Echo Memories

Echo 10/23/09

Bill and I have been spending a lot of time talking about and remembering our Echo, dredging up our memories of her over the past ten years. We are strangely comforted by this retrospective, and we spend a good deal of the time laughing over her antics.

Good dogs are "made," and it took a long time for Echo to become part of our family. I thought at the beginning that she had potential greatness, but when we first brought her home, she was a scrawny, nervous wild thing. The shelter told us she had been "living on the street" for almost 5 months before Animal Control could capture her. Then she had been incarcerated in the pound for another 4 months. She was not socialized to humans. She had a mind of her own, and it was geared toward escape and food she could catch and eat for herself. She was incredibly fast. Shortly after she first came to live with us, she went out into the woods behind the house and came back with a full-grown rabbit in her jaws. On our daily walks, she snatched up bees and grasshoppers and chomped them down.

Echo was named by the shelter, presumably for her big ears. We never knew if she had been another family's pet, or what she had been like as a puppy. Slowly, she began gaining weight and filling out, developing a "coyote tail" and a thick, healthy coat. I enrolled her in an agility class, hoping to focus some of her physical talents and speed into a controlled activity, help her bond with me, and burn off some of her boundless energy. But she was still a delinquent in spite of her smarts and abilities--she was not patient. She hated waiting her turn to do the course, and would bark at the other dogs when they made mistakes. At the end of our intermediate course, we were asked not to return until Echo learned some basic obedience skills.

Surprisingly, she got along with our cat. The cat either detested her or tolerated her, I could never make up my mind which. At first, the cat's head was always wet with Echo slobber, but they eventually negotiated a truce of sorts. Echo would chase any strange cat who ran, but "her" cat stood her ground and suffered as Echo charged and sniffed her. At one point the cat brought a flying squirrel into the house--but it wasn't quite dead yet. The squirrel took off, zooming from living room to dining room, trying to get away. Cat and Echo raced from one end of the house to the other, and Echo won. I asked Echo to give it to me, and to my astonishment, she dropped it into my cupped hands. I knew then that we were finally having some success on the path to civilizing the dog.

But for those first six years in New York, civilization was at best, a fleeting concept. She liked us well enough, but she never really got the idea that she belonged to us--she was still her own dog. Whenever the kitchen door was opened and the human was inattentive, she'd bolt for the horizon. We spent a lot of time driving the streets, trying to coax her to jump in the car to come home. There was never a chance of catching her on foot, you see.

When we changed the environment, she changed. Who knew that by putting her in the car and moving 800 miles, we were creating the dog we had always wanted? Part of the change was that she was maturing and calming down, but the real change was that she had room to roam free without a leash, plenty of scents to track down, and a job to do--patrolling her property and protecting me. The roadtrips to the west coast also helped--she became dependent on the humans in the car when we traveled to unfamiliar territory.

She still liked hunting her own food, to the exclusion of all other activities. I saw her often digging furiously for an hour or more, trying to get at a chipmunk or vole. She would even take logs in her jaws and move them to get at what she was digging for. She loved charging a flock of turkeys, and making them take wing. She still ate any buzzing, stinging insect, inside the house or out in the yard.

She was a "talker." Snuggling on the couch, she would tuck her big head into my armpit, expose her belly and groan and gargle when I asked her to talk to me. Eventually, she'd regain her dignity, shake her ears, sneeze and leave, as if she were disgusted with herself for showing such baby-like weakness.

I remember when long-haired Alex worked at the deli, she would bound up on the couch with him when he came home from work, sniffing and rooting around in his hair. This evolved into "snoofering" when we moved to Tennessee. When I came out of the shower with wet, clean hair, Echo would look up expectantly, and follow me until I sat and let her rub her nose in my hair. She would sneeze (in my ear, usually), and rub her neck in my scent. (She also liked Bill's Old Spice deodorant, and would do the same with him, trying to rub that scent onto her fur, tickling his armpits and making him laugh). And it wasn't just pleasant smells she liked to acquire--many times she'd come home from our walks with her neck covered in cow flop or deer poop, and then it was instant bath-time, despite whatever we had planned for the day!

She was always remarkably intelligent, but she became confident and calm over the past four years and incredibly, increasingly lovable to us. She finally learned to trust us, and she lost most of her younger fears. Even when she was so sick there at the end, she would still get up and follow us, wagging her tail and trying to please us.

I miss her like crazy.