after attending a canine adoption clinic yesterday with my friend Sheila,
i returned begging the question again,
"what is it about a dog?"
the more time i spend with these guys, after spending a life doing so, the less i know. some day no doubt the answer will be found in some DNA-resonant-crossover-chemically-based-genome-vibrational-distant-cousin-to-a-neuron-recombinant-bark-cell.
but even then, based in another body, i won't buy it.
when you go eyeball to eyeball, even from a distance an opening occurs that is
transcendent, ineffable.
rusty, american foxhound mix, standing elegantly still on the curb as if awaiting the lord of the mansion's next command, has been eyeballing me as i rush by, i suddenly realize. and so i glance back, there is gentleness in those eyes but i am afraid to look too long. "prey drive" are the words occupying my mind, with two cats at home. rusty, more trusting than i; maybe the drive was mixed out of him.
flashback to The Visit to a hybrid wolf farm long ago in Pennsylvania, its founder and operator since departed. The Visit is an Experience never forgotten and always immediately accessible to me like it was yesterday. no eyeball to eyeballs there; you imagine they must at least glance at you as you turn away from the raised pens and walk to see the next, but you will never know. primate that you are, it is unfathomable that no eye contact is essential.
the suspended meat hooks as you make the long drive from the gate through the multiply-fenced property up to the fenced compound should give a clue as to the serious nature of the creatures within. but it still doesn't totally hit till you are standing a few feet apart from a wolf behind bars. there are many, and they are all pacing.
my friend Mindy is a foster mom at the time to hybrid pups bred here. flash forward to sitting in Mindy's farmhouse, watching her feed an armful of voracious part-wolf pups. they are furballs: adorable, feisty, tumbling over each other to be first. i want to take one or all with me. but what if someday they begin to shrink from a glance, pull back into true nature, go the way of the wildest part of themselves.
primate that i am,
i pass on living
with a predator
for the time.
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