Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes

Author:Hannah Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596918115
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

FALL

7

BEFORE

MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND its beach are named after Captain Benjamin Willard. In a portrait, the man stands solemn-faced. His mustache is elaborately curled. His tights pouch at the knee. The fringe on his shorts tickles his thigh. A spotted dog, also solemn, sits like a hat, on Willard's head.

The captain's 1895 autobiography includes tales of sharks and swordfish he caught. It recounts shipwrecks, Civil War skirmishes, and other acts of derring-do. But the chapter in which Willard's gentle soul shines, the chapter most heavily illustrated with drawings and early photographs, is the one titled "My Trained Pets, the Coach Dog and the Cedar Bird."That chapter opens with a drawing of the big man lying on his back on the parlor floor, one leg extended toward the ceiling. Balancing on Willard's foot is, again, the dalmatian.

One can view the history of a place through any filter one chooses. Why not through dogs? They're the poster pups of the modern backyard. And prehistoric dire wolves, foxes, and other canines probably inhabited my yard before people did. Then, when the first people walked in twelve thousand years ago, a domesticated canine came with them. Most of the local canids fell into extinction. Most recently, Europeans sailed in four hundred years ago with a fresh batch of dog stock. Once again, most of the resident dogs faded in the face of today's dominant strains. Dog replaced dog replaced dog. One of the wildest chapters in this doggy history is unfolding right now, as coyotes and wolves soft-foot back toward my suburban lawn.

These days, the dominant canine sleeps indoors, and from among the odors of shampoo and coffee, he can't detect the scent of his approaching cousins. Cousin coyote, whom wolves once kept penned in the West, has lately trotted as far east as Nova Scotia. Like crows, the coyotes are finding the suburbs a safe and agreeable habitat. Cousin fox, too, survives to hunt the suburbs. I recently watched one trot down a nearby street in daylight. Even wolves, extinct in Maine for a century, are padding down from Canada. One made it all the way to the coast before being snapped up by a trapper a few years ago. They're also moving toward the yards of Minnesota, Michigan, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. I'm fascinated by the possibility that wolves might decide they're just as comfortable among the bungalows as the coyotes and foxes are. It would be a curious circling back to the first meeting of tame dog and wild.

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