The last free dog
How our Great Pyrenees became the hill's 'it girl'
I realize we may be living on borrowed time. Dogs don’t just roam free these days. We revere nothing if not the sanctity of private property, each house and yard its own castle and moat. All it takes is one neighbor to make an official complaint (and we’ve got one who’s grumbling) to put an end to this halcyon arrangement.
But for now, our Great Pyrenees — an outdoor dog — is free to wander to her heart’s content. Unfenced, unmonitored, she goes where she will, visiting her friends, following her nose, living her life.
It wouldn’t work most places, but we live in a special corner of the world. Once you get halfway up the hill, it feels like coming home. People start nodding and waving. George might holler or unleash a turkey call as you drive up, up, up toward the place where the last telephone poll marks the end of the line: where civilization ends and the state game lands begin. Sure, the no trespassing signs around here are colorful: “Carry ID so we can notify your next of kin.” But five years here and we’ve long since realized those don’t apply to us. We’re not trespassers, we’re neighbors.
This bonhomie evaporates at the bottom of the hill, though through sheer stubbornness I’ve gotten one mom in the middle to reliably, if tepidly, raise a hand in response to mine. Down below, though, the response remains a stone-cold stare, so I’ve taken a hint and stopped trying.
Our dog, Niko, on the other hand, does not give a fuck about rejection. She loves you. If you give her a pat on the head, if you’re terrified of dogs and won’t get out of your delivery truck, just so long as you’re human — she loves you. Niko is no lap dog; she will go wolf on any and all wild animals, barking her scary bark and snarling with all her fur standing up. But if you’re a Homo sapiens, she will greet you with butt-wiggling, tail whacking, paw-curling-around-your-leg-so-you-can’t-get-away glee.
Niko is a passionate lover of humans, but we live far from other people, in an 1890 stone house down a long, rutted dirt driveway, with only one neighbor beyond us. So when we’re not around (and sometimes, insultingly, when we are) she lopes the half-mile of our driveway to visit with neighbors, checking in on her secret caches of treats and bones en route when she thinks no one’s looking.
I have only a vague idea of Niko’s daily movements, since I’m at work in another state all day while she’s gallivanting god knows where. All I know is that she usually takes off after breakfast, since the kids and I often drive right past her on her trek toward the neighbors’ — just another commuter headed out for the day. By the time I drop the kids at the bus stop and continue on to work, Niko — the “White Wanderer,” as one neighbor dubbed her — will, I assume, have begun her social rounds.
She generally stays out all day until my Jeep returns up the hill, when, if I’m lucky, she’ll come bounding into the road to greet me, landing her front paws on my window frame and a couple kisses on my face, and provide me the most regal of escorts the rest of the way home.
At first, we’d apologize for her liberties, but generally our neighbors swore they liked Niko’s visits. A new mom who’s often home alone said she felt safer hearing Niko barking at night. The dad of a family of city folks who are up maybe once a month developed a real “creature-to-creature” relationship with Niko, as he described it. Whenever Dan’s up for the weekend, we barely see Niko, other than to glimpse her lounging on his deck as we drive by. She’s been known to stay at “her boyfriend’s” place all weekend if we don’t go get her.
Then there are Kim and Steve, a recently retired couple who, since moving up to their log cabin full-time, bought a bed for Niko to put on their porch — a picturesque, shady spot with a full view of all the action on our end of the road.
Usually the cases in which Niko becomes a nuisance — because, say, little kids are playing in the yard, and this 90-pound creature bounds in from out of nowhere to join in the rollicking and it’s a bit much — are easy enough to resolve. A neighbor shoots us a text and we bike over and coax her back home with treats and enthusiastic cheerleading.
But we do have one neighbor who has an issue with the current set-up, or lack thereof. She texted us a couple months back to say that though Niko’s friendly, she doesn’t like when Niko approaches her when she’s walking her two dogs because an unleashed dog is seen as a threat by a leashed dog, and her dog(s) might lash out. Could we keep an eye on her, she asked.
The text was polite; the request, reasonable — and between the lines I read catastrophe. The only way for us to “keep an eye” on a creature who can slip through the woods as quickly and quietly as her cousin coyotes, would be by installing an electric fence around a few acres of our property.
I understand that this is what we may have to do. I can see Judge Judy popping her eyes at us like the dumbasses she incessantly encounters on her show — of course that’s our responsibility. But I’m hoping with all my heart it doesn’t come to that.
Because here’s the other complicating factor. Niko is not really “our” dog anymore. Slowly but surely, she’s become the hill’s dog. Remember Kim and Steve, who bought her the dog bed? Well, nowadays Kim also feeds her, brushes her, gives her full-body rubs, worries when she looks skinny, and — though it took me awhile to admit it — clearly loves her just as much as the kids and I do. While I’m at work and the kids are at school, Niko spends her days at the log cabin, and increasingly, the occasional night, too.
Something funny happens when someone else loves the creature you also love. Thanks to our co-parenting, Kim and Steve have gone from nice neighbors to something closer to kin. When we happen to pass each other in town we honk and wave furiously. When Niko jumps down from “her” porch to follow us home, if Steve’s outside doing yardwork, he might bellow, Hey, where you going with my dog? and the kids laugh.
What a glorious life, I think as I slow down on my way home to pass their log cabin, rubbernecking to see if that majestic friend of mine is chilling on the porch. I don’t stop — she’ll come when she’s ready — but I’m hoping every time to catch a bolt of white flying my way.