Not a dog person
Length: • 5 mins
Annotated by Mark Isero
We named him Lincoln, after the Lincoln Monument off I-80 near the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. One, because he was the color of a new penny, and two, because the day we met him, he wore the same serious expression of our 16th president.
Earlier in the summer, I had answered an online ad from a young woman who wanted to re-home her dog, a floppy-eared spaniel mix. My husband, Michael, is not on any social media, but he wanted a dog. I messaged with the woman, and then she wrote to say she had changed her mind. I forgot about the ad and the little face in the pictures. But months later, she messaged again: Did we still want a dog? She couldn’t keep him. She had her first real job since graduating and was gone all day. Her neighbors in her apartment building complained about his barking. He was left in a crate all day wearing an anti-bark collar.
We had only been married a month, and this was our first big decision as a married couple. Did we want him? A dog we’d never met? When Lincoln, then named Duke, came to meet us, he had been bitten by a ranch dog a few days earlier and still had a big gash on his face. When his owner let him off the leash, he ran all over the house, then settled into the bathtub, panting. Did I want him?
Growing up in Wyoming, I had mostly known dogs that worked. At a friend’s ranch near Hole-in-the-Wall in northern Wyoming, I watched her two border collies herd cows with a kind of precision that reminded me of a dance. I had seen Labs retrieving pheasants in their mouths and Great Pyrenees guarding sheep and fending off predators. I wasn’t sure about keeping a dog as a pet.
But here in the West, it seems like everyone has one. At every brewery, water bowls are perched under tables. Dogs run and pant up hiking trails. “Out West, all you need is a Subaru and a dog!” a friend joked to me before I met Michael. I had the Subaru, but I feared a dog was too much responsibility. I wouldn’t be able to travel. Was I outdoorsy enough to have a dog? What if I was gone all day teaching? I told myself I just wasn’t a dog person. But now, it wasn’t just me. I was making a family.
AND THEN THERE was Lincoln, with his stoic look and deep brown eyes. We’d said he wasn’t going to sleep in the bed. But that first night, I felt his snoot rustling my arm and then the unfamiliar warmth of his furry body curled into mine. Soon, I could hear his soft snores. I lay stiff, unsure whether to move. I reached out in the dark and stroked his back. He rolled over, exposing his belly, and I felt his body relax. I scratched his ear, and then I felt his little head next to mine, and I surprised myself by kissing the top of it.
Lincoln was the first thing Michael and I loved together. In those first months of marriage, as we navigated our new life and sharing a home, it was Lincoln who united us. With him, we took long walks, and I saw our neighborhood anew. When we made dinner, we’d give him a little scrap of steak. We watched movies with him nestled between us. We took him to breweries, and he now drank from the bowls under the tables. We laughed over his facial expressions and how he hated squirrels.
Living in Laramie with a dog, suddenly, the world seemed bigger. I began to take long prairie walks every day. When we’d get out far enough, I would take Lincoln off the leash and watch him run across the land, a little blur on the prairie. At times, I’d see his tail wagging between the sage and rabbitbrush. If he was lucky, a jackrabbit as big as he was would leap out, and I’d watch the futile chase that followed. Lincoln always looped back to me, checking in, his tongue panting with the pure joy of being outside. He was happiest in wild places, free to roam unencumbered, without restraint.
Growing up in Wyoming, I had mostly known dogs that worked. I wasn’t sure about keeping a dog as a pet.
When we brought home our first baby, Juniper, Lincoln was nonplussed. He sniffed her blanket and kept a respectful distance. Soon, the spot he normally had, curled up next to me in bed while I worked, held the baby, so he relocated to the bottom of the bed. When Marigold came home, he seemed equally indifferent. And as the children turned into toddlers, he moved permanently to the end of the bed. “Gentle,” I say to them again and again, guiding their plump hands over his back, teaching them how to live with animals.
Lincoln doesn’t work hard at anything besides chasing bunnies in our yard and barking at the doorbell. But he has expanded my world. He’s taught me to see the land with joy and wild abandon, and he is goodness on a planet that seems increasingly bleak at times. He lives in the present with unending hope (usually for what’s on my plate), chasing squirrels and looking out the window, greeting everyone, stranger or friend.
When I come in from work, he doesn’t care if my class went well. He doesn’t care if I have on nice clothes or what I weigh. He just is happy to see me. He has taught me to love purely, without judgment. To love something so simply is a gift, and my dog gave that to me. In turn, I am showing the girls how to love him, how we must be tender with those we love, and how we must learn to love wild things from a distance. I guide Marigold’s hand again over Lincoln’s ear. “Gentle,” I say, “soft hands.” She startles him, and he groans, so I pull Marigold’s hand back. Living with animals means following their cues and respecting their nature.
Just after the new year, Juniper began to wake in the night. For weeks, she’d come into our room in the middle of the night, crying. One of us would end up sleeping on the floor beside her bed. Exhausted (and breaking every parenting rule), we moved her mattress onto the floor in our bedroom. Soon after she started sleeping there, I noticed that Lincoln was no longer on the bed with us, a spot he had never relinquished in the seven years he’d been with us. He now sleeps right next to Juniper, not on her mattress, but nearby on the floor, guarding her. It seems that he too has been taught a new way to love. With the girls, his watchfulness is close, but not too close; he respects their wildness. His little world has grown larger, too.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the July 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Prairie dog.”
Spread the word. News organizations can pick-up quality news, essays and feature stories for free.