Creature Discomforts

THERAPY DOG. Although I couldn’t imagine what the declaration meant, the message felt aimed directly at me. Therapy was exactly what I needed. The dogs, in a furry sort of way, clearly intended to provide it. In addition to the therapy-dog tag, the male wore a Saint Francis of Assisi medal. Both dogs were licensed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had been immunized against rabies at a veterinary clinic there. They had tags from the National Dog Registry. Identical owner ID tags proclaimed the dogs the property of one Holly Winter of 256 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Her phone number was listed. The dogs’ names were not. Whoever she was, she took good care of her animals. The dogs’ clean, gorgeous stand-off coats testified to an excellent diet and careful grooming. When the dogs had wiggled their feet in the air, I’d noticed that the nails were short and that the hair between the black pads had been trimmed to neaten the appearance of the feet. Even so, I felt a flash of outrage. This Winter person with the silly, Christmassy name should damned well have held tightly to those leashes! No matter what, you never let go of a leash! Never! My anger brought insight. Not for a second had I felt any fear of these big, powerful dogs. On the contrary, from the moment they’d barged out of the cloud that surrounded us, I’d felt increasingly strong and self-confident. Good! In what I now see as one of the monumental understatements of the millennium, I congratulated myself on being a person who liked dogs.
    By now, I was on my feet. To my amazement, the female had stationed herself in a solid stand at my left side and hadn’t budged as I’d rested my weight on her and hauled myself up. I’d had to keep lowering my head to let the blood reach whatever disconnected bits of my brain had survived my crash. Each time my head descended, the handsome male planted wet kisses on my face.
    Heartened, I finally took the practical step of searching my day pack and the female’s red dogpack. My pack yielded a staggering number of brand-new, medium-size pale brown plastic bags with handle ties, an old and sadly cracked Nikon camera, a ring of keys, and the kind of survival blanket that looks like a giant sheet of aluminum foil. After swathing myself in it, I ripped the female’s pack from its Velcro fasteners and began to empty its contents onto the ledge. The dogs took a tremendous interest in the unpacking, mainly, as I rapidly saw, because some of the supplies were ready-to-eat snacks: a blueberry muffin tightly encased in plastic wrap, cheese and crackers wrapped in aluminum foil, and a Granny Smith apple. Driven by some unexamined impulse, I quickly stashed the food in my own pack and zipped it shut. In a burst of common sense, I realized that there was something terribly wrong with me. The precise word eluded me. What came to mind was head injury. I couldn’t remember whether a person who’d sustained one was allowed to eat. The dogs had no such worries about themselves. As I stashed the goodies, they posed rather formally, wagged their tails over their backs, lifted their heads, and favored me with twin expressions of irresistible charm. On its own, my left hand reached into the pocket of my anorak and emerged bearing small cubes of cheese dusted with lint.
    Some of the remaining items in the dogpack made sense: two big bottles of spring water, a fabric water bowl for dogs, four heavy-duty nylon dog booties, two leashes, a flashlight, a pocket knife, a first-aid kit in a plastic box, hand towels apparently used as padding to prevent hard objects from poking into the dog, a collection of very small bungee cords, a hiking guide to Acadia National Park folded open to a page about Dorr Mountain, a map of Mount Desert Island, and a cobalt blue fleece pullover covered with what appeared to be dog hair. After unwrapping myself from the survival blanket and removing the waterproof anorak, I donned the pullover, then put the anorak back on, and again wrapped myself in foil. Acadia National Park! Mount Desert Island! (Let me note in passing that in mentally pronouncing Desert, I correctly stressed the second syllable, making the word sound like dessert, as in chocolate mousse, as opposed to the Sahara. French: Ile des Monts Deserts, Isle of the Barren Mountains.) The coast of northern Maine! No wonder the weather was cool and foggy! But the flashlight, the knife, the first-aid kit, and the water? What fool