My Life in Dog Years Read Free Page B

and made a straight line to the dead duck. He took it in his mouth gently, turned and swam back, climbed the bank and put the duck by my right foot, then moved off a couple of feet and sat, looking at me.
    I made sure the duck was dead, then picked it up and tied it to my belt with a string I carried for the purpose. The dog sat and watched me the whole time, waiting. It was fully light now and I moved to him, petted him—he let me but in a reserved way—and pulled his tag to the side so I could read it.
    My name is Ike.
    That’s all it said. No address, no owner’s name, just one short sentence.
    “Well, Ike”— at this his tau wagged—“I’d like to thank you for bringing me the duck…”
    And that was how it started, how I came to know Ike.
    Duck season soon consumed me and I spent every morning walking and hunting the river. On school days I would go out and come back just in time to get to classes and on the weekends I stayed out.
    And every morning Ike was there. I’d come across the bridge, start down the river, and he’d be there, waiting. After a few mornings he’d let me pet him—I think he did it for me more than him—and by the end of the first week I was looking forward to seeing him. By the middle of the second week I felt as if we’d been hunting with each other forever.
    And he knew hunting. Clearly somebody had trained him well. He moved quietly, sat in the blind with me without moving, watched the barrel of the gun to see which duck I was going to shoot at, and when I shot he would leap into the water. On those occasions when I missed—I think more often than not—he would watch the duck fly away, turn to me and give me a look of such uncompromisingpity and scorn that I would feel compelled to apologize and make excuses.
    “The wind moved the barrel,” or “A drop of water hit my eye when I shot.”
    Of course, he did not believe me but would turn back, sitting there waiting for the next shot so I could absolve myself.
    When the hunting was done he’d walk back with me to town, trotting alongside, until we arrived at the bridge. There he would stop and sit down and nothing I did would make him come farther. I tried waiting him out to see where he would go but when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to leave he merely lay down and went to sleep, or turned and started back into the woods, looking back to see if we were going hunting again.
    Once I left him, crossed the bridge and then hid in back of a building and watched. He stayed until I was out of sight and then turned and trotted north away from thebridge along the river. There were no houses in that direction, at least on the far side of the river, and I watched him until he disappeared into the woods. I was no wiser than I had been.
    The rest of his life was a mystery and would remain so for thirty years. But when we were together we became fast friends, at least on my part.
    I would cook an extra egg sandwich for Ike and when the flights weren’t coming we would “talk.” That is to say, I would talk, tell him all my troubles, and he would sit, his enormous head sometimes resting on my knee, his huge brown eyes looking up at me while I petted him and rattled on.
    On the weekends when I stayed out, I would construct a lean-to and make a fire, and he would curl up on the edge of my blanket. Many mornings I would awaken to find him under the frost-covered blanketwith me, sound asleep, my arm thrown over him, his breath rumbling against my side.
    It seemed like there’d always been an Ike in my life and then one morning he wasn’t there and I never saw him again. I tried to find him. I would wait for him in the mornings by the bridge, but he never showed again. I thought he might have gotten hit by a car, or his owners moved away. I mourned him and missed him. But I did not learn what happened to him for thirty years.
    I grew and went into the crazy parts of life, army and those other mistakes a young man could make. I grew