For Dog’s Sake
An essay by J. Aaron Courts
My head felt cloudy today, so I decided to take our dog on a walk.
His name is Bear Wilbur Courts II—you can call him Bear—we do. The sun was out, but it was still in the mid-70’s, so the weather was perfect for a stroll. I haven’t mowed the strips of grass on either side of our driveway since before the last bouts of much welcome rain, so wildflowers still have blooms, and Bear likes to watch the little honeybees buzzing around and filling their pollen baskets too. It was going to be a slow walk, with many stops, and ample time to clear my head.
It worked.
For the first ten minutes or so.
But that’s when a moral crisis presented itself. I should say, that’s when the first moral crises presented itself, and I’m sure my neighbors heard me complaining and asking Bear what he was thinking.
The truth is, he wasn’t thinking, but that didn’t help me navigate the crisis—either of them—or solve my dilemma. We’ll get to them all soon enough but first let me tell you a little about Bear.
He’s a normal dog. A rescue animal, half Dogue de Bordeaux and half Rottweiler, with all their best traits combined into a one hundred- and twenty-five-pound bag of reddish-brown fur. His Rottie snout and wide, jowl-sagging mouth plaster a congenial look across his face. He’s loyal, protective of the girls, and hates delivery men, so rarely are we surprised by a knock. He loves treats and sleeping underfoot and snapping at water from the hose. He enjoys watermelon and babysitting chickens. And he’s a good-looking dog. There are more pros, but no one likes to hear from a friend how perfect they think their baby is, and I believe it’s the same with dogs.
I mean, you get it… We like him, or he’d already be a Bear-skin rug. Same goes for our kids, of course. The we-like-them-part that is. We’ve invested too much into them for rugs. And there’s the fact that we love them too. That all but guarantees their hides stay untanned.
Bear’s got his problems though. He spooks in his sleep and barks out of nowhere. He has destroyed my favorite copy of my favorite novel—Gates of Fire. The copy belonged to my mentor in the Corps before he gifted it to me after I reenlisted the first time, and I’ve carried all over the world since.
He’s eaten a 19th century German text that I saved from a landfill, pointlessly, as it were. The first accident he had in the house when we were training him was to go to the third floor, find the master bedroom and nudge open the door, then jump onto the bed and drop a pile in the center of my wife’s favorite comforter. He gets terribly depressed when one of us leaves (which I don’t guess is a con, unless you’re the one who stays at home). And what we call his button—an imaginary on-switch—is on his butt, so he backs it into you to say hello or goodbye or complain and sits his butt—his button—on your feet to be close. It’s his love language, so I guess it’s not really a con either.
All in all, he’s great, and a worthy successor to his namesake, Bear Ogletree Courts.
Ours is a neighborhood in a stretch of Texas approaching the beautiful Hill Country, so it’s basically one large hill itself. It’s covered in purple Mountain Laurels, and their sweet scent fills every crook and jagged limestone cranny when they’re in bloom. And our home is about halfway up the big hill that is our canyon ranch community, so no matter which way you walk, you’re going to need to go uphill sooner or later. I decided to start with the hill but didn’t expect, when Bear and I set out, that we’d be hilling it both ways.
It also happens to be trash day, so all of the cans were still out, and Bear wanted to stop and sniff around them. I don’t know if it was the walking, or the unique household smells from this neighbor’s can or that, or maybe it was all of the coon and coyote scat. I guess it could have been the pellets from the rabbits and deer that live amongst our brush and scrub oak blanketed community. Whatever the case, as we approached the last neighbor’s house on our street before turning left to head up to the General’s House that serves as my usual turnaround (there’s a retired fly boy whose house looks like a castle at the top of the hill, so we call it the General’s House), I realized Bear wasn’t beside me.
I keep a leash in hand on our meanders in case we come across someone else walking their dog, but otherwise Bear is off leash.
“For dog’s sake, Bear. What the hell are you thinkin?”
I assumed he was sniffing the can we had just passed, but when I turned around, he was squatting. His tail was curved up and rigid. His front paws were positioned next to his rear paws. His large thigh muscles were flexed, and his head was turned toward me so that the sun was in his face. His eyes were squinted, and his cheeks were drawn back slyly. The duce dropping dude was smiling at me.
“For dog’s sake, Bear. What the hell are you thinkin?”
Bear just kept on smiling until his business was done. He gave it a quick sniff and then began to walk up the hill as if nothing had happened. No response.
“On no. Get your ass back here,” I said.
He stopped and turned his head over his shoulder to make sure he’d heard me right.
“Yeah. You gotta clean this shit up.”
He walked back slowly and sniffed his pile again, then sat beside it.
I could read his mind as clear as the sunshine shown down upon us.
Well, I don’t have hands, he was saying. And you brought those little baggy things. That’s what they’re for, right? That’s why you carry them. Because you have hands.
“You sonofabitch,” I said. I don’t mind calling him that for obvious reasons. Not least of which is because, well, after all, it’s true. He is.
I shook my head and unzipped the small yellow pouch that clips to his leash and holds a roll of black plastic poop bags. I tore one free and turned it inside out. His pile was warm and firm, thankfully, so I was able to clean everything up in two grabs.
Good job, he said. Real good job. Then he stood and turned to walk up the hill again, and that’s when the moral crisis came into play.
To dump Bear’s dump, or not to dump, that is the question.
I was holding bagged crap, two feet from a trash can, half-a-hill away from my house and our own.
There are a few types of people in this world I just really don’t like. Two of those types are pet owners that walk their dogs, but not just any dogwalker. Walking one’s dog is great. No, I’m thinking of the ones—and worse of the two—who leave dog crap where it drops, regardless of whether it is on someone else’s property or not. I’m convinced they’re the same people who leave dirty diapers in parking lots. The other type is someone who cleans up the mess but has so little respect for other people’s property that they think it’s acceptable to use it without permission.
Now listen, I know we’re talking about trash cans, but they’re still property and leased property at that. It’s a dadgum paid utility service, and they’re not the ones paying.
But I was already hallway up the first leg of the hill, and there was an empty trash can right there. The little bag probably wouldn’t even be noticed in the bottom of the dark can. I doubt my neighbor would have minded. I won’t lie and say I didn’t have the thought exercise or play the scenario out. I’m a flawed man, I know.
Bear said, Just throw it in, stupid, so we can get back to the walk.
I swear I heard him sigh when I started back down the hill to toss his bag of crap into our can. And you’d think that’s where the trouble ended. Where the crisis was averted and the dilemma resolved.
You’d be wrong.
At the beginning of this recounting, I said there were two crises I had to face on my walk uphill both ways. You might be able to guess what the second one was.
Here, look at a few photos of Bear while you think about it. Got your guess?
Okay, I tell you.
If you guessed that Bear saw a delivery man at the General’s House as we approached the very top of our hill; and since he was off leash, that Bear ran at the man in matching brown shirt and shorts and viciously attacked him; and I, being tired and slow to reach them because I’d already walked uphill both ways, couldn’t stop Bear fast enough; resulting in the man losing two fingers, for which I will need to follow Bear around with another baggy for the next day or so if I want to return the missing digits that he so desperately wants returned…
You’d be wrong. Again.
We did make it just a few places down from the General’s House though it was before the second crisis was upon me. So similar to the first, was the second, it was almost funny. Almost.
Bear took another dump, not two feet from a neighbor’s trash can. A-freakin-nother dump.
More paws drawn together, more tail curved up, a little crooked this time given the effort required to knock out a second movement so soon after the last, and more smiling.
“Bear, what the shit man?”
What?
“What, what?” I said. “You’re taking another dump you idiot.”
I need to go. He was matter of fact.
“You want to go,” I said.
No, I have to go, he corrected. You got more little baggy things, right?
“Yeah, but that ain’t the point. I gotta carry it all the way back.” I leaned into the street and looked at a row of brown trash cans curved along the winding hill. “Past two dozen trash cans, or more, dammit. Just to get to our own.”
There’s a perfectly good one right here. I sniffed it. It’s empty. Just toss it in. And with that he began toward the General’s House again.
“Oh, no sir. Walk’s over. We’re done.”
Buuut—
“Your butt’s what ended it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The walk back down was brisker than our walk up. No more stops to sniff the wildflowers or watch the bees. No more stops to sniff the scat or pellets or trash cans. No more off leash.
I was thirsty. Bear had drunk all the water at a stop before the second crisis, and the temperature had definitely crept above 80 degrees. The warm bag wafted me with each swing of my arm, so I tied it to the leash.
Bear looked at me.
Seriously?
“Yeah. Seriously.”
I loved this story so much I listened to it Twice!! 💕🤗
Wow, I was scared at the end, I missed the start of the line "If you guessed that Bear saw a delivery man..." and read the rest as truth! Compelling!