A Big Little Life

destination from the moment she exited the SUV.
    As the two dogs communed, Gerda and I chatted with the woman who had the other golden. When I described how determined Trixie had been to get to this very spot, she said, “Do you know what dog this is? It’s Tinsey, one of Trixie’s litter mates.”
    Most experts will say that a few weeks after the pups in a litter are separated, they no longer recognize one another as brothers and sisters. Insufficient long-term memory.
    Hah. Years later, Trixie caught the scent of her sibling from a couple of hundred yards and would not rest until they had been reunited. Considering all the other dogs present that day, this bit of evidence, though anecdotal, convinces me that dogs can remember not only what they learn from repetitive training or what knowledge directly assists their survival, but also what most matters to them otherwise, and they can remember it for a long, long time.

XVII
dogs and death
    WHEN A BELOVED character in one of my novels dies, I must write about that death with the emotion and the reverence I would bring to a eulogy given for a real person. We all go into that dark, which is the darkness of God, the ultimate humbling of our prideful kind; therefore, death is a sacred subject requiring me to consider the native knowledge with which I was born, whether Iam writing about the death of a fictional person, a real person, or a dog.
    Current theory claims that dogs are unaware they will die. Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with our intuition and common sense, which are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity.
    We might take comfort in this claim that dogs are unaware of their mortality because it lifts from dogs the fundamental fear with which we must live. But it’s a false comfort, as anyone knows who has loved and been loved by a dog, and who has not surrendered his common sense.
    Worse, in believing such a thing, we rob dogs of the profoundly moving stoicism that gives them immense dignity. When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.
    We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women—meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices—live as if death is not a part of life but only an end. They worship youth, live for the moment, in time and of time, with no capacity to imagine anything outside of time. They do not deny death as much as they repress the recognition of their intimate relationship with it. Death is given a place in their thoughts similar to that occupied by a childhood friend not seen in twenty years,known to be still out there in the old hometown, a thousand miles away, but not currently relevant.
    A life-altering lesson can be learned by considering what dogs know about mortality and how they know it.
    Intuition + common sense = dog wisdom.
    Contention One: Dogs know. Dogs know they die.
    Contention Two: By intuition, dogs know more about death than the mere fact of it.
    A neighbor of ours heard commotion in the backyard and stepped outside to discover that a mountain lion had come out of the canyon and over the fence. The big cat, one of the most ferocious of all predators and seen seldom in these parts, was after the family dog.
    Around the yard, across the patio, around the pool, the dog—let’s call him Winslow—raced for his life, spun-jumped-scrambled from one hoped-for haven to another. Happily for both Winslow and his owner, the mountain lion allowed itself to be chased off with loud noise and a makeshift weapon. This is fortunate because the lion could have decided to go for a Big Mac instead of a small burger, and could have killed the owner as easily as it could have chowed down on Winslow, who was a third its size.
    If dogs have no concept of their mortality, if they don’t know they die, why did Winslow strive so frantically to avoid the mountain lion? Maybe the big cat only wanted to play. Maybe they could have had a great time with a tug toy.
    We could say that instinct inspired Winslow to flee.
    Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity or a tendencyto action, a natural impulse, genetically programmed. Bird migration in winter is one