Dog and I Read Free Page A

and then took the little dog in her hands and checked it over as if it were something she’d picked up at the A&P produce counter. She checked the legs, the ears, the stomach, the teeth.
    â€œYou know it’s a girl?” she said.
    â€œYessss,” I said, as if she had just asked the most obvious question possible.
    â€œWe’ll have to have her spayed,” she said.
    I nodded. I wasn’t quite sure about all this. I knew it meant no puppies, and that was fine by me. But I hadn’t anticipated the whole extent of the problem.
    â€œIt costs a lot of money,” she said. “And we’ll have to take her to Bracebridge to have it done.”
    There was no veterinarian in our little town. Instantly, I was thrown into a pickle. We’d need transportation to get her to Bracebridge. We’d have to leave her and would need transportation to get her back. And we’d need money to pay for the operation.
    Males, on the other hand, need no such thing. Once the three dollars had been paid, that would have been it for a male.
    My mother smiled. “But she sure is cute.”
    NAMING a dog is almost as hard as taking the pick of the litter. For days I’d been searching for the perfect name for this little blond puppy, and while dozens of names had been written down on a sheet of paper, only to be scratched out after a few practice throws, I’d more or less settled on one that seemed, to me, to fit.
    â€œShe’s ‘Bridget,’” I told my grandmother once I’d carried the little thing down the street and up the stairs to her small apartment closer to Main Street.
    â€œWhat?” she snapped.
    This reaction completely caught me by surprise. My grandmother was a woman normally of great good humour, but she had the Irish temperament and could be a most formidable force. Not much over five feet tall, she had for decades ruled, with absolute power, a home where her husband had long been the towering chief ranger of the local provincial park. But even in full uniform he was at all times acutely aware of who was the true commanding officer.
    Being afraid of her fury was hardly restricted to the family. My two brothers and sister once watched in awe as a huge black bear came sniffing down the trail behind their log home on Lake of Two Rivers. She had been baking in the kitchen, and when she saw the bear coming closer she grabbed the broom and raced out so fast that the screen door hadn’t even slammed when the bear suddenly halted dead in its tracks at the sight of this little pepper pot coming straight at him in full attack mode, broom swinging as she shouted, “GET OUTTA HERE, YOU!”
    The bear spun and bolted back up the trail so fast that, to this day (a half century on), my siblings and I are convinced his back legs outran his front, virtually turning him inside out as he crashed into the spruce cover and safety.
    â€œBridget,” I repeated.
    â€œThat’s no name for a dog,” she said. No, she ordered .
    I had thought it perfect. I’m not sure today where it came from, but it may have had to do with the curling blond hair on the dog and Brigitte Bardot, whose very name then was somehow held to be equivalent to a dirty joke. So now I thought, naturally, that this is what must be bothering her. You couldn’t call your dog Brigitte Bardot in good company.
    â€œYou’ll have to find something else,” she commanded.
    Eventually we did—compromising on “Cindy,” though I have no recollection at all where that came from.
    For nearly forty years I never thought again of “Bridget”—not until a distant cousin began digging through the roots of the family tree. He had been searching through church records of the Upper Ottawa Valley. Both sides of the family—Scots and Irish on my father’s, pure Irish on my mother’s—had come to the Valley in the days before and during the various potato famines