BEGINNINGS
Into my writer’s isolation will come a dog, to sit beside my chair or to lie on the couch while I work, to force me outside for a walk, and suddenly, although still lonely, this writer will have a companion.
I’m ten years older than when I brought home my last dog, Charlotte, and I hope I have it in me to be there for one more vizsla.
Like my grandmother and my father, I have become attached to one specific breed and cannot imagine living with a different type of dog. I have spent twenty-two consecutive years with vizslas. This will be my third one. I love their joyful, exuberant energy and the close attachment they seek with their humans.
I have forgotten much about living with a puppy, but I do have a dim recollection that it is all-consuming, and that a quiet, contemplative writing life is almost impossible to balance with the chaotic energy of a young dog. So, I am thinking that while my life is upended by the puppy, it might be a good opportunity to write about that experience—to think about my writing life in relation to the dogs I have lived with, and to explore other writers’ relationships with their dogs. What does a dog bring to the writing life? My writing life has mostly included dogs, but I have never spent time thinking about what this has meant to my creative journey.
While working on a novel would be difficult with a young dog around, because it requires so much time and attention, surely I should be able to keep a journal with some hastily scratched entries, written in the moments when the puppy is napping or playing?
December 15
When I purchased a puppy before, I usually knew which one I was getting, as the breeder picked the puppy out for me based on my temperament and the temperament of the baby dog—a kind of matchmaking. Each puppy in these previous litters was wearing a little nylon cord collar in a particular colour so they could be easily identified. Hazel was the “yellow” puppy. Charlotte was “green.” Violet was “red.”
But the new breeder doesn’t like the collars, says they just get caught on things, so he hasn’t marked the puppies. Also, he maintains that you can’t really tell anything about the dogs when they are seven weeks old, and that they will all be fine, decent dogs, no matter which one I am given. I can see his point, and admire his confidence in his breeding program, but it does lend a certain randomness to what seems a significant decision, and I feel unsettled by his attitude. I worry that I might get the wrong dog.
I haven’t specified what sex of dog I want, but the litter is mostly female. The puppies were born on October 27, which also happens to be Sylvia Plath’s birthday.
Just as picking a title for a book is either easy—in that it occurs right away, sometimes before the book has even been started—or impossible—meaning that no title seems right, ever—so it is for the naming of a dog. “Hazel” was decided before the puppy was brought home. The colour that is hazel is roughly the shade of a vizsla’s coat and eyes. Also, at the time it felt unique, not being a popular name for either human or canine. Those were the reasons we picked it for the puppy and it always seemed right, although children had trouble with it and Hazel was sometimes called “Weasel” by anyone under the age of ten.
“Charlotte” was one of dozens of names that I tried out on the new puppy in the weeks after she was living with me. Before she was Charlotte, she was Rosie, Wallis, Harris, and a dozen other names that I can no longer remember. I settled on “Charlotte” because it seemed a vaguely aristocratic name and the puppy had a rather imperious quality to her.
This time, I want a name that isn’t a human name at all but is a piece of nature. I have tried and discarded various trees—Ash, Maple, Rowan, Larch. For a while, I was thinking of Cricket, and then Clover, but both names are hard to yell, feel too much of a mouthful for the countless times I will be trying to call the dog away from rolling ecstatically in the guts of a dead fish, or eating fresh, steaming piles of horseshit, or swimming out into the middle of the lake after ducks.
In the end, I’m not the one who thinks of the name. My stepdaughter, in a moment of clairvoyance, texts that she wants the dog to be born on her birthday (which it nearly was) and proclaims that it should be called Fig.
I like the name for its clarity and for how easy it is to say emphatically, and also for the possibility of using it in different ways—Figgy, Figlet. (I amuse myself by making up lots of nicknames for my dogs. In the last year of her life, I hardly ever called Charlotte by her real name, but instead was calling her mostly Joe or Fred. I had tired of her original name, and it didn’t really matter what I called her because she and I understood each other without words). So, “Fig” seems good, right. Also, the vizsla, with its dark red fur somewhat resembles the colour of a ripe Calimyrna fig.
Charlotte has been dead for five months and I miss her constantly. The months of being without a dog have been hard. The house has been so empty. Walking has felt pointless. So, I am anxious to fill my life, and my home, with a new dog.
A close friend and I drive north with a blanket and a small crate, in case the puppy is frantic at being separated from her family and needs to be contained for the ride home. Puppy Hazel was desperate to escape from the car when we first picked her up, and I don’t want the new puppy to squirm out of my arms. I have memories of a family vacation when I was a child where one of our cats crawled under the accelerator pedal while my father was driving on a busy highway and he almost crashed the car.
I have bought a few new things for the puppy—a soft collar for her little puppy neck, a small coat for winter—but most of what she needs will be provided courtesy of Charlotte. The new dog will eat out of the bowls that my old dog ate from. She will play with the toys that Charlotte left behind. And she will wear Charlotte’s old leather collar when she is big enough, because there is still a lot of life left in that collar. Why buy something new when what is already here will work perfectly well? The puppy will be herself, but she will enter into a continuum of dog where much has already been tried and proven.
We left early, but when we arrive at the breeder’s, two other families are already here, picking up their puppies. There are six in the litter altogether, four females and two males. One of the females has already been flown out to British Columbia, and the two families that are here with us are taking the males, which leaves three little female puppies writhing in the puppy box on the kitchen floor.
Vizslas are not known for being calm dogs and I fear that Charlotte, in her divine calmness, was an anomaly, but I am ever hopeful. We choose the puppy that seems the quietest and is keen to make eye contact with us. The other two are busy wrestling, and the breeder has already referred to one of them as a “firecracker,” which is not appealing. Because the vizsla is a finely tuned hunting dog, they can be neurotic and the line between “high-strung” and flat-out nuts is quite thin. I am confident that I can provide a peaceful environment for a dog, but it helps if the puppy I’m starting out with is not too hyperactive.
On the ride home, it seems that we have chosen well. Mary Louise drives and I sit in the back seat with the puppy, who dozes on my lap or lies in her crate with the door open, snoozing. She seems perfect and I am thankful, but I soon discover she was probably just stunned from the change in environment. Once home, she turns into a clawing, biting machine and draws significant blood from me three times in the first twenty-four hours. Also, the crate—which she didn’t mind in the car—she hates in the house. She vocalizes in a high-pitched puppy shriek whenever I put her in there for the briefest of periods to start the crate-training process. (Despite many dog-training books and videos saying otherwise, no dog of mine has ever taken immediately to their crate and thought of it as a “den” or “safe space.” Mostly they have objected to being locked in there and separated from the people and action of the household.)
I sleep on the couch with Fig the first night, because I don’t want my neighbours to suffer the screams of the puppy captive in her “safe space.” Whenever she wakes, I take her outside and we stand in the icy yard—me waiting for Fig to pee or poo, and her shocked by the sudden cold and not knowing why I have brought her outdoors to freeze.
She is unbelievably small—the size of a hiking boot and barely ten pounds—and I almost step on her a dozen times because she is constantly underfoot in her confusion at being separated from her mother and siblings. Seven weeks seems very different from eight weeks, which was the age that Charlotte and Violet and Hazel came home with me. Fig at seven weeks seems more timid and feral than my previous dogs. During the night, she has two modes—biting and sleeping—and she swings between them every couple of hours. When morning comes and I know my neighbours are awake, I throw her in the crate for half an hour while I go to the bathroom and make coffee and tend to my wounds.
I am not feeling confident in my decision to get a puppy. What was I thinking? (I did first look for an adult dog, but because I was stuck on the vizsla, an adult was impossible to find. The dogs are much more in demand now than they were when I had my first vizsla, and there is always a waiting list for puppies, and nary an adult that needs rehoming.) But, in one of the many sleepless moments of the night, I really felt that I had made a terrible mistake and that I wasn’t up to the task of having a puppy. I am almost sixty. What if I just don’t have the energy to keep up with the physical demands of a young dog? How had I not remembered how incredibly sharp and dangerous those puppy teeth are? Because the puppy brain is a much smaller, simpler one than an adult dog brain, the puppy views biting as play and won’t be deterred by the yelps I emit to teach Fig bite inhibition.
I can’t tell much about who Fig is in the first twenty- four hours. Her hackles rise at the sound of a crow in the yard. She hides from the postman’s knock at the door and is afraid of a visiting dog. She crawls up onto my shoulders to escape what she fears, and her claws rake my face and neck. Blood drips down from three different punctures on my nose, cheek, and neck.
I try not to compare a seven-week-old puppy to my beloved Charlotte, but the puppy just makes me long for my former dog and her calm benevolence. The puppy doesn’t seem to be related to anything I know of as “dog,” but is instead a wild, unknowable demon.
With the addition of Fig to my life, I am suddenly trapped and isolated. When the puppy isn’t biting, or standing perplexed in the backyard waiting for me to take her back in, she is sleeping on me, making it impossible for me even to get myself a glass of water. That first night, I went eight hours before I could manage to drink anything, and I was light-headed from dehydration.
Fig at seven weeks
We have been together for only twenty-four hours and already I feel defeated.
* * *
WHEN I WAS STARTING OUT as a writer, I thought that writing would be something that I could learn and then apply, that there would be an end point to the learning, a place at which to arrive. After writing a certain number of novels, say three or four, I would be good at novels and not so much effort would be required to keep writing them. But, of course, that assumption was completely wrong. Writing is not simply about learning skills. Each new novel requires that everything be learned all over again, because no two books are alike, and there are different sets of problems requiring different solutions when creating each one.
But at the beginning, there was no way to know this. And at the beginning of my writing, and my life journey, there was a dog.
My parents acquired a dog before they had a baby. Not because they wanted to use the dog to practise caring for another creature before graduating to having a human child, but because that was the order in which they wanted what they wanted. First a dog, and secondly, a baby.
By the time I was born, Lisa was firmly ensconced in the small house south of London, in Surrey, that my parents had bought upon marrying. A smooth-coated St. Bernard, she was 150 pounds, weighing more than either my mother or father, and occupying a role, for me, as a third parent. She had puppies while I was learning to walk, each one named after a character in one of the operas that my father loved. I have vague memories of Figaro or Bonzo tugging at my dress, knocking me over, as I manoeuvred unevenly across the rectangle of clipped grass out back of the house. My mother told me later that the puppies would try to steal my toys, sticking their heads through the bars of my playpen, so that I was forced to lie on top of my things instead of playing with them, to protect them from the marauding beasts.
My memories of that house in England are few and foggy. I was very young when we emigrated to Canada, not even three, but while I don’t have clear recall of incidents, I do have memories of sensations—the shapes of birds moving in the sky outside my bedroom window, the weight of the cat lying on me in the pram, the spring light on the grass, the softness of English rain.
Lisa walked up the wooden gangway ahead of us onto the steamer ship to Canada. Because she was so large, she didn’t fit in the standard pet cages on board. She was allowed to wander freely up on the crew deck, where she was very popular with the shipboard workers, who fed her scraps from their meals. Lisa gained ten pounds during the voyage, one for every day we were at sea.
It had been my father’s idea to emigrate. He was between accountancy jobs, and he remembered his own father’s dream of moving to Canada. (His father had been killed during World War II, so was never able to actualize his plan.) My mother was in her early twenties and was up for the adventure of the emigration. Lisa and I had no choice in the matter.
In our new suburban house on the edge of Toronto, I would wake in the mornings and go downstairs to the living room, where Lisa slept on a sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace. I would lie up against her belly—I remember that I fit exactly between her two sets of paws. I never went into my parents’ room in the morning, but always went to lie with the dog. I think I considered myself to be one of her puppies, but I wonder too if she was a better reminder of England for me than my parents were. A dog’s paws will smell of grass, even in winter, so perhaps Lisa simply smelled of home.
The jolt of the immigration, where suddenly all the familiar faces had been replaced by strangers, afflicted me with a shyness so acute that if anyone other than a member of my immediate family talked to me, I would lie on the ground and scream until they went away.
I took refuge in the company of Lisa and in books. My two favourites were dog books. The first was The Observer’s Book of Dogs, part of the Observer’s natural history series published by Frederick Warne & Co., which also released the Beatrix Potter books—both series shared the same tiny format. The first of the Observer’s books was Birds, published in 1937. The Observer’s Book of Dogs was published in 1945 and was number eight in the series, after British Grasses, Sedges and Rushes, and before Horses and Ponies. The dog book was written by Clifford L.B. Hubbard, a Welshman who worked in kennels as a young man while compiling information about the history of dog breeds and writing various books on them. Later, he worked in the book department of Harrods and, later still, ran his own bookshop in Derbyshire. His nickname was “Doggie” and he sometimes wrote articles on dogs for newspapers and magazines using the pseudonym “Canis.”
My copy of The Observer’s Book of Dogs was missing the original dust jacket. It had red boards for a cover and simple black lettering, with the word DOGS in large print. The Observer’s books, like the Beatrix Potter books, were meant for the small hands of children, and the size of the book was one of the things I liked best about it. I would often look at it under the covers in bed with a flashlight, when I was no longer meant to be reading, and it was small enough to quickly tuck under my pillow, should an adult ascend the stairs towards my room.
Each page of the book contained a photograph or drawing of a particular breed of dog and then a physical description that included historical detail. All the illustrations were in black and white. Years later, I met an ornithologist who had first learned about birds from The Observer’s Book of Birds, which also had only black and white illustrations. He had gone on to study mostly black and white birds—terns, gulls, kittiwakes—a congruence he had somehow failed to notice until I pointed it out to him.
I liked to look at the photographs of the dogs in the field guide and try to memorize the breeds. The words didn’t matter as much to me as the pictures, and perhaps this was because the words, when I read them now, seem designed for adults. I still have the little book with its red cover, and when I look up the breed vizsla there, it is described as “admirably suited to the game and conditions of the puszta.…” I would have skated right over that word as a child, but when I look it up now, I find that a puszta is a vast Hungarian grassland that was once home to wild horses. While liking to run on woodland trails or go swimming, all of my dogs have loved noodling around a field best of all, which gives me respect for the expertise of Clifford Hubbard.
Copyright © 2022 by Helen Humphreys
Excerpt from “Bedfellows” by E.B. White is copyright © by E.B. White.