A Big Little Life

problems, but I really hoped not to end up with a high-pitched Mickey Mouse voice.
    The shepherd had enough. He returned to the lawn where he was sitting before Hermann Goring IV sicced him on us, and he rubbed his face in the grass, trying to wipe off the noxious spray.
    The kid was wide-eyed and speechless, and I had one more squirt in the can, but I decided to save it for the shepherd in case he got his second wind.
    Trixie smiled at me and wagged her tail, and I felt like her knight in shining armor as I hurried her away from Dogzilla. We turned right at the corner and went four blocks on the next street before I stopped to examine her side where I thought the shepherd had bitten her. I couldn’t find any blood, and I didn’t want to linger. As we walked home, I glanced over my shoulder all the way.
    I told Gerda about the encounter and showed her where the shepherd had seemed to nip Trixie. This time, when Gerda pulled back the thick fur, we saw the bite. The wound was barely bleeding because he had ripped off a patch of her skin the size of a silver dollar without getting his teeth into the meat of her.
    This can’t have felt like any kind of kiss. Yet Trixie never yelped or whimpered.
    On Sunday, our vet’s offices were closed. We rushed Trix to the emergency clinic near the airport. After the vet on duty sewed up the wound and gave us medication instructions, she said, “She’s a very stoic little dog.”
    Short Stuff weighed over sixty pounds, but she was thoroughly feminine and appeared smaller than she was. She seemed particularly fragile to me as I lifted her into the back of our Explorer for the trip home from the clinic, because I couldn’t stop thinking that the attacking shepherd might have gotten his teeth in her throat if the first blast of pepper spray had missed his muzzle.
    I had no animosity toward the shepherd. I felt sorry for him, though I knew the spray caused only temporary misery. The dog had done what the boy had told him to do and what the boy’s parents had evidently trained him to do. The people were the villains here, and the shepherd could, in a sense, be seen as a victim of theirs.
    I reported the bite to animal control. The officer on the phone asked for the address. I told him the street name but did not know the house number. He did know the number, however, and knew the breed of the dog before I told him. Our attacker had a history.
    Because I believe policemen and animal-control officers usually do a commendable and thankless job, I’m sorry to say the owners of this animal weren’t fined and weren’t issued even a warning citation, as far as I know.After weeks of “investigation,” an officer gave me an incoherent explanation of why the case would be closed without action.
    Another officer, dismayed by the department’s failure to act, told me that the owner of the shepherd had tight ties to the city government and was destined to skate until the dog one day drew blood from a person instead of from another dog. I thanked him for his off-the-record frankness, but I told him that my Trixie was a person. Being a dog lover himself, he understood what I meant.
     
    “ A VERY STOIC little dog,” the joint surgeon said again.
    Having been unable to get a whimper from Trixie when he flexed and stretched her elbow, he X-rayed it from different angles and was able to show Gerda and me the problem. Trix needed the same surgery on her left elbow as she had undergone on her right.
    A couple of days later, we returned with her to the hospital. She would be staying overnight because surgery was at five o’clock in the morning. We took one of my dirty T-shirts to leave with her, so she’d have my familiar scent, and one of her favorite toys.
    This was June 2000, after she had been living with us for a year and nine months. She had long ago ceased to be just a dog and became our daughter, too. Because she couldn’t understand that hospitalization was for the best, leaving Trixie there felt like a betrayal. Gerda and I half wanted to go home and scourge each other with brambledbranches as penance for not insisting on sleeping in the hospital-kennel cage with her.
    At home, we split a bottle of wine with dinner, and I had an extra glass from a second bottle. My consumption was laughably low by the standards of Hemingway, but if Trixie had too many more health crises, I’d be pounding it down like Papa.
    We were told that Trixie would have to stay at the hospital at least one