Back in 1979 I decided to get a dog, so my friends who lived near Atlanta took me into town to the county animal shelter. I ended up with a dog that the card on the pen said was a dalmation named Sugar. Wrong on both counts. She looked dalmationish, but her head was shaped wrong, her ears were too long, and her spots were too faint. And there was no way I was going to have a dog named Sugar. It doesn’t pass the dog-calling test: Imagine yourself shouting the name at the top of your lungs. SUGARRRRRR!! Nope, not me. She ended up Jesse, and she was a great dog.

Now we have a dog named Zeke, of uncertain lineage. When he first showed up near our house, he “belonged” to our neighbors, but he always looked longingly at me when I took Zeus for a walk. We didn’t need another dog, and we were tired of finding homes for all the dogs that were dumped near our house. But we eventually gave in and he took up residence with us until we could find a good owner for him. He was friendly, but completely uneducated. Once when I took him with me to meet Leah for lunch, he nosed the back window of the truck open, jumped out and took off just like he knew where he was going, with no apparent intention of coming back.

Saintly

We took him to the vet and had him vaccinated, neutered and tagged, and then we advertised for someone to adopt him. One day someone answered the ad. I told them not to let him off the leash when they got home because he would run away. They assured me they would keep him restrained. So they drove off, and Leah and I took a two-week vacation at Yellowstone. When we got back, we had a call from our vet, who had been called by someone who found Zeke roaming aimlessly. Whoever found him had called the number on the rabies tag. We took that as a sign, so Zeke became ours.

He’s 90 pounds, so he outweighs Jesse by about 35 or 40 pounds. His head is larger and his ears are shorter. I could fold Jesse’s ears over her eyes, but Zeke’s ears don’t reach that far. Jesse was black and white, and Zeke is brown and white. The only real similarity to Jesse’s physical appearance is that his spots are faint.

But they are very similar in some ways. For one, Jesse was a wanderer, kind of like Zeke. I used to take Jesse backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. She would take off up the trail and run around me in a kind of electron-like fuzzy orbit, always out of sight but always in contact. Zeke also takes off, but apparently his energy is great enough to break the bond, because sometimes he doesn’t come back right away. If you saw either one of them running around in a field of tall grass, you would immediately think “birddog”.

There is one more trait that they share. They both kill possums. Every time Jesse saw a possum she immediately ran to it and started biting it. She could not be restrained. Same with Zeke. A couple of nights ago when I took him for his last walk of the evening, he got away from me and ran into the garage. He dived under the little stoop we have at the laundry-room door, where Leah has a cat hotel, and there was a loud scuffle. It was Zeke attacking a possum. The possum went limp and I finally got Zeke out. The possum was bleeding at least a little, but he was gone the next time I looked in the garage. I don’t know whether he was mortally injured. In any event, I think he figured out that the cat beds, although comfortable, were not safe enough for possums.

It’s no surprise that we have had a lot of possums around the house. We live in the country and Leah puts our catfood for the outdoor cats. That’s an almost perfect way to attract wildlife. We have probably trapped eight or ten possums and a few raccoons. We take them down into Texas Valley and release them near a nice stream. I don’t know whether they survive, but they have a better chance there than they do at our house. At least as long as Zeke is around.