My Life in Dog Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

setting pins.
    Dirk followed about four feet back—closer than before—and as I made my way along Second Street and came around the corner by Ecker’s Drugstore I ran into Happy. He had only two of his cohorts with him and I don’t think they had intended to do me harm, but I surprised them and Happy took a swing at me.
    Dirk took him right in the middle. I mean bit him in the center of his stomach, hard, before Happy’s fist could get to me. Happy screamed and doubled over and Dirk went around and ripped into his rear and kepttearing at it even as Happy and his two companions fled down the street.
    It was absolutely great. Maybe one of the great moments in my life.
    I had a bodyguard.
    It was as close to having a live nuclear weapon as you can get. I cannot say we became friends. I touched him only once, when he wasn’t looking—I petted him on the head and received a growl and a lifted lip for it. But we became constant companions. Dirk moved into the basement with me, and I gave him a hamburger every day and hustled up dog food for him and many nights we sat down there eating Ritz crackers and he watched me working on stick model airplanes.
    He followed me to school, waited for me, followed me to the bowling alley, waited for me. He was with me everywhere I went, always back three or four feet, always with a soft growl, and to my great satisfaction everytime he saw Happy—
every
time—Dirk would try to remove some part of his body with as much violence as possible.
    He caused Happy and his mob to change their habits. They not only stopped hunting me but went out of their way to avoid me, or more specifically, Dirk. In fact after that winter and spring they never bothered me again, even after Dirk was gone.
    Dirk came to a wonderful end. I always thought of him as a street dog—surely nobody owned him—and in the summer when I was hired to work on a farm four miles east of town I took him with me. We walked all the way out to the farm, Dirk four feet in back of me, and he would trot along beside the tractor when I plowed, now and then chasing the hundreds of seagulls that came for the worms the plow turned up.
    The farmer, whose name was Olaf, was a bachelor and did not have a dog. I looked over once to see Dirk sitting next to Olafwhile we ate some sandwiches and when Olaf reached out to pet him Dirk actually— this was the first time I’d seen it—wagged his tail.
    He’d found a home.
    I worked the whole summer there and when it came time to leave, Dirk remained sitting in the yard as I walked down the driveway. The next summer I had bought an old Dodge for twenty-five dollars and I drove out to Olaf’s to say hello and saw Dirk out in a field with perhaps two hundred sheep. He wasn’t herding them, or chasing them, but was just standing there, watching the flock.
    “You have him with the sheep?” I asked Olaf.
    He nodded. “Last year I lost forty-three to coyotes,” he said. “This year not a one. He likes to guard things, doesn’t he?”
    I thought of Dirk chasing Happy down the street, and later spitting out bits of his pants, and I smiled. “Yeah, he sure does.”

They are all there in my memory, a host of them from farms I worked on when I was a boy. They all seemed to be some kind of collie cross with longish hair and bright eyes and all seemed to be named Rex or King or Spot or Lad or Jim.
    They worked the farms. It is tempting tocall them family dogs or family pets because they were that as well—something the small children could roll around with, something to love and be loved, something to greet in the morning. But they were more.
    I cannot count the number of times I have been sitting in a truck waiting for a combine hopper to fill, a boy thirteen, fourteen years old on a hot August afternoon with an old collie dog sitting in the seat beside me.
    You could talk to them and they would listen. I’d tell them of my dreams, my problems, girls—endless talk of girls—as I sat there in