VIEWPOINT : 10 Years With Max Ends the Way It Started--Outside, Under the Stars

It was the pup’s first night away from his mother, and he cried. So I sneaked out of a nice warm bed, leaving my wife asleep, and slept outside with the tiny, black, quivering dog. He curled up against my shoulder, and neither of us woke until the morning light.

Last Friday night, I once again slept outside with Max. And again, he rested his head against my shoulder.

Ten years had passed between these doggie slumber parties.

I now live in a different town. Own a different house. And, now that I think of it, have a different wife.

And the dog that had on that first chilly night in San Pedro been roughly the size of a football was now roughly the size of a football field .

Oh. There was another difference. On that first night, Max and I were spending our first moments together. Friday night was our last. On Saturday he died, silenced by a quick injection that ended a few weeks of pain he had endured with a cancerous tumor.

Max was a half-Labrador, half-Doberman mutt who grew into 125 pounds of fearful-looking beast, the kind of dog you’d just as soon never see without a high fence between you and him. But he never harmed anybody.

Oh, I’m sure there would be some disagreement over that from the gas meter-reader who slammed his shin--quite painfully, judging from the thunk of the impact and the even louder shouting that ensued--into the bumper of my Fiat many years ago when Max chased him down the driveway. But let’s not nit-pick here. Let’s just say that Max never actually ate a human being, and leave it at that.

One day, during his prime, I took him for a walk inside the fence of an abandoned Army base in San Pedro. He quickly disappeared, and a minute later a man drove by and asked what I was doing there. When I told him, he winced.

“Better find that dog of yours in a hurry,” he said. “We’ve got a guard dog patrolling out here. Believe me, you don’t want him finding your dog.”

Seconds later, the two big dogs appeared at opposite ends of a muddy, 50-yard field. They began a very dramatic charge toward each other. When they collided, we could hear the impact from 100 feet away. And in about 20 seconds the guard dog was screeching wildly in full retreat, apparently out of a job.

Max came back to me with German shepherd fur in his mouth. Only dog-owners know this feeling, but I was, at that moment, the proudest damn guy in San Pedro.

An outing at a friend’s cabin in Big Bear turned into an equally marvelous adventure. I left Max alone in the cabin for five minutes while I went for cigarettes. When I returned, he had shredded four curtains, broken two lamps and crashed through a window. He did everything but turn on the gas and light a match. Apparently he had missed me. The damage came to $450.

A year later, my dog and I embarked on an all-night drive (I had to do all the driving) into the Sierras for a camping trip. Just outside Bridgeport, as the dawn broke, a small herd of deer crossed in front of my car. Figuring Max needed to stretch his legs after four hours in a Fiat, I flung the door open.

I didn’t see him again for two hours. He finally emerged from the wilderness nearly a mile from where I had turned him loose. And no, of course he had not caught a deer.

But he sure seemed proud of the rabbit!

Around the kids Max was a different dog. When Maggie or Nicholas would be nearby, Max would follow them very carefully. He seldom got too close, seeming not to need their love in order to give his.

When we had friends at the house, he would lie down beside our daughter. If anybody he didn’t know stood up, he would also rise and move closer to her, fixing a hard gaze on the upright human. The message was not difficult to interpret, a silent signal from a dog that was something along the lines of, “If you would like to continue using both hands to button your shirt, I would suggest taking a step or two away from her, if you wouldn’t mind.”

The cancer came quickly, showing itself first in a swelling on his right foreleg. I agreed to a $600 surgical removal of the diseased tissue that a veterinarian said might buy Max a few months of limpless days. It didn’t. But it was worth the effort.

When the cancer came back stronger than ever just a few weeks later, he began licking the wound constantly. He, like myself, seemed to think of himself as indestructible. The nagging pain seemed to confuse him more than hurt him.

Last week the limp became severe. At night, as I looked out at him through a bathroom window, I could hear him whimpering.

He could still run a bit. On his last day he climbed a 200-foot hill in our back yard. It took him five minutes. Two months ago he could make it to the top in 20 seconds. He likely could have lasted another month or so, but the pain would have been too much for both of us.

The night before he died I defrosted a three-pound London broil roast and gave it to him in the back yard. I felt pretty ridiculous doing it. He ate it in about four minutes. I considered inviting 11 of his dog friends over for this last supper, but knew that would be sacrilegious. So he ate alone.

I crept outside early in the morning and stretched out beside him on an old mattress he slept on. He licked my arm and plopped his head against my shoulder, and we slept for a while.

Several hours later, I knelt on the cold linoleum of the veterinarian’s office and removed Max’s leash and collar, the same collar he wore as he chased the meter-reader and the guard dog and the mule deer. The same collar he wore everywhere for 10 years.

I hugged him and I cried and then he was gone.

But what the hell, he was just a dog.