Leah and I don’t have kids, but we do have dogs. Ever since I got my dog Jesse back in 1979, I have noticed similarities between the way kids and dogs behave. I’m afraid I might have offended some people who have kids by that observation, but I don’t think it says anything bad about kids or dogs. I like dogs, so I would probably like kids, at least if they act like dogs.

If you believe what you see in the movies, in television commercials and in comics, kids love to jump in piles of fall leaves. I’ve never done it, but then when I was growing up we had mainly pines. I don’t think you’re supposed to jump into piles of pine needles. Based on Zeke’s behavior, if my observational theory of the parallel behavior of canines and young humans is valid, that picture of kids jumping into piles of leaves may be accurate.

Dead leaves fill the ditch on the uphill side of Fouche Gap Road where I walk the dogs, and Zeke almost invariably ends up running through the leaves like this:

What I really wanted to get was when he rolls in the leaves like this:

I took both of these videos with my iPhone. The last one has the classic amateur photographer’s shadow in the picture. Zeke has taken his leaf bath for a lot longer than he does in this clip, but I never seem to be able to get my phone out and videoing in time to capture it.

Lucy never wants to play in the leaves. I think she is mainly interested in getting the darned walk over so she can run into the living room and jump into her bed. I need to try to get a video of that, but I’ll have to be quicker than I have been with Zeke.

We also have cats, but I have never noticed any similarity between the behavior of cats and kids. Leah, who is much more familiar with cat behavior, says she has never thought about whether cats and kids act alike. I’m trying to picture kids bringing a dead mouse to the back door. I can do it, but just barely.

Last night when I took the dogs out for their final walk of the evening, Zeke made a break for freedom, or deer, or something. Our evening routine is that I go out first, Zeke comes out second, and then I turn around to pull Lucy out the door. This time, when I turned around to get Lucy, Zeke dashed down the front walk and jerked the leash out of my hand. I use a retractable leash, which has some benefits for the dog but some drawbacks for the handler. One of those drawbacks is that it gives the dog a running start, so he has plenty of length to build momentum. So he slammed my hand into the door, the leash came out of my hand, and he took off into the night. I heard the leash handle dragging on the pavement as he went down Wildlife Trail, barking all the way.

If you have read enough of this blog, you already know that this kind of thing has happened before. He has climbed over the (expensive) gate we had put on the front walk to keep him contained. He has jerked the leash out of my hand, and out of Leah’s hand. And on the rare occasion when I have let him off the leash, he has simply run off into the woods. When he gets loose, he’s a crazy dog. Sometimes you can hear some barking for a little while, but mainly he just disappears.

Zeke has escaped at night only once before, and his retractable leash was attached that time, too. When I went out to look for him that time, I found him with his leash securely wrapped around a tree. Last night as I walked down the driveway to look for him, I heard barking from the woods behind our neighbor’s house. It was not the kind of barking he does when he’s chasing something. This was more like, “Hey! I’m down here! Come get me!”

Our neighbor’s house sits at the corner of Wildlife Trail and Lavender Trail. I walked down Lavender Trail a little and shined my flashlight into the woods. Two bright eyes reflected back at me. This is fairly difficult terrain, even in daylight, and last night was cloudy with no moon. The land is densely wooded, and it slopes steeply off the road. There are drainage gullies with steep sides, fallen trees, and vines that loop down close to the ground. Fortunately I had just put new batteries in my flashlight. At least it wasn’t raining.

Zeke was waiting patiently with his leash wrapped around two small trees. I freed him and we made our way back up to the street. He went immediately to bed.

When this kind of thing happens, before I look for him I always come back inside and gripe to Leah about how I should just leave him outside to see if he learns a lesson. But I always go out looking anyway. He knows I’m mad when I find him, but I doubt that he has any understanding of why. Any kind of lesson is totally lost on him.

He’s lying quietly in his bed right now. He doesn’t move his head when I go by, but he moves his eyes to follow me. I’m still a little peeved.

Oh well. It’s time for their morning walk.

When my dog Jesse died in 1988, I wanted to adopt another dog. Jesse was such a good dog, I knew I would never find another one like her, so I wanted to find a dog that wasn’t like her. I bought some dog books – this was before the Web – and finally decided on a Doberman pinscher. It sounds odd now, but it didn’t take long to find a Doberman at the small local pound in Rome. She was about three or four months old. The workers at the pound knew who she belonged to. They said the wife wanted her back, but the husband refused to pay the few dollars it took to bail her out. Jerk.

The first thing this new dog did when I got her back to my parents’ house was to poop in my mother’s living room. I am amazed to this day at how well my mother took it.

The new dog became Sheba. We lived a simple life in a little mobile home in a little mobile home park in the middle of a soybean field north of Huntsville. I took her for a walk every day. She walked exactly like a dog is supposed to walk, right beside me. I was so used to having Jesse run wild around me on walks that I thought Sheba was not having a good time. But she was just being a good dog.

Sheba went everywhere with me, just like Jesse did. The first summer I had her, she went with me to visit my friend Tom in New Mexico. This is Sheba on that trip at Four Corners, wondering what I’m doing.

 Sheba turned into a handsome dog. Here she is a few years later next to Debra, Tom’s niece.

When I came home from work, Sheba always wanted to greet me with something in her mouth. One night when I was driving back to visit my parents, I ran off the road and wrecked my car. The rear window came out, and Sheba ran away. I called her, but couldn’t find her, and eventually I had to have my parents come and pick me up. I hit my face on the steering wheel and was knocked so silly that I couldn’t think straight at the time. The next day I went back to look for her. The kind person whose house I had gone to after the wreck said a big, black dog had shown up at a neighbor’s house. We went over to look, and there was a Doberman. All Dobermans look pretty much the same, so I wasn’t sure at first that it was her. But when she saw us she picked up a pine cone to bring to us. That’s when I knew it was her.

Once when I took her with me on a trip to the west coast, we stopped at a beach somewhere in Oregon or Washington. We walked out to the edge of the surf, and she took off running right at the water’s edge. She ran flat out until I could barely see her in the distance, and then she turned around and ran back. Another time I took her to a lake near Huntsville. I let her off the leash and she spent about an hour running back and forth splashing in the water. I never worried about her coming back. I trusted her completely off the leash.

When I finally bought a house in 1992, it was at the end of a dead-end road, more than a mile from the highway. My new neighborhood was out in the country, with big lots and only a few neighbors who grew to know me and Sheba from our daily walks. I thought it was a great place for a dog, and perfectly safe to let her stay outside at home when I was at work. Every morning when I left for work she was on the deck, watching me leave, and every afternoon when I got back home she was on the deck, waiting for me.

And then one day she wasn’t on the deck. I called and called, and I looked at looked. I walked all over the mountain that my house backed up to. I talked to neighbors. I drove up and down the roads, looking in the ditches. I put a classified ad in the paper. I put a display ad in the paper. My vet let me borrow a list of veterinarians and I sent a hundred letters out to vets all over north Alabama and south central Tennessee. I read the lost and found ads in the local paper for a year. But I never saw Sheba again.

My memories of Sheba are colored by my guilt at not keeping her safe. That sense of guilt tends to eclipse the good memories I have, and that’s not fair. Sheba was a good dog, and a happy dog. The least she deserves now is to be remembered as that happy dog.

Sheba, in a scan of a fuzzy old print.