For Mary Ann; good luck with your surgery!

(image provided by the Drifter)

It was during the darkest, deepest heart of the covid pandemic in the early part of the 2020s. My daughter and I were driving along on Roosevelt Road just outside Chicago, USA. I was in the front seat behind the wheel and she was sitting in the back seat on the other side of our modest automobile (Lou Reed was singing from the speakers). It was wintertime, so the sun had sunk very early, too early, it seemed; the darkness around us was the coldness of a northern Illinois winter post-holiday season, with the wind battering the car.

That was when she told me that herself, my other daughter (her twin), and my ex-wife (their mother) had recently met nine brand-new puppies.

The dogs had been discovered in an alley somewhere in Texas, with their mother, and shipped north to Chicago by the rescue agency. The woman who was fostering these animals had run into my daughters and ex on the street. Somehow they got to talking and she told my daughters about her new rescue project, which was to foster these nine new dogs and their mother.

The nine new pups were half Siberian Husky and half pit bull, with the Husky side of the appearance and personalities being much more prominent, for some reason, than the pit bull side, even though their mother looked like a one-hundred-percent pit bull.

Their mother’s name was Margaux. She was one year old. All of her fur was of the purest, cleanest white imaginable, and she had bold, bright, brilliant, very blue eyes.

As soon as I saw her she reminded me of my dog, Cowboy, who had passed on four years before. Cowboy was about twice Margaux’s size, brown and white with brown eyes (he was born with blue eyes that later turned brown), but there was something about the two dogs that seemed uncannily familiar.

When I met Margaux she immediately walked over to me and started nuzzling my leg, asking for petting. It was as if we already knew one another. And I felt like we really did know one another. The second I saw her I knew I would be adopting at least one of her puppies.

The nine puppies were like watching 101 Dalmatians. They had a habit of all rolling in a pile all at once, wrestling with one another. They would tussle, toss, nip, bounce, yip, zip, wag, fang, bite at each other, flounce, jounce, jump, prance, dance, charge into each other, fall down, dart around, jump into your lap if you were sitting on the floor among them, look up at you, stretch, flop onto their backs, stick their tails in the air, shake themselves off, scratch their ears with their back paws, howl, yowl, laugh, smile, grin, pant, bounce around some more, crash into each other some more, flop around, jump up, run, walk, jog, teeter, totter, fall, spread, splay, spoon each other, roll over, box each other with their paws like cats, leap, jounce, bounce, and jostle all over the floor while you sat in the middle of them. And this was all during the first five minutes.

One of these little dogs was the biggest of them all. When the other pups would sleep in piles on top of each other, he would always go off into a corner of the room to sleep by himself, mostly half sleeping while watching the rest of them from a distance from the corners of his amazingly alert eyes. He had the longest fur, the most human expressions and was the pushiest, biggest, happiest, strongest, most intelligent dog of them all. He was the pup who started challenging his mother for dominance, in a friendly way, while all the other pups were still following her lead.

And he often had his sidekick with him. This other pup was “lean and mean” in a good way. His one shockingly blue eye and his other startlingly brown eye were prophetic and symbolic of his inherently split (not to say schizoid!) disposition. As a full-grown dog, he would be able to nail a squirrel and even a rabbit, much less an opossum, with a deadly accuracy, skill and ease that would stun the viewer of such an event (we always try to stop him but are not always able). And yet, he is one of the sweetest and most gentle dogs, otherwise, you could ever care to meet, someone who is even afraid of little children, when he isn’t trying to guard them, which he usually is whenever they’re around.

The reason we didn’t adopt Margaux, their mother, along with these two pups was waiting at home. Her name is Bandit, a pit bull with the greatest sense of humor of any dog you ever saw, and the strongest jaws you can probably imagine.

Bandit stepped in out of the blue when Cowboy, my beloved pit bull, passed on over the Rainbow Bridge (where he is waiting for us; I am sure of it). Bandit helped save my life by her presence during one of the toughest periods of my life I’ve ever gone through (I’ll skip the details about that for now). She tends to get a bit aggressive with other female pit bulls, especially when they’re on her own territory, so we had to let Margaux go. I heard Margaux is now living with a friendly family on a farm somewhere in Iowa where she has lots of room to run and play with other dogs. I hope so.

We named the leader Boo, after Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s favorite horse), and the Sancho Panza dog we named The Colonel, after Elvis’s pal (and manager).

Bandit, Boo, and Colonel are all black and white, with almost exactly the same markings, almost like a miracle.

Life with these three animals in it is infinitely enhanced, endlessly better than it could ever be otherwise without them. It’s probably fair enough to say that I would die for any of these animals if I had to (like I would jump in front of a car to try and save them, if it ever came to that). They would do the same for me and my kids, and I know this for a fact because I’ve seen them try to do it when they thought we were in danger.

A few years ago I heard a story in the local news about a teenaged boy who ran back into his burning-down house to try and save his dog who was trapped inside. He wasn’t able to make it back out and both himself and his animal met their end together in the flames, and mostly the smoke. Their bodies were found side by side. The news reporter talked about it like it was the most tragic thing that ever could have happened, a bad decision made by a naïve child.

My heart goes out to the boy’s family in every way you can possibly imagine, but that news reporter was deadly wrong. Only the good die young. If there is a heaven (and I’m almost certain there is, I don’t even know why), that boy and his dog are in it. And they are together: forever now.

THE DRIFTER sometimes calls himself Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD.