“Put your nose to the North” (2012)
The best kind of family is the one we choose for ourselves, but sometimes they’re a little furrier than anticipated.
BY TRICIA SANS CHAN
IMAGE BY TRICIA SANS CHAN
It’s believed that seven years for a human is equivalent to one year for a dog. That means at the age of three, when human children would still be toddling around, dogs are of legal drinking age in the US—although your mutt would probably prefer a bone to a beer.
Typically, we perceive our pets as a responsibility that we take on because of how much they depend on us for food, shelter, and, essentially, their survival. But when we take into account how quickly a dog matures compared to the average human, it is the opposite that might be true.
In the winter of 2007, I was 19 years old. I had spent the previous summer driving across the country, living out of my car, and picking up the odd day job to make enough gas money to get me to my next destination. The most adventurous summer of my life was missing just one thing, though: a road dog. There I was, standing on top of the foothills near Lake Louise, imagining how much quicker I would have made the hike had I had a quadruped to set the pace. I sat on the sand of Tofino in my wetsuit, wishing I could be like the old local who had taught his ten-year-old Jack Russell terrier to hop onto his surfboard and keep its balance to the shoreline. I drove through the prairies, wondering how far one could let their dog run across the flattened earth before they wouldn’t be able to see them anymore.
That same year, my parents decided they were tired of Canadian winters and were going back to my mother’s homeland, the place they fell in love: Mallorca, Spain. They gave me six months’ notice. Until then, I would still be able to live in our family home and they would still help me with school finances. They lined up and paid for a plane ticket so I could visit them in August before the fall semester started. But by then, they would be gone, and I would be alone.
Or would I?
In Smithsonian, Brian Handwerk describes a mutually beneficial relationship that led to the domestication of wolves into the animals that live in our homes, play with our young, and get their photo taken with a mall Santa every year. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that these two animals share a genus, right? Regardless of history and science, the feeling is undeniable; a bond with a dog is on a different emotional plane than any other. The thread that ties my life together is my unwavering desire for a canine contemporary, a furry fellow, a soulful sidekick. I don’t understand it, but there is an undeniable magnetism between our two species that spans tens of thousands of years.
The weeks before my parents left, I looked online at puppies for adoption instead of helping them pack. I saw a listing for “rez dogs husky mix” and clicked the link. The picture was of Maple, a red and white-faced puppy with one green eye and one brown. She was gorgeous. I sent an email and received a response within fifteen minutes. It said that the puppies had just arrived in Acton from up north and I could visit them tonight. My parents were busy on the phone with their lawyer, so I grabbed my car keys and whispered that I had to “run an errand.”
When I first met Maple at the foster home, she was kind of a bitch—literally, yes, but also figuratively. As I stood there, looking at her with my most concerned side-eye, I felt a pull on the back of my jacket. I turned around and made eye contact with a gray-faced, blue-eyed goofball who was playing tug of war with my coat. He immediately let go, sat down, and then, while maintaining eye contact, strutted over to the pee pad and had perfect aim.
“I’ll take HIM!” I yelled.
A few hours later, I arrived home with my new errand. I walked into my parents’ room with their new grandson. My father’s first response was, “Is that a baby kangaroo!?”
My mom, on the other hand, didn’t say much until she saw his name tag.
“Marley? Really? Are you that much of a stoner that you had to name him after Bob Marley?”
That night, while smoking my bedtime joint, I watched my new puppy in the light of the full moon.
Then, I howled.
I tried to coax one out of Marley, but he was too distracted trying to eat moths.
“A-woooo,” I said, sounding it out phonetically.
He grumbled, but no howl.
I tried again, hollering my best wolf call into the darkness, but Marley was still fixated on that moth. I turned the porch light off, snuffing out any artificial light.
“A-WOOO!”
I held the note much longer this time and when I went quiet, I had a howling husky beside me.
That was the last thing I ever taught Marley.
He didn’t need a leash to walk; he just stayed by my side.
He didn’t need to attend training classes; he listened and looked and learned perfectly all by himself.
He didn’t need to be instructed to protect me; he just never let a stranger get between us.
For the first time—for a teenage dog owner with a 100-pound husky—it was a literal, and figurative, walk in the park.
In the winter of 2009, when I was twenty-one years old, everything changed. I had my first up-close experience with death. My grandfather, the only grandparent I had ever known, was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of eighty-six. Four months later, it had metastasized to his brain and he went into palliative care. My mother called me. I got on a plane and, a week later, I was back home, mourning the death of my idol.
I didn’t go to school.
I didn’t go to work.
I didn’t answer the door or the phone.
I did, however, wake up every morning at 5 a.m. to make a peanut butter sandwich, layer on my winter gear, and drive to Forks of the Credit to hike 15 kilometres with Marley.
Dogs are the perfect companions for grieving people because they are always up for anything. They have no preference, so long as you’re content. And they also don’t feel the need to fill the silence with small talk.
On one particularly frigid morning, Marley and I were following the river, taking a shortcut back to the car. He had grown into a majestic, hundred-pound hulk with ice-blue eyes and paws the size of frozen waffles. His fur was thick and seemingly impenetrable when his protective undercoat grew in for the winter. He was in his element, while I was just struggling to breathe without feeling the sharp, stabbing pain in my lungs that comes with gusting -20° C winds. Marley kept veering in and out of the water to grab sticks and ice chunks floating by.
“Quit!” I yelled, as he splashed me and I walked ahead of him to avoid it.
After a few hundred metres, I heard a yelp. I looked back to see Marley’s head sticking out of the water. He was spinning in a slow circle, but his eyes looked terrified. I called him with as much enthusiasm as I could. He acknowledged me with a bark but wouldn’t swim to shore. I stood on the riverbank, hoping that if I called out for him louder, he would come. As soon as I saw his head dip below the water and pop back up again, I realized that he was working so hard to stay afloat that he was tiring himself out. In a split second, I threw off my boots, gloves, and coat. I jumped into the river and swam over to Marley on the other side. I grabbed him by the collar with one arm, while holding on to a tree branch with the other. I dropped my head under the water, trying to feel around for what was keeping my dog from me. His hind leg was trapped between a rock and a fallen log. I pleaded with him to help me and, accepting that the possibility that breaking his leg was very real, I gave him one final pull. I needed my dog alive and with me; he wasn’t going to stay here alone.
The walk back to the car was long; each step got harder as the cold set in against my wet clothes. But every few steps, Marley would nudge my hand with his equally frozen nose, as though he were saying, We’ll get a lot of mileage out of this story. Minutes prior, he had been terrified, but now, he was frolicking in the snowbanks and running through the powder. At that moment, I realized that he had made me into the kind of person I had always wanted to be: adventurous, instinctive, and brave.
Our life continued like this for eight more years, with thousands of frozen kilometres trekked and boundless adventures enjoyed.
Dogs are endless balls of beaming energy. They burrow into our lives as a matter of self-interest, but also, seemingly with a greater purpose at work. Marley came to me at a time when I needed support and unfiltered love. He grew up with me through my twenties, through all the losers I dated, through my start/stop academic career, through my father’s death. He was my only constant, my partner, my caretaker, and my interspecies soulmate. He held on until I found my place and then he decided his work was done. We said goodbye in January 2017.
Going for walks felt pointless, so I gained a few extra pounds. My cleaning routine became non-existent, as there was no longer an endless parade of furballs roaming around under my furniture. I wore black without having to use a lint roller on myself several times before leaving the house. I cried a lot, and hard. People thought bringing their pets to visit me would help. Instead, I became the hysterical, forlorn dog girl, pleading with my friends to “hold your pets close.” Meteorologically, it was on-trend, but that season felt like the coldest, harshest winter I had ever experienced. Every bleak and miserable winter thaws into a hopeful spring, though, and it was April when I first met Scout.
The first time I saw her, I cried. She was adorable with a black, tan, and white face and honey-coloured eyes, but she had the same look of terror that Marley had when he had gotten stuck in that river. She looks how I feel, I thought to myself. But I’m brave now! Maybe I can save her life, too.
The death of a dog is so gut-wrenchingly painful because their love is so pure. The pain of their loss is, at first, thorough and reliable—just like them. But with time, it subsides, offering us a space to truly understand what they meant to us.
Scout is not Marley. She cannot walk off-leash. She weighs a third of what he did at thirty-five pounds, and she definitely doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of men. She does, however, garner love from everyone who crosses her path. In the way that I once did, she needs support and unfiltered love; she needs reassurance, and it was Marley who taught me how to be there for her.
Do I love Scout as totally and completely as I did Marley? The answer is a simultaneous no, and also, not yet.
Tricia Sans Chan is a Humber journalism graduate and writer based out of Toronto, Canada, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain. You can always count on her to have dog treats, human snacks, and an extra pair of socks in her backpack. If you’d like to keep up with Tricia and her new pup, Scout, follow her on Instagram @sans_chan.
Image: Tricia Sans Chan, Put your nose to the North, 2012.
An earlier version of this story was originally created as part of Humber’s WRIT 400: Literature and Composition 2 course.
Edited for publication by Cassandra Smyth, as part of the Creative Book Publishing Program.
The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by the Applied Research & Innovation.