Dog and I by Roy MacGregor

Author:Roy MacGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

Lost Dog at Twenty Below

The call came late on the shortest day of the year. It was the youngest, on a cellphone, his voice breathless and thin as if coming from somewhere deep back in the bush—which, in fact, it was.

“Willow’s gone!”

He and a pal had taken their dogs—the pal’s dog a true border collie, ours a borderline collie with borderline intelligence—off to an area park known on local maps as the Bruce Pit. In local circles, however, it is known as the Dog Convention Centre, a place where mostly purebreds and a few mutts run wild in gangs, a designated sanctuary with not a single sign threatening the dogs with fines if they don’t keep their owners on a short leash.

There are, increasingly, such places to be found in Canadian cities. Male dogs arrive convinced that the Supreme Court of Domesticated Animals has declared the entire park a swingers’ club; females, as a result, spend much of their time sitting on cold snow and snapping angrily at pestering males; and owners sip coffee—Starbucks snobs in one corner, people with taste in another—and talk about such pressing matters as the best place to find designer pet clothes and debate the benefits of modern crate-training over traditional house-training.

It is hard to believe how the politicians have missed all this. In this country they think there are votes to be had for something as minor as daycare spaces for preschoolers, little realizing that any political party offering to subsidize agility classes for puppies would sweep the country.

The idea in coming to Bruce Pit this bitterly cold day was to “socialize” the dog. She is one year old this month, frighteningly friendly to humans but skittish around other dogs, especially those with loud barks and untoward intentions.

The idea was to let her run with the older, more secure border collie. The two of them could snake about the park in that odd you-can’t-see-me slouch of the herding collie, perhaps meet a few regular dogs, and maybe even realize how lucky they are that their owners haven’t turned them into fake-fur-and-bootie-wearing Barbie doll dogs.

It worked fine for a while—right up until they happened to run smack into an evolving dog fight over some imagined slight. The little dog bolted immediately. Straight under the dark skirts of the nearest spruce, off back into the deep, deep woods—and gone.

“Bring warm clothes!” the youngest shouted into the phone, teeth chattering in the background. “It’s freezing!”

It was twelve below when we got there. The boy, having headed out in nothing but a fleece, looked like he needed medical attention, not help looking for the lost dog. He put on the ski clothes we had brought along, pulled on thick mittens and a toque, and all of us, some carrying flashlights, headed off deep into the pit.

Darkness fell and the moon, fortunately, rose. It was a bright, clear night, but the advantage given to the eyes came with a disadvantage to the rest of the system: the temperature was now twenty below and heading lower.

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