The Karelian Bear dog charged me.
That sounds like a sentence found in a memoir by a survivor of Stalingrad.
Let me show you the rest of that moment.
Tina, the Karelian Bear dog, holding fast to Mr. Rabbit, charged me.
That’s better.
Tina was a big dog, close to 80 pounds, fast and young, and I had her in one of Lamancha’s enclosed pastures where I could take her off leash and run her. She kept Mr. Rabbit with her and would allow me to toss it. When she retrieved it, she would run straight towards me very fast and at the last moment veer off, circle me and then, when I knelt down, nuzzle close and let me take her bunny from her mouth.
It is very hard to write about dogs without sentiment. Through thousands of years, our two species have had a mutual training pact. We feed them, shelter them, protect them, love them and they do the same plus throwing up on rugs, eating couches and doors (my lab/sheepdog mix did this), and hitting us up for the cost of a small car over their short lives.
Raise them well, and they repay us for our patience with uncommon devotion and heroic resilience. I’ve seen bait dogs rescued from dog fighting breeders come back from terrible abuse and show nothing but joy in their connections with those adopting them. I remember a Pit named Simon, ears torn off, face rippled with scars, who would jump straight up to the level of my chest whenever I came to take him out of his Run. His happiness gave every volunteer who worked with him a shot of hope that every kind of optimism about the healing effects of justice and love was possible – you see, dogs make us a good kind of crazy.
Tina was adopted by a ranger from Baxter State Park in Maine and Simon by a young woman who returned a year later for a second dog and told me that Simon had saved her life by pulling her from depression with his incomparable energy, unceasing affection and desire to please.
I’ve owned dogs almost all of my adult life so I’m not coming at you with a detached, disinterested take or tone. I love them. At their best, they are less bestial than men, incapable of lying and built for faithfulness. What’s not to love.
