All Creatures Dead and Small

Last week I went on a pilgrimage to Herbert—I hadn’t been back for some years. I phoned Allie, who is still in Herbert (as is Joe) and went for a visit. We picked up our conversation as if we’d seen each other the week before. We also went for a walk around the not-so-mean streets of Herbert that figure so largely in my memories.
The day was sunny but windy—welcome to Saskatchewan, I thought. Most days are windy—the air assumes real velocity when there is nothing to impede it for a thousand kilometers. As the clouds piled up on the horizon (always visible, no matter where you are in Herbert, or Saskatchewan for that matter), we wandered past houses I remember so well and in which I spent so much time.

Our old backyard is transformed—the garden vegetable beds are no more, nor is the little greenhouse where we babied tender plants. The apple trees we planted are also gone, although the firs and the birches are huge. I am gobsmacked by their size until I realize it’s been almost thirty years since we planted them. Then I am gobsmacked by the fact that almost thirty years have gone by. Time’s passage is now too heavy for comfort.

I see the streets and the houses through a scrim of present superimposed on the past. Wallace Stegner, in his excellent memoir Wolf Willow, talks about returning to the town of East End, seeing his childhood places with adult eyes and the vertigo that this double-visioning produces. It’s not until he smells the evocative scent of wolf willow that his double-vision clears—the spicy aroma brings him singularity.

I have no such olfactory epiphany on the streets of Herbert. I just see everyone’s houses and register the changes—some good, some bad. The Legion Hut (the Herbert branch of the Canadian Legion was never rich enough for an actual hall—the best they could manage was a one-room hut with a kitchen of sorts stuck on the back) is now a private residence). For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to take on the project of making the Hut livable. However, we had many events in the Hut—Kaiser tournaments, games nights, various parties. I remember one memorable Halloween party where Duane was a sartorially splendid fellow with little beeswax knobs stuck to his head for horns. He never alluded to the identity of his character, but would whistle The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” when asked who the heck he was supposed to be. Rollie’s brother Steve sported a latex skull-cap with a strange occipital lump that made him look like a mutant nuclear holocaust survivor. Good times, as my boys would say.

As we returned to Allie and Joe’s place, we were greeted by their two dogs. One is new, but I remember Bell from previous visits. Bell, a male dashchund/terrier cross, is a fat little sausage of a dog—he is old now, and sports various fatty lumps on his body, although it’s difficult to tell which lumps are growths and which are just Bell. Allie told me they lost Smoky the cat the year before. I cannot believe that Smoky lasted as long as he did—I remember them getting Smoky from Ellen and Hal, who moved into Herbert with their two boys Darryl and Robert a few years after we arrived. Smoky, we figured, was brain-damaged at birth because Ellen’s chihuahua used to haul him around by the head. Smoky was prone to visions—he’d stare at a bare spot on the wall for hours and then attack it in a sudden frenzy. A steel grey feline juggernaut, he was constantly hurling himself at walls.

Which brings me to the subject at hand—pets. As I walked out on the streets of Laredo—I mean Herbert—that day, I couldn’t help but think of all the critters who used to live in the houses we frequented, and many of whom are buried in the backyards.

Before Smoky, Allie and Joe had a cat called Tiger. Tiger broke a leg and was treated at the University of Saskatchewan’s Veterinary College, where he became a bit of an experimental cause celebre. Tiger’s leg had more metal pins in it than Robocop, and the vet bill he piled up was almost as impressive as his bionic limb. Tiger also had strange habits (Allie and Joe attract eccentric cats). One was his propensity to crap on our roof. We lived in fear that he’d be hit by lightning and we’d have to haul his crisped and costly carcass across the street to Allie. He also liked to sleep behind our car’s rear wheel. Jack usually checked before leaving for work in the morning, but was worried he’d forget one day. Then we’d have to haul Tiger’s squashed carcass across the street.

Rollie and Dee also had a cat—Ernesto the Besto. Nesto was the laziest cat in the world. He would park himself on the fence and gaze up at whatever birds swayed on branches above. He’d wave his front paws halfheartedly in their general direction, likely hoping that one would fall. We’d watch his desultory hunting attempts from the kitchen window. Dee swore the birds were laughing at him.

We, too, had a cat—Gozer, named for the Gozer the Gozerian, the Destructor, and Lord of the Sebouillian from Ghostbusters. Gozer had a small frame and a fat body. She was almost completely spheroid, and rolled when she moved. She was terrified of magpies, who quickly picked up on this and would chase her down the street, hopping and cawing as she scrambled just barely ahead of them. They also took great delight in dive-bombing her as she cowered on our backyard picnic table, too fat to dive for cover.

Natalie inherited her granny’s dog Lucky. Lucky was elderly when they got him. He had snaggle teeth that gave him a ferocious grin—Joe was terrified of Lucky and refused to come into the yard unless someone was home to protect him. Lucky, however, was fairly harmless. He just looked frightening. He also had spectacularly bad breath—we used to kid that this was the scariest thing about him. Lucky spent most of his time in the backyard dog-house Duane built for him. When you would enter the yard, he’d come out, snorting and wiggling, baring fangs that went every which way. It was a bit disconcerting for anyone who didn’t know that Lucky was not dangerous, and for Joe, who didn’t believe it.

We ourselves went through a couple of dogs. If Joe and Allie attracted weird cats, we had bad luck with dogs. Our first attempt was an Airedale-Collie cross called Rufus. Rufus turned out to be the world’s dumbest dog. He refused to obey the simplest command. He also was addicted to garbage. Because Herbert had burning barrels, we would pile our bagged garbage in the back porch until burning day to keep the critters from getting into it. One day as we returned from the city, we opened the back door to a scene from some third-world urban dump. Rufus had eaten his way through a solid wood door to get at the garbage. After he ate the door and whatever garbage he didn’t strew around, he went to work on my leather shoes. He also used to cruise the town’s burning barrels for poopy pampers, which he’d bring home to munch on at his leisure. After one too many garbage episodes, we decided to give him away. We put an ad in the newspaper and a family responded, came out and fell in love with him—he was a nice-looking dog, and we didn’t want to prejudice any potential owners by divulging his unfortunate habits. They took him away with them, and Jack and I heaved a sigh of relief.

The next day, I got a phone call from the man who’d taken Rufus. It seems he’d run away the evening before, and they were concerned that he might head back to Herbert. After assuring the man that we’d watch for him, I hung up. Swell, I fumed, the stupidest dog in the world is now going to pull an Incredible Journey on us. Thankfully, the man phoned a few hours later—they’d found Rufous several streets away, playing in a park with a bunch of kids. We breathed again.

Our next dog was a Keeshond called Rocky. Rocky was very protective of the boys. In fact, he was a bit too protective and went after a neighbour kid one day. Trying to be good citizens, we felt that he would have to go back to the breeder. We found out later that the kid was a bully who picked on our boys and jabbed sticks at Rocky when he was tied up. On the day that Jack and Primero came back from returning Rocky, Gus the guinea pig died in his cage. Segundo solemnly announced to Primero that Gus was all stiff, and proceeded to poke him with a pencil. Primero, already emotionally raw at losing his dog, burst into tears and decked Segundo. After both boys recovered, they buried Gus in the back yard, under the lilac bush. For the next couple of days, Segundo would wonder about Gus’s physical state. Finally, on the third day, they dug him up. Disappointed that not much had changed, they reburied him. They would then scoop him up every few days to check on his rate of decay. Gus must’ve finally rotted to the desired consistency, because they eventually quit disinterring him.

Terry and Dave had a cockapoo called Buffy. Buffy was a gender-bender. She would hump your leg and lift her leg to pee. Other than that, she was fairly normal. Terry also had various cats and rabbits over the years. She adopted our angora rabbit Bugs, when it became apparent that Bugs and Gozer were never going to get along. Various members of The Little Moron Club got rich looking after Terry’s critters when she and Dave and the kids went on holidays.

Dee and Rollie had a Chow cross called Siku, who went with them when they moved to Fort McMurray, where their Italian neighbor fed leftover pasta to Siku, who ballooned to an enormous size. Rollie and Dee, mystified by the dog’s weight gain (they’d reduced her food, bought diet kibble, stepped up her walks—all to no avail) staked out the yard one evening and discovered the source of Siku’s clandestine carbo-loading. The neighbor, not realizing that pasta was bad for dogs, agreed to stop. However, Rollie suspected that every once in a while, she’d sneak some lasagna or rigatoni to Siku, who was known to vomit in front of guests—she’d zero in on the person least comfortable with dogs and hurl at their feet. Rollie blamed the pasta.

Then there were the numerous fish, birds, rodents and amphibians that lived fleetingly,were buried ceremoniously, mourned briefly, and quickly forgotten. Backyards were bone-yards. Cats, hamsters, goldfish (those that weren’t flushed), budgies, mice—all nourished backyard gardens and childhood curiosity about death.

And then there was the road-kill. In the summertime, the paved streets were perfect for preserving flattened frogs and toads who hadn’t made it across the road. The Little Moron Club was forever poking at these with sticks, flinging them at each other, trying to dismember them even further. It was a gigantic outdoor biology lab.

Boys have a fascination for dead things—large, small, in various states of decay (in fact, the gooshier the better)—it is all grist for their little morbid mills, so to speak. And who knows where such interest will lead? Segundo, for example, always wanted to dissect the fish we caught on camping trips. Jack would gut them and Segundo would check to see what their last meal was. He would then gouge out their eyes and examine the little round buttons of tissue. Segundo is now an ophthalmologist. Go figure.

Not having ever been a boy, I confess to some discomfort with the boys’ childhood absorption in critter death and decay. Since then, I have relaxed my view somewhat. After all, they weren’t offing living creatures. They cherished those—they looked after them, pet them, fed them, walked them, played with them. No, it was the dead critters that enthralled them. I tell myself that perhaps it was the great mystery of death, writ small. After all, the death of a hamster, while a tragedy, is not in the same league as a human death. And in the lives of fortunate families, the death of a pet will likely come before the death of a family member. With a pet, a child can get up close and personal with the enigma that is physical death. There is grief for the guinea pig, but there is also curiosity about how the body disappears into the earth.

Having experience with physical death clears a space for dealing with the big questions—the ones about where we go when we die. Do we get buried in the backyard with the budgies? Do dogs go to heaven? Will Bowser be there to greet us? Do cats have souls? Do we?

As humans, it appears we are hard-wired to believe in an afterlife. Traces of flower pollen and red ocher buried with ancient remains seem to point to this. We look up at the night sky and imagine that is where we go when we die. After all, there is a lot going on in up there--stars, planets, a moon that sometimes eclipses, northern lights....For the Inuit, the aurora borealis are the spirits of the ancestors dancing in the sky. To the Cree, they are the “Dance of the Spirits”. In the Middle Ages, Europeans thought they were a sign from God. These are all far more evocative than ionized nitrogen atoms excited by solar wind particles, and who is to say less true?

The great mystery is, of course, death. It has kept poets and playwrights and artists and thinkers and prophets busy for millennia. Hamlet’s soliloquy is a rap on death and what comes after (short version--no one knows!). We seem to instinctively sense that something is out there in the great beyond, something to do with the spirit, or the soul, or the incorporeal reality that makes us human. And pets do not seem to have this special something, no matter how beloved they were. Which is why boys dig up pets. They know this difference very early on.

The world’s religions all promise a life after death. The exact nature of this life is, to all intents and purposes, unknown. It seems to be connected to how we live our lives in this world. The artists of the Renaissance made great creations out of the places we go when we die, and scared the crap out of us at the same time.

And we've remained scared of death. We don't like to think about it or deal with it. Our technological society has managed to distance physical death—outsourced it, so to speak. Family members no longer prepare bodies for burial. They are handed over to professionals, and we simply show up at the event. We then go home and grieve. Maybe we've lost a connection by handing over our loved ones to strangers.

What has this to do with pets and Herbert, you ask? I think of all the pet semataries in the backyards, of all the creatures who were beloved by the various kids who lived in those yards, who buried their animals in the warm earth, cried, said their words, and went away, and sometimes were pulled back by curiosity about what changes in Fluffy the earth wrought. Being kids, operating for the most part under adult radar, they had no compunction about having a peek. And, with no adult around to freak out, they calmly went about examining the evidence.

We are told that pets are a good way to teach kids various things--compassion, empathy, responsibility, among other things. And because pets generally do not last long(unless you're a parrot or an elephant), they teach kids about death.

If death is a part of life, as the poets and prophets tell us, then perhaps childish attempts to explore pet death is a good thing. Maybe it's not morbid to dig up the family gerbil, but healthy (as long as they wash their hands before dinner, that is). So if your little boy wants to dig up the gerbil, or hamster, or Siamese fighting fish after a few days, don’t worry. He’s not an incipient serial killer. He’s learning about life. Or maybe he just likes gross stuff. In any case, make sure he re-buries Fluffy and washes his hands. Tell him to use soap this time.