Like any pet owner (or parent), my beloved and I know enough to take note when our rambunctious young charge goes suddenly quiet. No good thing comes from a dog’s sudden silence. When the snorts, grunts, yelps, bumps, bangs, and soft tearing sounds abruptly grow dim, it’s time to investigate. And best to come running.
Once or twice now, ‘ve caught our new puppy, Archie, on mute, and hurried to behold the latest proud mischief / deadly distraction / stunning devastation. Today, my quick-check intruded upon what appeared for all the world to be his morning devotions.
This was not the moment’s diversion of a neighbor child’s cry from beyond the great backyard fence. It was not the panorama of 47 pigeons deciding, in unison, that our newly seeded lawn would suffice for an aviary cafeteria. It was not what must be, to a dog’s ears, the cataclysmic end-of-life-as-we-know-it roar of the Luke Air Force Base jets buzzing the neighborhood.
If anything, it was a morning breeze gently strumming the leaves of the nearby trees. Sunlight gleaming on just-sprinkled grass. Bougainvillea blossoms swirling across the patio.
And there Archie sat watching … watching. Transfixed. Absolutely still, while a long couple of minutes ticked quietly by.
What does he see, in these moments? Only what I see? Or does he, like Baalam’s donkey, behold things that elude a man’s jaded vision? At some point, a creature whose entire world revolves around dirty socks, crunchy plant pods, and a truly homely stuffed hippo suddenly finds all these things irrelevant compared to an odd, unidentified enchantment just beyond the sliding screen.
Whatever Archie feasts his big dark eyes upon, he’s not the only one chowing down. Two days before I snapped his picture, gazing out on the Great Mystery, a friend sent along a photo she’d just taken of her own dog, equally mesmerized. Something beyond the high terrace had captured Brinkley’s attention, and his fine canine mind was lost in rapt absorption.
And now, on reflection, I recall how enthralled past pups of ours could be by unseen sights singing on a rising wind, or blurred in the flickering leaves.
Some will hasten to assure us that a dog is just a dog, and he’s no more “seeing something” than a diligent ant is doing Euclidean geometry. Others take gentle admonition from a creature who’s not too busy with mutt matters and cur-rent events to stop and smell the roses … or maybe the laundry room.
But I am remembering stories of other dogs who, in the last hours of their master’s life, were found gazing relentlessly at a corner of the ceiling, or at a place off to one side of the deathbed, tails quietly wagging or thumping the carpet.
And I look at Brinkley, taking in the morning light. And on little Archie, gazing upon the splendor and the glory beaming there before him.
“It’s just the way the light hits the camera,” you say. He’s just listening to a bird. Studying a whiff of the dog next door. Counting the years ‘til suppertime.
Maybe so.
But I think of Baalam’s donkey. And wonder.
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