A Big Little Life

what she cornered. If we didn’t take her suggestion right away, she would lie down and paw at whatever might be in the hidden space.
    Inevitably, when we got warily on our hands and knees to peer under the furniture for the mouse, nothing was there. The way Short Stuff grinned at us, I swear this was her idea of a practical joke. We fell for it again and again, and when we refused to be conned, we saw her pull the trick on other people.
    In the Harbor Ridge house, we once had a real mouse loose on the lowest of three floors. In the kitchen, I lined up a series of mousetraps in the lid of a box that I could carry to the lower floor, and I baited them with chunks of cheese, one by one.
    Trixie stood at the counter, at my side, interested in my task but drawn also by the aroma of Velveeta. Five times, as I carefully put down a set trap, it sprang, flipping into the air with a hard snap, which caused Trixie to twitch but didn’t frighten her into flight. The sprung traps castbits of cheese to the floor, which Trix snatched up with pleasure.
    In truth, I shouldn’t be allowed any nearer to a mousetrap than to an armed nuclear device. I’m no more mechanically inclined than I am gifted at bird imitations.
    After I carried the traps downstairs and placed them, I decided I needed four or five more. My strategy when I am out to kill a mouse is not to trust in its taste for cheese. Should it be that rare mouse disgusted by the very idea of cheese, I distribute so many traps in each small area that the little beast will inevitably blunder into a deadly mechanism the first time it ventures from cover.
    In the kitchen again, where Trixie waited, I put five more traps in the box lid. She watched me solemnly, but instead of waiting for more cheese to be flung by sprung traps, she made a low throaty noise of concern and backed away from me, tail between her legs. She backed across the kitchen and through the doorway to the family room, and kept backing away, away, in my line of sight, until she was at the farther end of that adjacent room, fully forty feet from where she had started. Once there, she made several wheezing sounds that were as close to laughter as I can imagine a dog getting. Her tail began to wag, and she grinned at me.
    I know as surely as I know anything that she was having fun at my expense, mocking my mechanical ineptitude with the easily sprung traps. She was saying, I really want the dropped cheese, Dad, but I want to live, too, so I’m getting out of the death zone.
    G. K. Chesterton—who had two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle—wrote more than a little about the importance of laughter in a well-lived life, and of laughter’s role in a marriage, he said: “A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.” Dogs love to play the fool, and as part of the family, they are quite capable of recognizing the fool in us, and of celebrating it with a joke now and then.

VI
she poops on command, but not just anywhere
    DURING THOSE FIRST days with Trixie, we learned that her personal tao, the code of virtuous conduct by which she lived, included a proscription against pooping on our property. She would pee on our lawn, but she refused to do the nastier act within the borders of our domain. She lived with us for eight years, nine months, and five days, and not once in all that time did she breakthis self-imposed rule, which had nothing to do with her training.
    As part of CCI’s excellent instruction, their canine graduates obey a toileting command. When you speak this word, they do number one and then number two (if they need to), with nearly as much dispatch as they sit or lie down when given one of those commands.
    Considering the many tasks these dogs can perform, I was for a while surprised that people unfamiliar with CCI were routinely most amazed by the toileting command. “It’s astonishing,” friends would say, and then at once wonder, “but why would anyone even think to teach a dog such a thing?”
    The answer is that a person in a wheelchair is not easily able to escort a canine companion outside at the animal’s whim. It’s more convenient for them if the dog is fed on a strictly observed schedule that establishes a daily toileting rhythm. If in addition they can speak a command that encourages the dog to do its business promptly, instead of waiting while it wanders around in