Walking the Dog

But we were certain that Brigitte was being overprotective, and I took him out a couple of times even before he got his shots.

He took to the leash well. At first it concerned him that something was around his neck -- and this seemed sensible. But then he seemed to get the thrust of the principle (the leash connects dog to human, controlling the dog while giving him some range even in unknown circumstances) in one gulp. And he liked it, tripping down the snowy sidewalk with an immaculate cowhide leash and a bright red collar.

It was the first time we got to show him to the world. And while I do not recall anyone running to their windows to see the young prince padding by, I had a giddy feeling that, like a child with a first bicycle, able to go anywhere, do anything, we were a force to contend with now.

It is hard, as you go about your business of inspecting the neighborhood's nooks and crannies, not to get wound around a tree, tangled up in your master's legs, even wrapped around a car's tailpipe. Dogs that can't seem to anticipate these difficulties will likely remain on a short lead all their lives. Dogs who have a knack for avoiding them are candidates for what I call the genius leash.

The genius leash is one of the greatest developments of our concluding century. You may know it as a retractable leash, or a reel leash, or a spring leash. It is a long leash of black nylon cord, ranging from 16 to 22 feet in length, that is mounted on a tension spool. In its resting state the cord retracts in its plastic housing, and the dog walks beside you. When the dog wants to venture further from you, the cord lets itself out with just the right tension, neither going slack nor strangling the dog.

The first leash you buy will seem awfully big on your puppy. But you may as well get a full-sized one. A good, 6' leather leash is the best short lead for all but the smallest dogs. It keeps you close to the animal without tripping over it, and it doesn't bunch up like fabric and nylon leads.

The beauty of the genius leash is that it overcomes the basic conflict of walk-taking, which is that people like to maintain a consistent pace, while dogs like to make frequent stops to check out the olfactory entertainment. With a 26-foot leash, the human can walk, the dog can stop, the leash will lengthen while the dog sniffs around, and shorten again, automatically, when he has completed his research. Thus a walk takes on the yogic rhythm of breathing – expanding and contracting as you make your way through the neighborhood.

The best-known of these expensive ($24-$40) leashes is Flexi3, a German product warranted for life against wear and tear. It is a good leash, and its spring mechanism works long after similar mechanisms jam up and come to a halt. I have one leash that still works after two years.

But I could never take them up on their warranty, because my dog has broken three of them. It is a snap for any dog to chew through the nylon cord and send the tail end of it whirling back into its casing, with no way to pull it back out without taking the case apart with a screwdriver.

My dog, especially when he was young and determined to escape, chewed through just about every kind of leash. Chrome-plated chain was the one substance he did have his way with. On the other hand, he is forbearing with leases until they make the fatal mistake of wrapping around his tail and chafing his butthole. He hates that, and he will prevent that leash from ever doing it again.

Out on a walk, the human may be enjoying the exercise. It may be lost in that fuzzy reverie that pet owners give themselves to. Many people look forward to walks as an opportunity to bond with their pet, as a special moment between the species. Or the human may be impatiently urging the dog on because people have better things to do than walk a dog.

But to the dog the walk is everything. In rain, sleet, snow, or scorching heat, it is just as eager to get out and do its thing. It generally doesn't begrudge the leash, and accepts it as the price of doing business. But the walk is not about getting exercise or bonding with the master. The walk is about trees and smells.

Every time a city dog takes a walk, it logs onto the dog Internet, in which it communicates with all other dogs in its network. Dogs download data with their noses, which house 10,000 times the information receptors that human noses have. And they upload data with their bladders.

Like our Internet, the dog Internet is ubiquitous yet invisible. We can see the dogs, and we can see the trees, but the network itself is transparent. To participate in the dog Internet, human eyes are useless. You need a nose, one 10,000 times better than your current one.

For a human to "see" the dog Internet, you might want to videotape a single city block from above, perhaps a gondola shot from a blimp. You will want to film the proceedings using sped-up, stop-gap camera technique, like that famous film of a rose blooming, then wilting, all in ten seconds.

And you would want to add chroma key video "tracer" to the dog pee, highlighting it like an enhanced hockey puck on TV, so it appears bright blue or hunter orange as it splashes onto tree trunks, fence posts, telephone poles and bushes. After a day of shooting, run the sped-up tape and, finally, you will "see" the dog Internet. You would see that a single city block experiences scores of uploads, each one a splash of fireworks, plus hundreds of downloads. Each hit is a message from one dog to all other dogs logging onto that network.

Since dogs cross streets, the tracers cross the street with them, carrying news from one block to the next, thus creating a network of networks -- an Internet.

In both Internets, telephony plays a vital role. While the human Internet is conducted by electricity along telephone phone lines, the dog Internet is conducted by urine and other scents distributed along telephone poles and other vertical objects.

While the messages dogs post are encrypted, so as to be readable only by other dogs, it is not hard to guess what they are saying. They are saying the same basic thing we say on our Internet: I was here.

Each day's marked signpost is like a prisoner's hashmark. It may contains clues about your existence: "My name is Smoky. I am this tall. I had noodle soup for lunch. I am very fierce and very potent. But I might like to play. This belongs to me."

The dog Internet is not a dogs-only Internet. The trees carry the scent of every creature that has been near the tree. In the city this may include cats, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, insects, slugs, snails, and birds of every feather. Each has a story to tell that is interesting to the dog, and invisible to you.

Marking is a form of online advertisement. It is a dog's way of saying who I am, how big I am, and where you can find me. The higher up a pole a dog posts his message, the more status accrues to him.

This becomes amusing when you realize that height on the pole does not always correlate with size of the dog. It is inspiring to watch the efforts of undersized dogs to stand practically on their heads to direct their stream to the topmost point on a pole or tree trunk. Dogs are not above Internet forgery.

The dog Internet is essentially urban in nature. The countryside does not have the critical ratio of dogs to trees to create the network effect. In the country, there are more trees but fewer dogs.

In my city neighborhood of Merriam Park in Saint Paul, there are about perhaps 20,000 people, 4,000 or so dogs, and half as many trees. This is a favorable ratio for a canine community bulletin board. So many dogs, distributed among a handful of trees, means that no bush, no hydrant, no No Parking signpost, is spared.

The next time you are out with your dog, and you can't understand his urgency to get to the next tree trunk, try to appreciate what he is going through. He is experiencing sensory overload, downloading from multiple sites simultaneously. Give him time, and a long leash, and let him be about his business.

Beau, from an early age, seemed to like all dogs. We would be out walking in the newfallen snow, and he would strain at the leash to cross the street, where a man was walking his German shepherd. When Beau got a chance to mingle like this, he was all over the newfound friend, licking and pawing him, offering evidence of his goodwill. He wanted the new dog to begin where his litter left off.

Very often, however, dog owners, seeing us, would quickly turn in the opposite direction, and hurry their dog away. Beau would whine his frustration, seeing them disappear around the corner. I, too, was frustrated – what could the owner be thinking of? Didn't he know that dogs need other dogs to be fulfilled? Wasn't he afraid the dog would contract his own antisocial behavior, and turn mean?

A better chance for Beau was to make regular rounds of the backyards that he knew had dogs in them. The two of us created a mental map of the homes in the surrounding blocks that had dogs, especially dogs that spent lots of time outdoors.

Beau would be in terrific tension as we would head out of the house, looking for dog action. He was so much fun to be with when he played, in those days, that I was frisky, too.

Many dogs came up to the fence to make our acquaintance. A few ran out to scream at us to get away from their property. More than once, when we approached, the people inside would see us and call their dogs inside – even when Beau and their dog were behaving nicely through the fence.

There was a young boxer named Ginger, the same age as Beau. Her owner was a Latin teacher who wanted to raise her for breeding. Beau was always dashing out our front and over to their place, where the two dogs would frolic on the sidewalk. Ginger especially seemed to lose control, going into a squirm and shimmy dance on seeing Beau.

Their great concern was that Beau would have sex with Ginger 1) at all, which would have produced the world's weirdest dogs, boxers and poodles being the opposite of one another in every possible way, and 2) during her first heat, which most breeders like to avoid, as it taxes the dog's maturity. So when they saw Beau coming, they freaked out and tried to shoo him away, which was not strictly possible.

They may have felt they were just being sensible, but I felt they were being just a little nuts, and that they didn't want their dogs to be happy. Until I met Noelle and her two dogs Cobi and Sonja, Beau's first and best friends.

We first met them walking down the alley of their home on Selby Avenue. Cobi was the elder of the two females, a mix of poodle and border collie, with very strong herding instinct. Sonja was the younger dog, a Labrador retriever big enough to retrieve Labrador and half of Newfoundland.

When we walked by after an especially deep snow, they barreled off their back porch and began barking at us. Cobi, the herder, orchestrated the barking, and Beau was delighted with the havoc, and wagged his tail appreciatively.

The dogs' owner, appeared in parka at the back door. "Allo," she said. She was French!

"Hi," I said. "This is Beauregard, and we were just –"

"Beauregard," she said, stooping to pet the puppy. "It is true – you are so beauty-ful!"

Beau and I both brightened. I was dying to have someone say nice things about Beau. We had been cooped up in the house, me falling in love with him – and no one to show him to!

"You know what we call you where I am from," she said, scratching behind his ears. "Caniche. Oh, you are such the beauty-ful boy."

"It's nice to meet people who like dogs," I blurted out.

"We love the dogs," she said with a Gallic shrug. "I tell you, any time you want to visit, come by. My dogs, they always love to play. And you would be most welcome, Mike." I liked how she said Mike, stretching it into two syllables.

I was stunned – to encounter such hospitality in emotionally frozen Minnesota. "Are you sure?" I said. "Because we'll be here every day. Beau just loves to be with other dogs."

"Let them play," Noelle said to me. "I will make you a cup of coffee inside."

And so began a splendid friendship all around. Noelle and her husband John, and their three kids, and their dogs, became "best family friends" of my contingent. All winter, and then all summer, and then on into the next year, I would stop by, almost every day, and Noelle would make me coffee, and maybe I would buy a sweet.

Noelle wanted someone to tell her stories, and someone to tell stories to. She told me about growing up in Mauretania in Africa – her father was in the foreign service, and a friend of DeGaulle, and her mother was a concert pianist in her hometown at the base of the Pyrenees.

And so we talked, and enjoyed our coffee, while the dogs out back raced around the apple trees and played.

I was never really allowed to meet Beau's family. I understand his mother was a snow-white bitch named Emily, a champion show dog, as was his jet-black father, Razz. But Brigitte and her daughter Lorraine, who actually kenneled their dogs, were careful to hide their operations from me, and I never glimpsed what his litter was like, except for that one moment when we all first met, and a lone white sister was with him.

Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that Beau had a terrifically happy puppyhood. I never saw him with his brothers and sisters, but I know enough about him to suspect he was fun to be with, capable and active but never mean. As the alpha leader, he set the pace for the pack. I'm guessing they played rhapsodically, day after day, for the three months they were together.

And now, when he pulls on the lead because he senses a dog behind hedge or fence, or he knows I am headed for Sonja's house, I think he is out to recreate those weeks of bliss, rolling on his back, nipping at one another's ears, striking heroic poses one moment, clowning poses the next. Dog friendships recreate the litter emotion of childhood. And emotion is everything to dogs.

Which means that, when he is solitary, at home, on his pillow, staring emptily out the window, he misses his litter. Even the most pampered lap dog must feel this quiet grief, a yearning for what is happening on the other side of the window, and a dim memory of paradise, tumbling with one's siblings.

One day I had a special treat for Beauregard. I took him with Daniele to her riding stable in Wisconsin. While Daniele struggled with the lesson (in addition to her other phobias she was very much afraid of falling from a cantering horse and being trampled; go figure), Beau played with a setter collie mix, and the two of them fought and played for the full 60 minutes of the lesson. It was a dazzling display, in the dizzying atmosphere of horse manure and sawdust, of all-out full-tilt dogplay, like a boxing match with no bell between rounds. The only rule was, get in each other's face. They loved it.

Each breed is like a tribe, and each tribe has its eminent concerns. Beagles are concerned – they are very concerned -- about rabbits. For a setter, fetching sticks is the order of the day. If a Labrador retriever is not paddling about in the water, it cannot be fulfilled. Border collies are obsessed with maintaining order in the herd, even when there is no herd. Whippets run. Terriers harangue. Poodles pose.

Get all these breeds together and there are bound to be disconnects. Beau wants other dogs to play dueling tyrannosauri with him. He can do it for hours. But if the other dog is a golden retriever, he won't get far because the retriever, perhaps nature's most devoted dog, will have all eyes on his human, in case a stick is thrown his way, or a compliment, or a pat on the head. (Goldens are do-gooders and praisehounds.) The poodle barks at the retriever to forget the stick and play with him. The retriever ignores the poodle, eyeing the stick as if it were God's gift. Oh right, the poodle, says, and he almost rolls his eyes: the stick.

Dogs want to mix it up, but their interests are not the same. So different, they are unable to find common ground. I have been to parties like that, and so have you.

I can illustrate this point by going one dog at a time through our neighborhood:

Basil, an oversized golden retriever whose master bitterly regrets neutering him – "It took all the dog out the dog" – is a loner by natur4e. He just likes to stand like a statue in his lawn, and warn away interlopers. He also likes to slip out of his collar and go for long, slow walks through the neighborhood. When Beau salutes him, Basil smiles fondly, but can't think of anything they might do together.

Reggie, a fox terrier, is a people dog. He likes to be fondled and held on a lap. When Beau and he get together, they haven't a clue what to do. Beau gets into a semi-sexual position with Reggie, standing atop him with his genitalia dancing in front of the little dog's face. The little dog bows down and averts his gaze. It is a stalemate.

Emma, a Dalmatian, wants to kill Beau. She hates the thought of other dogs walking by her alley. Her owner wears a look of exquisite pain when we walk by – she is ashamed that Emma is such an unmitigated bitch.

Barney, an elderly beagle, looks gouty and gray. His owner, Bill, steers him away when we come by. My sense about beagles is that one thing alone causes blips on their radar, and that is rabbits. Beau, as a puppy at least, is blind to the possibility of wildlife. I have thought of putting a bumper sticker in our back yard: Start Seeing Squirrels.

There are two Alexes near us. The Berubes have an Alex who is a sheltie, and he and Beau seem unable to connect. Alex only likes his master, Ned Berube. There is no room in his life for an erratic, self-involved puppy. Ned, a minister, finds Beau interesting, and always gives him a pat. But I get the sense he is writing sermons, with Beau as the Prodigal Poodle.

The other Alex is a soulful Brittany spaniel, who hints and whines when we stroll by. But he seems more lonely for human company than for Beau. He licks my fingers through the cyclone fence. Alex is a dog whose owners leave him all day, and each day he suffers meekly until they come home.

Two dogs Beau was interested in were Harley, a Rottweiler, and his pal Buster, a golden mix, who live upstairs and downstairs from one another in a duplex on Dayton Avenue. After the big snows, these two discovered they could actually walk up a tall drift and stand atop their garage, and bellow at anyone traversing their alley. It is quite a sight, to look up and see two giant dogs hollering at you. Beau thought that was very neat, but Buster, himself a puppy, was standoffish with Beau, and even a bit hostile.

Other dogs had even less chance of connecting. Sparky, the Keiths' mini-dobie, is blind and frail, and incontinent. Beau is more interested in her as a chew toy than a companion.

There are two dachshunds a few blocks away that are very clever. They ring bells to be let outside and poop in a litter box. One dog is evidently the pet of the other. But there is no room in this precise living arrangement for a creature of Beau's sprawling temperament.

We also know a small poodle mix named Binks, but Beau doesn't like him much. He is the kind of dog who tries to attack you and complain when you fight back, simultaneously. Even his owner doesn't seem to like him. Only the daughter likes Binks, but she likes him very, very much, which suggests he has virtues only she can measure.

Besides Cobi and Sonja, Noelle's dogs, I can think of only two dogs in the neighborhood that Beau struck up any kind of relationship with. The first was a lovely small golden named Mango, who lived behind the Congregational church. Mango was precisely the same age as Beau, was male, and had the same ineffable light in his eyes, that seemed to say he was ready for anything. But we could never get the two dogs together. Their friendship existed with a fence between them.

The other dog, whom Beau did not discover for several months yet, was a gorgeous white Samoyed named Sophie, who lived by the park in a corner house. Sofie and another dog, a feral-looking but very childish older male named Bear, black in color, spent hours every day tied to two giant spruce trees.

Sophie and Bear were owned by Walter, who doted on those two large dogs like a dad, and took them running in the park every night, off leash. When I met Walter, I felt I had met my twin.

Beau and Sophie would usually play with Sophie chained up, and Beau let loose. They had a marvelous chemistry, Beau loving Sophie with a heroic passion. Indeed, she was the quintessential bodhisattva dog, with an angelic light shining out of her, beaming news of great canine wisdom and joy. When she was with Beau, I saw Beau at his very best.

But the point that must not be lost is, Beau loved all these dogs. But Sophie (and Cobi and Sonja) were the only dogs he really got to play with. The others were either barred from him by fences and gates, or their masters shooed him away, or the dogs could not figure out what to do with one another.

For a dog who lived to socialize, this was a very frustrating formula.

Beau suddenly looked up from his sniffing to see a letter carrier going about his appointed rounds. He walked up one walkway, up three steps, and deposited mail a box, then back to the sidewalk, down to the next house, up to the mailbox, and so on. It is a credit to Beauregard's attention span that he stood rooted to the snowy ground until the mailman had visited every single house on that side of the street -- about twelve minutes. The expression on the young dog's face was one of utter seriousness.

Every dog has a vocation, a calling to a certain kind of career. Deep down, the vocation is some aspect of hunting -- either killing, or pointing, or retrieving, or chasing, or tracking. Even herding and racing, I suspect, are reshapings of the basic hunting instinct. Even guarding and providing companionship and security, connect to that ancient impulse. Even breeding and showing, in the sense that these processes create more hunters.

So how do I explain that Beau chose to make letter-carrying his vocation? Because from that day on, when we are out on the retractable leash, he makes his way through the neighborhood, stopping at every porch for just a moment, then moving on to the next house. I think he derives meaning from this. In some weird, very earnest way, he is delivering the mail.

On the Saint Paul side are Hidden Falls and Crosby Farm. On the Minneapolis side are Fort Snelling State Park and an area known to historians as Camp Coldwater, but known to my family as Poodlevania, the one place in the Twin Cities where dogs roam free.

These areas are all wild and relatively unpoliced. When the coast is clear, I let Beau off his leash, and he dances alongside me while we walk 2-4 miles along well-worn dirt paths.

The horrendous blizzards of our first winter brought equally horrendous spring floods. The road into many of our river walking areas were shut down, as the river rose up above its banks and dumped millions of tons of riverbottom sand along the alluvial plains south of the Twin Cities. The transformation from sleepy green riverbank to barren soggy dunes could not have been more striking. Footbridges, docks, picnic shelters and sheds were lifted up and swept away. The scars of the flood are still evident -- plastic bags caught in tree branches at twenty feet above flood stage are still there today, tattered and translucent, ghostly markers of yesterday's high water.

The upshot of all this destruction was that the parks were officially closed for about three months. These three months of devastation, coinciding with Beau's fourth through sixth months of life, were exceptionally fun ones for the two of us, because would go where no one else dared, and no one, including police, would follow.

There on the dunes and muddy plains of the river flats, Beau seemed to blossom into the kind of bodhisattva dog I pined for -- happy, handsome and brave. He encountered every kind of creature, from white-tailed deer in high snow to big, dangerous snapping turtles at egg-laying time. We saw snow fall, and heard ice crack, and seedlings sprout. We heard the chaotic yakking of the crows in subzero weather in the bare treetops.

Every day I seemed to walk further with him. Some days we walked for two hours or more. I had an aching knee, but having my puppy dance with me by the river made the twinges bearable.

Sometimes we just sit in the soft sand and watch the river go by, and we can feel our breath inside us. Beau gets all panty when he is happy and his mouth opens in a saurian grin and he winks at me. Such times I think, this dog understands everything. Everything that matters anyway.

I don't think Beau minds my daydreaming, but I'm certain he resents the memo-book. Sometimes I look up from the silver coil and he is looking at me with a look of dissatisfaction that seems to say "Yo, Shakespeare, ixnay with the ookbay."

Sometimes Beau has severe energy rushes, in which he suddenly starts dashing back and forth in frantic ellipses. He tears like a cheetah through the underbrush, tongue hanging out the side of his head. It is truly an uncontrollable mood he is the grip of, and if I could translate it into words it would be something like "Wheee!" Only in giant triple-italics, double-underlined, and red.

He signals the end of these rushes by biting me. Not a bloodletting bite, but more of a gentle crunch of my flesh in his powerful jaws, made while he is still flying from post to post.

Beau has destroyed about a half dozen pairs of gloves this way. And he does it to everyone, including, when he was younger, complete strangers, who must feel as if their life is coming to an end. Obedience school did nothing to diminish this grisly handshaking ritual of his. It's one of those things poodles do. I spoke to another poodle owner at Daniele's school, and he winced at my description of the bites.

"It's what they do," he said. "They bite. Out of love."

It would be so easy for Beauregard to guillotine my hand from my arm with those crocodile teeth, but he never has. God, it hurts sometimes, and I never feel very successful in communicating the pain these bites cause me. Beau just looks at me and grins. On the other hand (so to speak), he stops.

In America we have two best friends, our cars and our dogs. One of the classic mistakes is trying to get good friend to be friends with one another. And so it is with dogs and cars.

I know a man who owned a German shepherd who had problems being separated from him. At home this meant she would gnaw on furniture legs when he would leave -- bad, but not worth killing her for.

But, oh, the damage she did one day when he left her in his new BMW, while he bought a drill bit. He could not have been in the hardware store for more than ten minutes. When he emerged, he found her sitting at the driver's seat, with every bit of vinyl stripped from the dashboard, seat covers, steering wheel, and the car's doorwalls.

Dogs are at an ergonomic disadvantage in cars. For all the millions of hours designers have spent designing vehicles for the comfort and safety of the human body, nothing has been done for the canine body, which is really different from us.

So dogs must find their own way of sitting and standing when traveling in cars. In serious accidents, it is unusual for dogs to survive.

When Beau was little, he had a way of showing his misgivings about auto travel. This surprised me, as I thought all dogs loved cars. But when I set him on the front seat next to me and started up and pulled away from the curb, he began to lean noticeable into me. As seconds passed, his leaning became stronger. He eventually pried a space between me and my seat back, and hid himself behind my back while we drove. It was a vote of semi-confidence.

Dogs seem happiest in the backs of pick-up trucks. Pick-ups are a little like dogs -- open, informal, work-oriented. And dogs seem to understand the rules of the road. I have never seen a dog jumping from a moving pick-up, but it happens, and it is not good for the dog.

Inside the car, they try to approximate the feeling of being in a pick-up, poking their heads out the window and inhaling the kaleidoscope of aromas borne on each buffeting gust. I am told this practice is bad for dogs' eyes -- that dust particles slamming into their eyeballs hasten the onset of cataracts. But how do you tell that to a dog? They seem willing to run the risk.

Another danger dogs face in cars is overheating and exhaustion. The population finally seems apprised of the stupidity of leaving a dog in a parking lot on a sunny day with the windows rolled up. Or even rolled down, on a hot day in Tucson or Atlanta.

But even here dogs are resilient and resourceful. One day I was having lunch with my friend (and passionate dogperson) Maya, at a gyros shop in Minneapolis. We talked about dogs over sandwiches, and she told me had some great books she wanted to lend me. When we were done, I invited her out to my car -- a beat-up Chevy celebrity station wagon, which I bought from Bosnian refugees when they had become successful enough in the U.S.A. to buy a Chevy Suburban.

I led her out to the parking lot -- which was in a noteworthily bad section of town -- and looked in the front seat. No Beau. I stepped to the middle seat and peered in. No Beau. I dashed to the back seat and opened the gatedoor. The dog was not there.

I looked at Maya, and my face must have been a mask of sorrow, horror, and surprise: "Oh, Maya -- he's gone." I had lost my second dog.

Then I heard a struggling sound. Up in the front seat, folded away under the steering wheel, a figure began to unfold itself. It was Beauregard. He had hidden himself down in that dark space, perhaps to escape prying eyes. And how he was happy to see us, beating his tail merrily against the car seat.

When Beauregard was young, I would bring him home from our walks, and I would open the car door at the curb and indicate that it was time to get out of the car and walk into the house. Occasionally he would comply. More often, he would stare sadly up at me as if he were physically incapable of bounding down from the car seat and into the house.

Sometimes I would get impatient and would drag him by the collar to the house, with him resisting all the way. Other times I would yell at him, and he would blink, but like Bartleby the Scrivener, he would not make a move on his own behalf.

I am ashamed to say that sometimes I became so impatient that I would leave him there (never in hot weather), shut the door, and go into the house for a half hour or more. When I returned, he would still refuse to leave!

This went on for months. Then one day, I thought the obvious thought. Why not put the leash on him, and lead him the thirty feet to the door? I snapped the leash on, Beau sprang to the curb, and trotted in the house, tail waving like a flag.

All that time, all he wanted was the connection to me, to make the transition from fun (walking by the river) to tedium (napping alongside me while I work) more bearable.

A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.