September 7
September 7
When it comes to naming animals, my family is unoriginal. The red horse we called Red, the paint horse we called Paint. In the pasture now we’ve got Smoke, the dapple gray; Black, the black and Midnight, the other black. The most inventive names that walk around the pasture cropping grass are William and Dawson, but those two horses came with their names. Dad and I would never impose appellations like those. When Dad added another unnamed red horse to the pasture, we dubbed him Green.
At sunset today I loaded Duke, the black lab – Duke the Second, to give his full name – into the truck and drove down into the pasture to visit the herd. I let Duke ride in the cab as his predecessor liked to do. Duke the First would sit on the wide console of a Dodge pickup and watch through the windshield, tongue hanging happily out of his mouth like a stoned Driver’s Ed teacher. For hours he would sit like that. He did not look for anything in particular – blondes, brunettes, redheads, nothing fazed him – but he always seemed content, and he liked to have his head scratched. Duke the Second hasn’t developed the same love of travel. I don’t think he likes trucks – he gets embarrassed.
Duke the Second has the same jet black coat that Duke the First had. He has the same finely shaped head and snout, the same robust body, the same graceful tail. He can bark just as loudly and he jumps into lakes with the same aplomb. He is just as amiable, and every bit as smart – Duke the Second’s English vocabulary includes the commands here, kennel, back, sit, heel, fetch and stay. But Duke the Second only has about half the legs. Whereas Duke the First cast an impressive, well proportioned silhouette – the David of the canine world – Duke the Second looks like Michelangelo started at the head and gave up when he got to the knees. He is the butt of innumerable jokes. At the Stewart County dove shoot yesterday, he followed Dad into the living room where we were serving barbecue. “Hey Jim, is that your lab?” someone said. “Looks like he’s got a little basset hound in him.” Duke plays dumb, but he hears the jokes. Behind his back, we call him Lowrider. But he will never ride in a lowrider because all of our trucks are four wheel drives, which is unfortunate for Duke. His altitudinal challenges are never more apparent than when he tries to jump into a high-riding pickup truck.
Duke sat in the passenger’s seat and hung his head for the first few hundred yards, and his nose bobbed at the bumps we passed over. But dogs are sensible creatures and will not remain despondent for long. They are superior to cats in that way. Cat lovers, most of whom are Yankees, will tell you cats are more sentient than dogs, but that’s untrue. Cats are just more self-absorbed and finicky. Duke is too wise for such Yankeeism. By the time we reached the horses, he had decided he didn’t give a damn if he was related to a basset hound. He leaped out of the truck and bounded around to the other side to greet the remuda, the tall grass waving above his head.
The remuda stood and looked at us for a moment. Those unacquainted with equine cognition would have taken this for taciturnity, but Duke and I knew better. We waited, and eventually the horses realized who we were and came to meet us. Horses are generally benign but universally stupid. Curiosity is about all one can hope for in a horse when it comes to intellection. A horse that manages to learn its name is noteworthy. As Duke can tell you, no horse is ever going to learn to watch a stick sail from a thrower’s hand, mark where it lands, then retrieve it, much less be sagacious enough to draw from the process the immense joy Duke derives.
But there is no doubt that a horse is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth. Its elegance is unmatched, its quivering power noble beyond the capacity of lesser creatures. This beauty is not to be taken lightly. As Oscar Wilde has written, “Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned.” For years, southern men, who have traditionally underestimated the intelligence of southern women, have analogized their counterparts to horses. The analogy is not without merit, though it is not without flaws. Duke and I appreciate the special grace of a southern woman. From Texas to the Carolinas, from Florida up to Maryland, the southern woman dwells and exercises her gifted charm with a coquettish smile or an unanswered phone call. But she does it knowingly. The horses before Duke and I were not so wise. Knees lifting high out of the grass, manes billowing behind, shoulders tensing and releasing with each semiconscious step, they trotted and sidestepped and reared, reacting to one another as they converged. We watched their ignorant beauty, a gangly man and a stumpy dog standing reverently in the grass with the sun setting behind.
William and Smoke approached the truck. The other horses lost interest before they made it. William butted his head against me and I rubbed his forehead. He rubbed back, then thrust his head over my shoulder so that his jaw and mine were side by side. Hoping he wouldn’t toss his head, I massaged the coarse hair of his mane. I ran my hand along the aligned hairs of his neck, my hand sliding from black patch to white to black again. William blew through his nostrils, producing that sound that mimics almost exactly the rise of a covey of quail.
Smoke poked his head through the driver’s window, which was open. His whole head was inside the truck. His neck bobbed as though he were chewing the cloth of my seat. I opened the rear door and peered at him. He met my eyes with surprise – what are you doing in here? – and withdrew his head. He ambled toward the front of the truck, his shoulder brushing the wheelwell. He stopped before the front bumper and nuzzled the grille, moving his head up and down against it in an arc. Then he raised his eyes, as if to look into the windshield, turning both ears toward the truck. He drew his chin across the hood.
William, for his part, had discovered that the driver’s windowsill made an excellent scratching post, and was vigorously rubbing the end of his nose against the point at which the plastic that sheathed the glass met the sheet metal of the door. The whole truck shook. Duke and I watched with interest. I had always believed the tip of a horse’s nose to be sensitive, but William seemed disinclined toward my viewpoint. He rubbed for several seconds, then, without acknowledging the disquietude of man and dog, began cropping grass.
I heard a thump from the other side of the truck, and stepped around the tailgate to find Smoke caressing the side-view mirror. He had pressed the mirror back against the truck, but it had sprung back to its former position when he released it. Smoke was not perturbed by the sudden movement. As I watched he rubbed his cheek against the radio antenna, which sprang back into place with a metallic whang. Then, leaving the front of the truck, he stepped gingerly toward me, moving along the side panels, and lowered his head to the bedliner.
Back on the driver’s side, William was still cropping grass and Duke had taken a scholar’s interest. He was trying to do the same, turning his head to the side and attempting, with his elongated canine teeth, to grip the grass and tear it from its roots. But most of the grass slipped through his mouth, and the grass that Duke could crop he could not chew. Gamely he tried, though, working his tongue against the roof of his mouth like a man with a hair in his mouth who lacked the hands to retrieve it.
In the gathering dusk the crickets had started to call. “Kennel!” I said to Duke, and he abandoned the grass to load up into the truck. I turned the key and turned on the cargo light, which shone in Smoke’s eye and drove him out of the truck bed. I let out the clutch. Under the emerging stars Duke and I bumped back up to the barn to play a few rounds of fetch in the floodlights. Behind us the horses grazed, unfazed by our visit, though we thought of them as we drove up the hill.
When it comes to naming animals, my family is unoriginal. The red horse we called Red, the paint horse we called Paint. In the pasture now we’ve got Smoke, the dapple gray; Black, the black and Midnight, the other black. The most inventive names that walk around the pasture cropping grass are William and Dawson, but those two horses came with their names. Dad and I would never impose appellations like those. When Dad added another unnamed red horse to the pasture, we dubbed him Green.
At sunset today I loaded Duke, the black lab – Duke the Second, to give his full name – into the truck and drove down into the pasture to visit the herd. I let Duke ride in the cab as his predecessor liked to do. Duke the First would sit on the wide console of a Dodge pickup and watch through the windshield, tongue hanging happily out of his mouth like a stoned Driver’s Ed teacher. For hours he would sit like that. He did not look for anything in particular – blondes, brunettes, redheads, nothing fazed him – but he always seemed content, and he liked to have his head scratched. Duke the Second hasn’t developed the same love of travel. I don’t think he likes trucks – he gets embarrassed.
Duke the Second has the same jet black coat that Duke the First had. He has the same finely shaped head and snout, the same robust body, the same graceful tail. He can bark just as loudly and he jumps into lakes with the same aplomb. He is just as amiable, and every bit as smart – Duke the Second’s English vocabulary includes the commands here, kennel, back, sit, heel, fetch and stay. But Duke the Second only has about half the legs. Whereas Duke the First cast an impressive, well proportioned silhouette – the David of the canine world – Duke the Second looks like Michelangelo started at the head and gave up when he got to the knees. He is the butt of innumerable jokes. At the Stewart County dove shoot yesterday, he followed Dad into the living room where we were serving barbecue. “Hey Jim, is that your lab?” someone said. “Looks like he’s got a little basset hound in him.” Duke plays dumb, but he hears the jokes. Behind his back, we call him Lowrider. But he will never ride in a lowrider because all of our trucks are four wheel drives, which is unfortunate for Duke. His altitudinal challenges are never more apparent than when he tries to jump into a high-riding pickup truck.
Duke sat in the passenger’s seat and hung his head for the first few hundred yards, and his nose bobbed at the bumps we passed over. But dogs are sensible creatures and will not remain despondent for long. They are superior to cats in that way. Cat lovers, most of whom are Yankees, will tell you cats are more sentient than dogs, but that’s untrue. Cats are just more self-absorbed and finicky. Duke is too wise for such Yankeeism. By the time we reached the horses, he had decided he didn’t give a damn if he was related to a basset hound. He leaped out of the truck and bounded around to the other side to greet the remuda, the tall grass waving above his head.
The remuda stood and looked at us for a moment. Those unacquainted with equine cognition would have taken this for taciturnity, but Duke and I knew better. We waited, and eventually the horses realized who we were and came to meet us. Horses are generally benign but universally stupid. Curiosity is about all one can hope for in a horse when it comes to intellection. A horse that manages to learn its name is noteworthy. As Duke can tell you, no horse is ever going to learn to watch a stick sail from a thrower’s hand, mark where it lands, then retrieve it, much less be sagacious enough to draw from the process the immense joy Duke derives.
But there is no doubt that a horse is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth. Its elegance is unmatched, its quivering power noble beyond the capacity of lesser creatures. This beauty is not to be taken lightly. As Oscar Wilde has written, “Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned.” For years, southern men, who have traditionally underestimated the intelligence of southern women, have analogized their counterparts to horses. The analogy is not without merit, though it is not without flaws. Duke and I appreciate the special grace of a southern woman. From Texas to the Carolinas, from Florida up to Maryland, the southern woman dwells and exercises her gifted charm with a coquettish smile or an unanswered phone call. But she does it knowingly. The horses before Duke and I were not so wise. Knees lifting high out of the grass, manes billowing behind, shoulders tensing and releasing with each semiconscious step, they trotted and sidestepped and reared, reacting to one another as they converged. We watched their ignorant beauty, a gangly man and a stumpy dog standing reverently in the grass with the sun setting behind.
William and Smoke approached the truck. The other horses lost interest before they made it. William butted his head against me and I rubbed his forehead. He rubbed back, then thrust his head over my shoulder so that his jaw and mine were side by side. Hoping he wouldn’t toss his head, I massaged the coarse hair of his mane. I ran my hand along the aligned hairs of his neck, my hand sliding from black patch to white to black again. William blew through his nostrils, producing that sound that mimics almost exactly the rise of a covey of quail.
Smoke poked his head through the driver’s window, which was open. His whole head was inside the truck. His neck bobbed as though he were chewing the cloth of my seat. I opened the rear door and peered at him. He met my eyes with surprise – what are you doing in here? – and withdrew his head. He ambled toward the front of the truck, his shoulder brushing the wheelwell. He stopped before the front bumper and nuzzled the grille, moving his head up and down against it in an arc. Then he raised his eyes, as if to look into the windshield, turning both ears toward the truck. He drew his chin across the hood.
William, for his part, had discovered that the driver’s windowsill made an excellent scratching post, and was vigorously rubbing the end of his nose against the point at which the plastic that sheathed the glass met the sheet metal of the door. The whole truck shook. Duke and I watched with interest. I had always believed the tip of a horse’s nose to be sensitive, but William seemed disinclined toward my viewpoint. He rubbed for several seconds, then, without acknowledging the disquietude of man and dog, began cropping grass.
I heard a thump from the other side of the truck, and stepped around the tailgate to find Smoke caressing the side-view mirror. He had pressed the mirror back against the truck, but it had sprung back to its former position when he released it. Smoke was not perturbed by the sudden movement. As I watched he rubbed his cheek against the radio antenna, which sprang back into place with a metallic whang. Then, leaving the front of the truck, he stepped gingerly toward me, moving along the side panels, and lowered his head to the bedliner.
Back on the driver’s side, William was still cropping grass and Duke had taken a scholar’s interest. He was trying to do the same, turning his head to the side and attempting, with his elongated canine teeth, to grip the grass and tear it from its roots. But most of the grass slipped through his mouth, and the grass that Duke could crop he could not chew. Gamely he tried, though, working his tongue against the roof of his mouth like a man with a hair in his mouth who lacked the hands to retrieve it.
In the gathering dusk the crickets had started to call. “Kennel!” I said to Duke, and he abandoned the grass to load up into the truck. I turned the key and turned on the cargo light, which shone in Smoke’s eye and drove him out of the truck bed. I let out the clutch. Under the emerging stars Duke and I bumped back up to the barn to play a few rounds of fetch in the floodlights. Behind us the horses grazed, unfazed by our visit, though we thought of them as we drove up the hill.
posted by Jeb Butler at 9:58 PM
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