The Last Word On Nothing

This post originally appeared in February, 2020. I resurrected it because I figure we could all use a dog hug, in this pandemic time of not hugging folks outside our households.

When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. Proof once again that love can draw blood—mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.

Each time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace.

Taiga is small and fox-like, with a full lexicon not of words, but of gestures that may as well be words. When she loves, she hugs with her face. When she knows you in that deep way that dogs do, once they’ve spent even a few days with someone, she may lean, with all of her weight, her forehead into your forehead, her thin forearms flung about your neck, her paws hooked over your shoulders. If you are new, and she is tentative, but approves, and you know the right places to scratch her under her collar or just beneath her ears, it may be her forehead into your knee. If you are chummy and the moment is light, and you are sitting beside each other on a couch, it will be her forehead into your shoulder.

The press is brief, but firm—you feel the touch as bone to bone. We two are bodies here for a moment, it seems to say, so let’s lean and rest and revel in this one point of shared warmth. And then she is gone, off about her own business, smelling or eating or watching or dashing about in seemingly random ways that no doubt have their own sacred order—the base order being, if I had to guess, pure joy. Half fox, people say, when they see her out walking. And maybe so, found as she was, running along a rural highway on the flank of a mesa 10,000 feet above the sea. A wild thing.

She is, as most dogs are, happiest in motion, under the sky. When you have not been out enough, or up enough, she lays behind you and looks at you unblinkingly under the whitening points of her brows. Skeptical. Quizzical. You know this is not good for either of us. The reminder again that you are yourself a moment, a breathing thing in need of movement and light, too soon gone, and off you go into the day for at least a little while, made newer for the time spent, if also made a little late. And what matter?

I have seen, more recently, the things her ears do, in presence of threat. When a juvenile mountain lion followed us briefly along a trail last year, Taiga’s ears swiveled towards it before her head—two triangles of perfect alertness fixed on our sudden feline companion. More recently, mistaking two sawhorses draped in a drop cloth for, perhaps, the same creature, she became stiff as a board—an antennae receiving every vibration of the world, except, perhaps, the bit about this thing being a couple of sawhorses—and barked at its silent menace with feeling.  When I’m sad, she stays near, her eyes dark and searching my face. Dogs always know. In sleep, she barks into her closed mouth—a sweet sound of dream chase, of the puppy she once was, 10 years ago.

I say sometimes that the best people are dogs and kids. The way they are, essentially and without filter, themselves. How little of that there is, among those of us who call ourselves adults.

When I got back from Alaska that one time, the force of Taiga’s leap split my lower lip. And yet it diminished nothing about the reunion. I wiped the blood from my mouth and gathered her tight into my arms. Trying to contain the spin and whir of her wild energy—and maybe, just maybe, to absorb a little bit of it.

Original photos by the author