and dispersal in the New World some 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. They may have been why we did so well as a species worldwide in the middle of the Paleolithic, canids being one of the keys to our success. With them, we could better siege mammoths and Ice Age horses, their skins and meat allowing us to spread farther into the world.

Though dog remains are scant if not non-existent from the Ice Age in North America (human remains from then are scant, too), the earliest domestic canids appear to have been present in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Recent DNA analysis suggests that the first dogs appeared in Paleolithic Europe, though there are still strong holdouts for earliest dogs in southern China. The ones that eventually created Native American stock originated from Siberian dog genes, a direct shot across the Bering Land Bridge. On the Siberian side of the land bridge, a dog burial was excavated and in its open jaws a piece of mammoth bone had been placed.

Before those times, dogs were wolves. Fossil DNA shows a short and well-proven genetic hop from one to the other.

You can see how it would have happened early in our days. Human and wolf would have looked at each other with a sort of interspecies understanding. Both had similar survival strategies, pack hunters living and reproducing in nomadic but regional groups. It was inevitable that territories overlapped between the two species and they had to deal with each other. Hunting Ice Age megafauna, humans and wolves alike would have left behind carcasses and scads of meat. If we were successful, wolves would have followed like seagulls behind a fishing boat. If wolves were successful, we would have followed them. Humans are not just hunters and gatherers. We are also scavengers. Like coyotes or vultures, we would have moved in on Ice Age muskox or giant bison carcasses left by wolves. You might imagine that on certain days, standoffs would have happened: humans with rocks and sticks, wolves with teeth and speed. We won some, they won some. Over time, we mixed. We threw a bone or two, speaking the language of pack animals, inviting them in.

Those who joined us became dogs. Those who did not remained wolves. 

I don’t know who got the better deal. Maybe it was the dogs. I’ve seen savvy street dogs lounging around cantina fires, living the life, and I’ve been sure we did this trip together, as equals. This is perhaps what we mean when we say, symbiosis. We both get something.

But the wolf has not turned against its own nature, like domestic creatures such as ourselves and our dogs.  It kept to a different evolutionary path, an original path, an older voice. 

The dog with me this morning has obviously lost a good deal of its wolfness. It rambles excitedly, missing one deer path after the next, its nose so overwhelmed with possibilities that it is not always sure which way to look. I’ve lost a lot, too. I once knew how to survive among saber-tooth cats and now-extinct dire wolves with big, bone-crushing heads. I could take down a mammoth with a spear. I looked wolves in the eye and convinced them to join me, as they looked me in the eye and convinced me of the same. Now, I am an atrophied version of the animal I once was, my senses bettered by a young black lab clearing a path for me through the woods.

Image: biodiversitylibrary.org/page/47291236