Truckstop has killed twice. That sounds pretty fierce until you consider the number of attempts: one hundred thousand million rabdillion. It goes like this: walk, stop, stare at shivering pile of earth, tilt head to side as though listening to secret communiques from said pile, raise forefoot, stare harder, lurch elegantly at pile, tunnel one snout-length into pile, attempt to worm barrel-shaped cur body into snout-sized hole, surrender to tugging on leash, express dismay via sneeze, blink dirt from stubby blond lashes, walk five yards, repeat.
The first time she caught something I was alone with her and there were lots of people around. They were good-looking people jogging in pairs wearing wicking fabrics. The thing she caught was a gopher. Gophers rank fourth among her targets after outdoor cats, squirrels and crows. Indoor cats fail to rank, but a sighting of the neighbor’s cat on our shared fence induces a semi-asthmatic shriek-bark that, well, I can’t describe it, except maybe it’s the sound a lemming makes the moment it throws itself over the cliff.
So crows are all over the beach and gophers* are all over, or rather under, the park. But the gopher she actually caught, three or more years ago now, was at the beach, so maybe it had a broken heart, or was a spy, or its life journey had wound to an end and it wanted to die in sight of the wide water. I like the last explanation best and also it seems the most probable, because no vigorous, self-respecting gopher can be caught by a dog in a matching pink collar and leash.
Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you about is the second animal she killed. Before I say any more, I should mention I grew up with several generations of NIMH-level genius pet rats adopted from the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, and once when my cat chased a fruit rat under the stove I set out a water dish and a bunch of grapes for it until I figured out how to rescue it. I’ve never lived on a farm or in the heart of a city or anywhere else where rats might pose a special threat. So, I like rats.
But there we were in Golden Gate Park like we so often are, a pair of humans in decidedly non-wicking fabrics and our mutt, in her only fabric. Truckstop is doing the usual stop-stare-lurch, and the next thing we know she veers into a clump of grass and comes out with a rat. She killed it in two seconds, dropped it, and trotted on. You have never seen anything like it. Ok, very likely you have, but it was amazing. Not as a physical feat, not as a reminder of the swift brutality of nature, but simply because after all this time, after three years and the radzillion attempts, she got what she wanted, and then she didn’t care. I don’t mean she didn’t care. And I don’t mean she acted like I acted when I bought the $160 jeans I had flagged in Lucky magazine and yearned for for weeks and finally decided I deserved because of how badly I wanted them, and then as soon as I owned them felt so embarrassed by my reasoning I never wore them, and anyway they weren’t that flattering. Nor did she act like a professional assassin, for whom killing is deadly serious and life is a joke. No! She acted like she really wanted something, and then she got it, and she enjoyed it, and then she moved on, like, That’s cool. That was cool. What’s for lunch?
I was so struck by this because in some ways, right now, I am getting what I want. By that I mean my life is happy, is changing in ways that bring me joy, and though it is also changing in ways that make me sad, what I don’t feel like doing is emitting the agony-ecstasy shriek of the lemming. What I do feel like doing is sitting here with a mug of the tea my downstairs neighbor gave me for letting her puppy out while she’s at work, listening to the National (new National), and, well, that’s it. It’s cool. You get what you get, darling T, and you tunnel on.
*Get a load of this thing I just learned about gophers: the invasive Spanish grass that turns our California hills green in spring and gold in summer needs freshly turned soil to grow. Gophers love to eat this grass, and their exploding population depends on it to keep exploding. As they dig around looking for tasty roots they turn the soil, producing exactly the conditions it needs to grow. They turn the soil so much I heard it described as “boiling in slow motion.**” Anthropologists have trouble studying California soil because a nail from 1998 is going to be gopher-churned into the same layer as an arrowhead from 1338. So basically the gophers have inadvertently mastered agriculture and overcome the Malthusian paradox.
**I learned all this from Mark R. Stromberg, Ph.D., Resident Reserve Director of the Hastings Reserve near Monterey.
