The apocalyptic traffic predicted for the last day of the Memorial Day weekend hadn’t become evident before Kiki and I covered the three hours and change from the North Shore back to Montpelier. As usual, I emptied everything temporary out of the car, put the leftovers from last night’s restaurant meal into the fridge, and unpacked my overnight bag (locating as I did the belt I couldn’t find when I duded up for a fancy meal at a yacht club north of Boston).
Flushed with virtue and success at getting everything put away first thing, I allowed myself a few moments of repose before getting on with the rest of the evening. I flipped the bedroom recliner chair open and stretched out by the window. That’s always the signal for Kiki to jump up onto me and lie down in various attitudes of repose. I find it mildly flattering that she likes and trusts me enough to use me as a dog mattress, so I don’t object when, sometimes after several hours, she’s still there.
This time she sat crossways and, enjoying the elevation of my lap, stared intently (I can’t imagine her not staring intently) out the front window, seeming to expect something spectacular — like a dragon or a FedEx van — to come up the driveway. I cranked the window open wide. She leaned forward, stood up and began sniffing at the odors wafting through the window. I had a close-up view of her senses in action.
First, of course, her eyes. There are no eyes brighter than a terrier’s. Bred and trained to spot, catch and destroy mice and rats, she sees everything. I often envy her ability, even without the multichromatic vision we human beings have, to spot things in the woods that I don’t see till they move. She gazed out the window unblinking, as if the first of us to see something important would win a prize.
The nose. I read recently that dogs have the ability to smell things independently from both sides of their noses, like frying hamburgers on the left and a skunk on the right. I watched carefully; her nose is no bigger than a walnut, and was no more than a foot from my eyes. Sure enough, the two halves were twitching and pointing in different directions, her eyes following one or the other. There didn’t appear to be much of particular interest out there.
The ears. Kiki’s always had outsized ears. When she was a puppy, I often wondered if she’d ever grow into them. Eventually she did, kind of. They’re still pretty large, and go a long way toward making her look cute. But they also operate as independently as her eyes. Not always. At times, both of them stand up straight and point straight ahead; at others, they spin around in search of the source of the sound she’s trying to isolate. Her ears, more than anything else, are key to her feelings. They can rotate with enthusiastic interest, or lie flat with the expectation of unhappiness from the boss or a sudden surprising loud noise nearby. You should have seen them the other morning in Exeter, N.H., when a trash truck dumped an empty metal bin onto the pavement right beside us.
Her tail. A terrier’s tail kind of sticks up into the air naturally, anyway. I love to watch hers. It wags most of the time, usually in anticipation. If I had to characterize Kiki in a few words, they would be food and anticipation: a 24-hour-a-day search for comestibles and an unflagging interest in whatever is coming next.
So I watched her watching the front yard, still but coiled, ears erect and facing forward, standing utterly carelessly on my thighs as if her claws weren’t digging into them, tail slowly wagging and ready to be excited. Her slender front legs, the bones hardly larger than a chicken’s, have always intrigued me. When she was still a puppy, I marveled at how she tossed herself down the steepest stony hills without ever snapping a single bone. She’s pretty sturdy now, but those leg bones still surprise me.
She’s 10 years old, so, dreading the inevitable hour of our separation, I’ve started looking for signs of advancing age (I don’t have to look very hard for signs of my own). But this little ginger-colored rascal still acts like a puppy most of the time. Watching her stare out the window, I can just feel the enthusiasm radiating from her. Either one of us could go first. If it’s me, I hope she’ll remember perching on my lap on a holiday afternoon, gazing out the window; if it’s her, I’ll want to live always with the memory of an intimate friend with enthusiasm bred in the bone, and a constant interest in whatever’s coming next.
