Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Rufus, Hound of the High North

I first saw Irish Wolfhounds at a society wedding on a beautiful estate. There were several of them weaving graciously on the lush grass amongst the guests. Do you know the breed? They are the tallest of dogs, males sometimes 38" at the shoulder, and they have the great chests and long legs of all sight hounds with angular, elongated heads and small ears. Their hair is short and shaggy, either grey or blonde. The breed almost died out after it killed all the wolves in Ireland and was only revived in the mid 19th century.

The "wedding" Wolfhounds weren't particularly responsive the way, say a Golden Retriever would be. But they weren't unfriendly, either. They simply stood patiently while you patted them, as if your hand on their fur was something nobly to be endured and when you stopped, they simply walked on.

I fell in love.

Fast forward six months to the Yukon, a dark, bitter December with temperatures plummeting to minus 55 F. I had just joined my husband there the previous July with a nineteenth month old daughter. That September, I had another daughter. Those first winter weeks were cruel, shocking. I was holed up in our house with an infant and a toddler, knowing no-one, questioning our decision to be there.

Then, in one of the two newspapers, (I don't remember if it was The Whitehorse Star or The Yukon News) I saw a picture of a couple with their two Irish Wolfhounds and twelve newborn puppies. Now that was news. Irish Wolfhounds in the Yukon!

The couple, newly-arrived from France, (all sorts of people go to the Yukon), lived well outside of town in a ramshackle cabin with only a wood stove. The temperatures hadn't risen and the interior was not warm when we visited. The Noirot were well-padded. I kept my coat on, feeling the chill.

The mother with her new puppies lay on one side of the stove. On the other, the father was stretched out. He got up to greet us, an enormous, shaggy grey beast called Abraham. The mother, a blonde, was Esther. The puppies were about a month old, still wobbly, still small enough to hold in your hands, giving no sense of their upcoming size. When I knelt down, some climbed on me. They were like little grounhogs. I kept picking them up, one by one, examining their faces, trying to detect some personality. I was smitten but it was too soon to choose.

At eight weeks, we picked a sturdy, dark grey male called Chaim. (All the puppies had Biblical, Hebrew names.) We renamed him Rufus. I don't remember particularly why we chose him.
He ended up being a big scruffy beast of a dog, 36" at the shoulder, loving but incorrigeably recalcitrant.

My husband tried to train him, (There were no obedience classes in the Yukon in 1971), but Rufus was defiant, headstrong and strong. He refused to sit. When my husband pulled up on the choke collar and pressed down on the dog's rump, the dog raised himself on his hind legs, eyeball to eyeball with my husband, who is 6' 5".

There was never a hope to get him to heel. People didn't put their dogs on leads in the Yukon, in any case. Though there was a dog catcher, except for the dog teams chained in the bush, dogs ran free. We built a spacious run in the trees just back of our house with a cozy doghouse filled with straw for nights. And when we went to bed we heard Rufus' howls, "wooo-oooh-oooh-ooh" echoing through the wild. He wanted to be with us but he couldn't sleep indoors because after awhile, he got too hot and paced and panted and stratched to go back outside. Unfortunately, during one particularly harsh spell, Rufus' testicles froze. We felt awful but at least it neutered him. Since there was no vet, it wouldn't have happened otherwise.

He ended up being my husband's dog. Though I was very attached to him, I was preoccupied with my babies and simply finding a way to survive North of the 60th parallel.

Among the Huskies and Malamutes and German Shepherds that were the most common dogs up there, Rufus was a bit of a standout. And for some reason those breeds had it in for him. He was not the least aggressive but if one of them picked a fight, which they often did, he retaliated with all the force of his size. Those were terrifying battles: big powerful dogs at each other's throats, raging, snarling. I don't know how we broke them up, but we did and no-one ever got injured. The Northern dogs were protected by thick coats. Rufus was just lucky. Once, after one of the worst fights with a German Shepherd, he lay low for several days, obviously sore. But there was never a wound.

In fact, his worst wound happened when my husband chopped off the end of his tail when he shut the door of the Datsun station wagon on it. The tail bled profusely: it was a paintbrush dripping with blood and whenever Rufus wagged his tail, we had great smears and spatters of blood everywhere. People were ordered never to say his name because it made him go thwap-thwap, re-opening the cut. We wrapped it in gauze and torn diapers and taped it tightly but it oozed for weeks.

Rufus was not a good ski dog. The cross-country skiing in the Yukon was spectacular; the snow dry and firm. We skied right out our back door in sunlight skittering through dense woods, up into endless rolling hills, out onto vast lakes rimmed with majestic mountains. We skied wherever we wanted, however far we wanted to go. All we faced was more.

Everyone took their dogs. Some dogs were trained to run alongside so as not to ruin the tracks, but Rufus took the lead right on the tracks. "Move, Rufus! Move!" shouted the person gaining on him, especially on a downhill. There were tumbles when he didn't. Occasionally he'd stop dead and poop right there and the skiers would have to quickly side track to avoid "gooing-up" their skis.

Rufus was not stately or magnificent. But he was a much beloved animal: affectionate, sociable, gentle, trustworthy. Actually, he was an unkempt, appealing delinquent who was nothing but trouble. It was our fault for not training him, for not finding a way to control him. We were not good "dog-citizens". The neighbours hated him for walking over their gardens, their newly-seeded lawns. He lived the life of a free spirit, assured of his next meal, roaming at will in a barely-tamed environment. His worst fault, in fact, his fatal flaw, was car chasing. Unwittingly, we'd encouraged that, as well. We used to run him along the empty back roads beside our car. He loved it.

He chased skidoos, too. When they roared past the back of our house, he'd tear after them, terrifying the drivers with whom he was head to head. He must have seemed like some fierce spectre rising out of the clouds of snow.

But cars passing our house were the most challenging. Even moreso were the big pick-up trucks with dogs in the back. Too often we heard shouts, the screech of brakes. We started keeping him in his run most of the day. Usually my husband would let him out for a couple of hours when he got home from work.

One April evening, he had just done that when we received a phone call from our next-door neighbour. He thought he had just seen Rufus hit by a truck but he'd run behind the house. We looked out and saw his stilled body lying in the snow. He had a small round hole between his eyes and we thought perhaps he'd been shot by an angry driver, the kind with a gun rack in his back window. We called the police. They probed the wound and found it to be shallow.

Our neighbour, who was a doctor, said it was likely Rufus had had an instant cerebral hemorrhage.

"Oh dear Rufus," I said, leaning into his still warm fur. He was even more massive in death, his normally pliant body ungiving to my touch. "You were a bad, bad dog but you didn't deserve this."

There was no way to bury him. The ground was still covered in snow. With a friend, my husband wrapped his deathly heavy body in a tarpaulin and drove it to the town dump. Fires burned there all year round.

It was a terrible, insulting end for such a carefree, colourful dog.

1 comment:

  1. I remember being fascinated and horrified by the idea of him being taken to the dump wrapped in a tarp. It is an image that has haunted me for decades. Thanks for telling his story.

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