AT
LARGE
Absent friend
January 13, 2005
By
Doug Cabral
The kids, teenagers now, had an important opportunity this weekend
to dig a grave, to shroud the corpse, to help arrange it in the
hole, and finally to join in a brief committal service. It is tough,
dreary work to dig a grave in the dimming late afternoon of a chill,
drizzly January day. If it were a scene in a movie there would have
been fog machines, grasping tree branches, and maybe a headless
rider plunging by on a rearing stallion.
We didn’t lay out the grave on the sod. We were in the tangled
woods that oppress part of our lot. The first six to ten inches
of the excavation were covered in leaves and vines, poison ivy mostly
I suppose. Soon we’ll all be scratching and covered with rashes.
Then there were a few inches of woods loam interlaced with roots.
Then it was the worthless, sometimes impenetrable, clay that includes
stones too large to ignore but too small to be useful in wall building
or much else. Weeks of rain and snow had softened this dense, inert
earth, so the digging was better than it might have been. Still,
it’s poor ground for anything but puckerbrush and graves.
We dug the grave for Copper, our 11-year-old Rhodesian ridgeback,
who had died of accumulated infirmities an hour or so earlier. He’d
been in decline for a year or so, but the downhill quickened last
week, and we knew the end was near. How near was in doubt till the
end, but he was peaceful, never agitated, so we waited.
It was the sort of day Copper dreaded. He was a hot weather dog.
Although he was born in Vergennes, Vermont, he hated winter, he
regarded snow as pollution, and he hated water in any form, except
to drink. A heavy dew meant an indoor day for Cop. His idea of heaven
was an August afternoon stretched out in the dust of the driveway
beneath a ferocious sun. In the summer, when he’d shaken off
the dirt, his silky red coat gleamed with orange and gold highlights
in the sunset light.
Cop’s sister Elsa lived in Vineyard Haven with Gus and late
Dabby Daniels. We met the Danielses one evening after Radnor, Cop’s
predecessor ridgeback, had died. It was a fateful meeting. When
they learned of Rad’s death, Gus and Dabby put us in touch
with Karin and Robert Hardy, the Vermont breeders of Elsa. That
led us to Copper.
Radnor died at 10. He was a handsome, stalwart guy whose amiability
was at times in doubt, though never his loyalty. He had an appetite
for architectural details such as doors, which he took pains to
reduce to splinters if he felt he was on the wrong side of the offending
barrier. And he had a lusty interest in females in heat wherever
they lived on the Vineyard. He was a dear but expensive-to-operate
pet.
Copper’s grave is in the general vicinity of Rad’s, as
is the final resting place of our 14-year-old Abyssinian cat Nano,
whose compact, exquisite beauty survived the ravages of old age
and even approaching death. Nano was ambivalent about the dogs,
as they were about her.
Cop’s personality evolved considerably over the years from
a persnickety and snappish beginning. His delights as a young dog
included some impromtu games that visitors and friends often found
disconcerting. For instance, as a one-year-old, he liked to race
in circles on the beach or in a big field, rapidly circling back
to someone walking nearby. He would launch himself into the air
as he approached the person he appointed as his playmate, then open
his jaws and let his huge canine teeth graze the forearm of the
appointee as he flew by.
As you can imagine, there were from time to time cries of “He
bit me,” but like all dog owners, we explained that it was
more of a scratch than a bite, and anyhow Cop was playing a game.
Ha, ha. Some of his playmates accepted this explanation, some did
not.
As time went on, Cop went to work every day at The Times. There,
he met a great variety of humankind, at least the variety of humankind
that live on the Vineyard. They taught him to love widely, to extend
his amiability and embrace strangers. Embracing to Cop often meant
poking them in the nether regions with his nose or insinuating himself
between their legs and, if they were small or perhaps elderly, bouncing
them up and down with his neck. Although he began life with a built-in
reserve toward strangers, he decided as time went on that every
one of these strangers would naturally fall deeply in love with
him. He let the love flow. So, he made many friends among the indulgent,
while a few, but only a few, were immune to his charms.
At home, we were never immune. He was undemanding, affectionate,
loyal, obedient, and adaptable — a perfect dog, I’ve often
said, sounding, I know, like every dog owner you’ve ever met.
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