It was Christmas Sunday, almost 14 years ago, when I opened the door of my Explorer, a dog came up, looked in my truck, and walked away.
“Do you want a dog?” A friend lived beside the church and was walking across the parking lot. “He showed up here almost a week ago.”
The friend began talking to my husband. Another car pulled in. The little yellow dog walked up to the car, looked in the driver’s door, and walked away. I needed to see it happen one more time before I was willing to say anything. The third car pulled in. The dog walked up to the car, looked in the driver’s door, and walked away.
“He’s looking for his people. He is sure they didn’t leave him behind on purpose…” I murmured. The men nodded and kept talking. We started walking into church.
Our church fronted a four-lane highway. Though the dog had been safe so far, I told my husband that we should at least retrieve him and take him to our little place off of the main drag where he could be safe, and I could rehome him on my Facebook network. My husband was doubtful that we would ever part with the dog, but I assured him that was my plan.
A few days later when I grabbed him and pulled him into the truck, the dog screamed. I had never heard a dog scream before. Yelp? Yes. Scream? Never. It is a haunting noise. My heart hurt for him. The last thing he wanted was to be taken from where he last saw his people. Loyal guy - sure they were coming back. Abandoned in a Missouri winter, but with the loyal heart that only dogs seem to be born with.
When we got him home, we found out he played rough. Broke skin shaking our hands in his mouth kind of rough. My guess was that, when he was a cute yellow fluffball, it was funny when he was fierce, and inexperienced dog owners didn’t redirect his behavior. When he got to adult size, it wasn’t cute anymore, and they got rid of him rather than risk being sued for a dog bite. We took him to the vet, scanned for a chip (there was none), were told he was about a year old and neutered. He was also professionally groomed. I was a little baffled why someone would put so much into a dog to discard him.
I bought a dog training book for my son, hoping to interest him in training the dog, and posted him on Facebook. Only one person interested, two states away. I called a local no-kill rescue and volunteered to act as foster if they would help with placement. They agreed. When I told my son, then in middle school, he sobbed, “He will think no one will ever love him if people keep throwing him away!”
That night when my husband got home from his 16-hour shift, I explained, “Honey, we need to get J a consolation kitten.”
“What in the world is a “consolation kitten”?”
“Well, when I told him I had someone to help me place Hank, he started crying, so we will need to get him a pet to help him get over rehoming Hank.”
“Hank is now J’s dog.”
“No. He is wild and crazy. I don’t want to keep him.”
“Too late,” my husband replied. He sounded a bit pleased with himself for some reason.
My son didn’t bother to train Hank, so I did. Sit, stay, lay down, roll over, come… He quit playing rough but still could be triggered to do so if you played rough with him. He was terrified of car rides though. When we moved to where we were building a house, he nearly made my son, now driving age, wreck his vehicle when Hank went a little crazy part way down the road.
We got him various toys, and one of his favorites was a rather round, squeaky stuffed hedgehog toy we called his “squishy” (yeah, thank you, “Finding Nemo”). One day we lost his squishy. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. I gave up and bought him a new one. He wanted nothing to do with it. Not his squishy! A few months went by, and I found his old squishy, deep under a chair while moving furniture for a thorough vacuuming. He was delighted, and finally willing to play with them both.
Hank was a chicken killer on a farm. Usually, this is a death sentence for dogs, but we worked hard, instead, to just keep him away from chickens. About six months after Hank, we added a Great Pyrenees to the mix, and when we moved to the new farm, I watched her actually “play” him away from the birds when he was interested in them. Over the years, she taught him chickens were off limits. The amount of communication between dogs fascinated me. It still does.
Hank still wouldn’t get in cars voluntarily. One day he was out, wouldn’t go back in the house, and wouldn’t get in the car with me. I threw up my hands and figured I could definitely drive faster than he could run, and “lose him” in our quarter-mile long lane. I happened to pass my husband heading back towards home the same time I was heading to town. We waved at each other, but the surprise was later when I got home.
“I found Hank at the corner about a mile from the house after we passed each other. As far as I can tell, he was tracking your car…”
He was still so afraid of being left behind, he would try to follow the car if he could. Now we knew, and we would have to be more careful.
My husband got cancer, then the radiation from treating that cancer gave him a second cancer. Then the first cancer also recurred, and he had two stage four cancers. When the second one wrapped around and strangled a kidney, he began having issues with electrolyte imbalances. One day coming home from an oncology visit, my husband announced we would have to work hard to teach Hank it was safe to ride in the car with us. I knew it was because he was thinking ahead to days when I would be living alone, with only the animals for company.
One stressful night when my son brought friends to help me get my husband in the car to get him to the hospital, they were holding Hank as I got into the driver’s side, and the boy holding him lost him. Hank bolted to the car and, for the first time in almost ten years with us, he voluntarily got into a vehicle, laying down across the both of us. He never gave me trouble getting into a car again.
I was in the ICU in acute kidney failure when my husband died, and the months after I was discharged, didn’t go out much. I was seriously weak. They wanted me in a nursing home another eight weeks after the hospital, but I had livestock and pets, though my neighbor ended up taking care of my chickens. I was too weak to do so for the whole eight weeks. My son shopped for me and brought in food, helped with laundry and household chores. His best friend wasn’t working and came in even more often than my son. I was very blessed to have family like that. And Hank was my constant companion, curled on the bed where my husband used to sleep.
When I finally began leaving home, I found myself unwilling to go without him. A deep reliance on his company had built, and he became a kind of safety blanket. He also recognized when I was in disease flares, and would walk towards the bedroom, pause, and look over his shoulder at me: “You need to lie down.”
Missouri lets you train your own service dog. He had already had a ton of obedience training teaching the bad play out of him and was already reacting to my health issues without additional input. I had a letter certifying I needed him, and we began going everywhere together. He even went to church, and after instruction during the first visit, was the best-behaved dog you could imagine. When he would lay at my feet as I waited in line at Aldi, people would marvel at how well he behaved. It made me a little sad, wondering what other people were trying to pass off as trained assistants out in the real world these days.
My son brought his part Basenji dog over and decided he was so obedient that it was safe to leave him off leash — and his dog took off after a beautiful buff Orpington hen I had (named She-ra, in part because she was a hen with a rooster’s comb, and she crowed). I began screaming. Then Hank ran towards the other dog. Remembering a Hank that could be triggered to play rough when he was younger, I watched in horror, screaming more loudly than I remember ever screaming in my life. Hank caught up to the other dog, and then, miraculously, they ran a few steps away from the hen and stopped. The hen ran the rest of the way into the chicken yard and I closed the gate. Hank actually told my son’s dog that chasing chickens was off limits. Again, I pondered dog language.
This year, I began to realize he was getting older. Some days it was hard to wake him up, and I would worry, “is it now?” Over the past few weeks he declined really quickly, and I finally called the vet and made an appointment. The vet said his liver was failing. It is a relief to not see him struggling, but the house will be so much emptier. For a dog that weighed less than 40 pounds, he seemed to take up a lot of space with his character.
Hank. You were a very good boy. You learned your lessons well and had a heart that would do anything for your person, and you only believed the best about people. I think the world would be a lot better place if we all learned to love like a dog. I hope I never forget the lessons I learned with you, and that the space you leave in my heart remains soft and open, holding the lessons of your loyalty and trust.