My Life in Dog Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

several times as he studied the fence, looking for holes. When he was satisfied, he trotted to the corral that held the two ponies and when they were clearly all right he came back into the barn.
    The whole route had taken ten minutes. He sat for a moment near the empty milk pan, then stood and walked up and down the barn several times, looking at each cow from the rear. That finished, he turned and went in front of them, walking back and forth in the narrow slot in front of the manger and studying each cow as she chewed on her hay.
    It never really ended. I thought that with his rounds done, he would relax. Instead hestarted over: the pigpen, the calf pen, and this time he spent more time on the chicken yard, carefully smelling along the base of the wire at one side. At one point in particular he nosed the dirt, snuffling the mud slightly When he returned to the barn I went to that spot and saw the fresh tracks of a skunk that must have tried to get into the pen during the night. (The next night Rex would catch the skunk trying to get to the chickens again and kill it in a battle that left the mauled body of the skunk by the granary and the entire barnyard so thick in stink it was hard to walk through it.)
    Once more in the barn Rex sat for a moment. He was sitting there when I came in to help finish the chores. In a moment he moved to the wooden manger in front of the cows. This time he climbed the crude ladder to the hayloft, until his head was just up in the loft. He stood there for a moment, thenwent down the ladder, and up and down the line of cows one more time, front and rear, then outside to check the other stock…
    He didn’t stop his circling route until we were done with milking. Then he escorted the cows out of the barn—not pushing them but simply walking along with them—and took them back out to the pasture.
    “He doesn’t just leave them in back of the barn?” I asked Warren.
    “Who—oh, the dog?” His wife had told me the dog’s name was Rex. I never heard Warren say his name. Just “the dog,” but spoken in soft terms, with deep affection and care. Even when he called Rex, he simply said, “Come here, dog,” always soft and gentle. “Oh no—he’ll take them out to where the grass is good so they can graze. There’s no grass in back of the barn.”
    “He knows that—to take them to grass?”
    Warren looked at me. “Sure—why not?”
    “But how could he know that? Did you teach him?”
    Warren shook his head. “Not me—the cows. He watches the cows. They taught him.”
    I knew then, and I know now, people who would not be able to learn that. I was skeptical that a dog could learn such things—I was very young and had not yet known dogs like Josh and Cookie—but by the end of the day I would not have been surprised to hear that Rex had learned to read.
    With milking done we went back to the house for a “quick bite” after breakfast of raw-fried potatoes, a bit of venison, rhubarb sauce and fresh rolls. Rex did not come in the house—he never came in—but Warren’s wife, Emily, took him a plate of meat and potato scraps as he waited on the porch. I watched him through the kitchen window. He didn’t relax. From where he sat on theporch he kept watching the farmyard, the stock pens, the cows out in the pasture. I thought of pictures I’d seen of lions in Africa surveying the veld—his ruff made a wonderful mane—and he maintained control until the girls awakened and came out to play.
    They were young—three and five—and when it rained they stayed mostly on the open porch, with forays into the yard for toys they’d left out. The minute they went outside they came under Rex’s control. On the porch he sat near them, watching them play, sometimes reaching over with a paw to move a toy and laugh and wag his tail. When one of the girls left the porch he would move with her, staying always on the “outside” to contain her, and as soon as she’d picked up the toy she’d