An Old Dog in the Rain

We had an old dog named Hoover who broke out of his yard during that rainstorm the other day, and we haven’t seen him since. I’m afraid he’s gone forever.

It is unlike him not to be around somewhere. Even when he managed to dig out under the fence, which he had done since he was a puppy, he never went far, especially in the rain. It terrified him.

I say he’s probably gone forever because Hoover was about 18 years old and wobbly on his feet. He also couldn’t hear well, and that made him vulnerable to attack.

We live in coyote country and I suspect he came face to face with a pack of predators and just couldn’t stand up to the onslaught. That’s one reason we kept him in the yard.

I don’t know, of course, that he met that kind of fate. I like to think he just trotted off in the storm, looking for trouble, and disappeared over a far horizon, the way old dogs sometimes do.

He wasn’t the kind of animal someone would kidnap for ransom. To begin with, he was just an old mutt and uglier than a manatee. Hoover was a drab brown, had an extraordinarily long snout and an expression that managed to be both sad and defiant.

Also, his behavior was less than exemplary. He was hell on cats, maiming one so badly it cost me $800 to have her patched up, and he was always less than totally housebroken.

I’ll say this for him, though. He never messed in my workroom, although he did elsewhere in the house. We had a kind of tacit agreement. I didn’t dig up his bones and he didn’t urinate on my rug.

*

Hoover was not a very important old dog. He wasn’t a watchdog, that’s for sure. We got him as a puppy and tried to train him to ward off intruders, but the most he’d do would be to stand in front of the refrigerator and bark at the ice maker.

“What the hell kind of protection is that?” I’d demand of my wife Cinelli, who loved that old dog dearly.

“I didn’t get him for protection,” she’d say. “I got you for protection. I got him for company. He’s a better listener, and he doesn’t drink martinis.”

But at least I don’t pace in circles. Hoover paced endlessly in his old age, wandering clockwise around our central fireplace, through the dining room and then into the living room. Then he’d do it all over again.

I’d go crazy listening to his toenails clicking on the tile floor while I was trying to watch “Mad About You,” and after about his 40th time through the room I’d holler at him to stop.

He’d freeze in his tracks for a moment, then turn slowly and go the other way, pacing in circles counterclockwise, his toenails making that clickety-click sound on the tile, glaring at me as he’d pass. You had to hand it to the old mutt. He had spunk.

I suppose that’s why he loved freedom so, because you can’t enclose a defiant free spirit. Not that his yard was small. We had it built especially for him and it was almost the size of our home, with a large doghouse to keep him out of the wind, which he also feared.

But he kept digging his way out, and after awhile would show up at the back door, almost gloating, knowing I’d have to go out and find his escape route and close it up again. Damned dog.

*

We called Animal Control when he didn’t return, and then I went out looking for him. Two old dogs in the rain.

“Be sure to come back,” Cinelli said to me when I left, as though I might wander off too, trotting toward the distance, where storms are born.

I walked up through the hills and then down a lot of streets asking if anyone had seen a dog that looked a lot like a manatee and limped a little when he walked.

It seemed everyone was busy loading sandbags or shoveling mud or patching quake-damaged roofs, but they still took the time to listen to me. Dogs are important in Topanga.

I’d say, “He was just an old dog on his last legs and not much good to anyone. He was afraid of everything, even the moon, and sometimes when it was full, he’d cower in a corner of the house and bark at the ceiling.”

But no one had seen Hoover and I finally gave up. We have accepted that he’s gone and won’t come back, and I miss him. I wasn’t the best dog master in the world, but there was a kind of character to Hoover that age defined with compassion, and I came to understand his defiance. He was an old man raging against the dying of the light.

Death is a walk we take alone, and Hoover chose to take it in the teeth of a storm, despite his misgivings about rain. He’s one with the weather now, but I’ll think of him when the dark clouds gather over the mountains and a hard wind blows.