Winter Dog

By Jeanette Lynes

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The dog found us late in February, that trough of winter after the valentines have been sent, when there's little left in the world to love, when the first peeping violets seem an eternity away. As if rising from a drift of snow, it suddenly appeared to us, ragged and yellow, shivering, rib-worn and gaunt, yet wagging its tail frosted like fern. Its floppy ears looked frozen at their tips, its scraggly Terrier-like-beard grizzled with frost. It was no dog we knew, and living in rural Ontario, the dogs of our township were familiar, part of the neighborhood fabric. This unknown one stood scratching at the door of our house, lifting one paw at a time as if to offer each a brief respite from the cold. Wagging its frosted fern-tail.

"Don't let it in!" my mother called out to me from the kitchen. "You let it in, it's game over. Besides, we already have a dog — and he eats too much."

This was a fact. Ed was our big, lumbering part-something, part-something else mutt. He had a huge appetite and slept away much of the day beside the stove. He was supposed to have been a fierce farm-guard. That had been our plan for him. He was not scary at all, could have been a stand-in for a cartoon dog quite popular at the time, Marmaduke. Ed didn't even bark when the strange yellow dog scratched for help that day.

I opened the door a crack, enough to see the poor mutt's system of raising and lowering its paws. It whimpered and still Ed did not hear, or hearing did not care. I compared Ed's warm, padded cushion by the stove with the plight of the winter dog, with its frostbitten ears, outside.

"Mom — it's cold — please?"

My mother emerged from the kitchen, her hands covered in flour. She was trying to give me the evil eye or, as we called it then, the hairy eyeball.

"You want to let it in," she said to me, in flat tones.

I bobbed my head energetically. "It's cute."

"Cute? Can it shovel snow?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"Can it clean stables?"

An even weaker shrug from me.

"Then what use is it?"

***

The yellow dog, of course, came to live with us. The truth was, it was not uncommon for pets to be driven to the country in a car, then dumped out and abandoned. Drifter, I named the stray, because he looked, when he appeared to us, like he had risen from a drift of snow. There were many storms in those days, and in fact our road had been closed for two days when Drifter came scrabbling at the door. If someone had dropped him off, he had been alone in the howling wind and blizzard for at least a couple of days. Winters were more severe in the years of my youth.

The yellow dog loved us for taking him in — he rolled about in a bliss of gratitude meant to be entertaining, we supposed, until my mother would say, "Yes, all right, all right, Drifter, you are here, now, you can stay."

Ed regarded Drifter with a benign indifference. As long as Ed's food bowl wasn't affected, Ed was cool.

***

Drifter was frightened of cars. If it was true that he had been abandoned and pushed out of a car, as we speculated, perhaps he feared a car would open its door and snatch him away from us. Ed, on the other hand, loved riding in the car.

One day, two winters after Drifter was brought into our house, my mother took Ed to town with her, grocery store run, taxes to pay. I didn't want to go to town, I needed to work on my 4-H project: a pair of pajamas I was sewing. Leopard pattern, the latest thing. I was old enough to stay home alone, had done so before. Besides, I wasn't alone. Drifter was there. I whirred the machine into a pleasant frenzy. I didn't hear the car engine idle in the yard, but Drifter heard it. At first I thought it was my mother and Ed, back from town. She had promised to buy puffed wheat cereal and marshmallows; we would make squares. I'd been thinking of those squares the whole time I sewed, so I ran to meet her.

It was not my mother. It was a frowning man in a dirty overcoat and sloppy galoshes. Already out of his car, beating his way over the snowy path to the front door.

Drifter sent out a wail of volleying barks, guttural, alarmed. Growls I'd never heard issue from his throat before. He stood on his hind legs and watched, through the window, his nose poking through between the drapes, the man approach our house. The man knocked on the door, spiraling Drifter's growls and barks into an even more crazed, intense pitch.

"No one is home!" I called nervously through the door.

"Doesn't sound like that to me," the man snapped.

I started to blubber that my mother would be back any minute.

Then man paid no heed.

In those days, no one locked their houses. The concept of a locked door was foreign to us, for city people. The man pushed the door open enough to stick his ugly face into the kitchen.

Drifter went berserk. He leapt and lunged at the man, and sank his teeth into his dirty overcoat, ripping a segment off the lower sleeve. Whatever kind of dog Drifter was, there must have been some wolf in his line. His eyes lit like two red-orange, searing flames.

The man swore at Drifter, but could not shake him off his sleeve, though he kept cursing and shaking his arm. It was like Drifter's teeth were permanently stuck in the man's coat. I cried harder.

Suddenly my mother appeared at the doorstep. And Ed. Like I said, Ed was the biggest, sleepiest, laziest dog, but something about seeing Drifter clinging, growling, at the man's sleeve, lit dynamite under him. He became, at that moment, the guard dog we had envisioned. Ed grabbed the back of the intruder's overcoat and it was clear to all of us that his next move would be sinking his teeth into the man's backside.

My mother told me to phone the police. By the time they arrived from town to our farm, the man had retreated back into his car and, throwing out a long spray of snow from his spinning tires, he tore out of our laneway and down the road in a white cloud. When the officer arrived, we were able to describe the man and his car in detail. Not long after, the police caught him. They had been looking for him for a while.

After that day, Ed and Drifter guarded us with their lives. They became a tag team, a duo-security force. I got these neat gold badges from prizes in cereal boxes and I attached one to each of their collars.

Though my mother and I never spoke about that first day Drifter came to us, I knew from the start she would let him in; country people have an unspoken custom about any desperate, hungry creature shivering outside in the wild, freezing elements — it is bad luck not to help them — moreover, they will repay your kindness someday when your thoughts are far as they can be from any economy of generosity, when you've embarked on an errand of absolute ordinariness, like making a run to town for milk and bread and cereal and paying the tax office.

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