Cherished by Barbara Abercrombie Read Free Book Online Page B

Maybe carrying isn’t the right word: They are fighting. Seamus, a cairn terrier with ears still too big for his head, has a crazed look, the whites of his eyes exposed like an Appaloosa’s; Spud, a muddy-brown blur of a toy-breed mutt, holds his end of the stick so fiercely next to the other dog’s clamped jaws that the force of it lifts Seamus’s puny body off the ground.
    The ground is mottled with turned leaves and the dim amber sunlight of a Minnesota October. I remember the dogs growling, pulling, shaking, tearing, fiercely devoted to the first in a long series of battles that would last the rest of their lives. They are each four months old.
    I took the picture when I was twenty-nine. My new husband, Michael, and I had found little brown Spud and his four all-black brothers in a clear plastic pen at the store where we bought food for our cats and turtles. We set him on the floor and watched him run back and forth between us, throwing his stubby little front legs out straight with every stride, like a cartoon puppy. We paid three hundred dollars for him and brought him home, believing our landlord wouldn’t notice a dog so tiny. When the landlord caught Michael sneaking Spud outside under his jacket, we found a loft apartment in downtown Saint Paul with high ceilings and a lobby that every day after work filled with yipping dogs and the singsong voices of the people who talked to them.
    Now that Spud had forced us to move where dogs were legal, I saw no reason to settle for just one. I set to work combing the newspaper listings for the dog I’d wanted since I was a child surrounded by mutts and poodles. A dog that would follow me anywhere and could be trained to do tricks. A cairn terrier, like Dorothy’s Toto.
    I found him in the classifieds. He had been born to a family on a farm, the progeny of ratters, and Spud and I went to meet them all in a parking lot on the outskirts of town. The breeder, three little boys, and a pile of puppies spilled out of the car, and before long, one of the puppies had pinned Spud on his back. Only one hung back, and I claimed him as mine.
    Seamus, as I named him on the way home, must have been sick or nervous that day, because within his first week at home, he took to standing over the water dish with his upper lip curled and an eerie rumble emitting from his puppy throat. Neither dog nor cat nor turtle dared come near. The first time I tried to move him away, he bit clear through the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger. One of our turtles died in his jaws; we hastily gave away our pet rabbits. The cats hid. Still in his puppyhood, Seamus held us captive in fear.
    â€œYou can’t keep that dog,” Michael would say to me. “He’s vicious. He’s going to hurt somebody.” But it wasn’t in me to give up a dog. Instead, I took him to obedience class, where I was told that my dog was too aggressive for a class setting. I tried another class, but Seamus lunged at an Airedale, and I left. Finally, I found a woman just over the border, in Wisconsin, who trained Rottweilers — Rottweilers! Big-headed dogs, powerful and skilled. I figured there was no kidding around with them. Her name was Marion, and she lived forty-five miles away. I diligently went to her beginner class once a week, which more than once required driving through a blizzard.
    Both Marion and her peaceful Rottweilers found my scrappy terrier delightful. “You need to have more fun with him,” she told me once, skittering her fingers around on the floor, watching him puppy-pounce among them. Obedience trainers back then had yet to come around to schooling dogs with clickers and treats, so Marion taught me to hold my dog at heel with a chain collar and praise him boisterously when he cooperated. Within weeks, Seamus had stopped growling and started to work. Within a month, he lived to work.
    At his novice class graduation, he earned the title Most Improved