Marley: A Dog Like No Other

Our headlights shined on a mailbox. The numbers on the side reflected back at us. This was the place. I turned up a gravel drive that led into a large wooded property. There was a pond in front of the house and a small barn out back. At the door, a woman named Lori greeted us, with a big, calm yellow Labrador retriever by her side.

“This is Lily, the proud mama,” Lori said. Lily’s stomach was still swollen even though she’d given birth five weeks before.

Jenny and I got on our knees, and Lily happily accepted our affection. She was just what we pictured a Lab would be – sweet natured, affectionate, calm and beautiful.

“Where’s the father?” I asked.

“Oh,” the woman said, hesitating for just a fraction of a second. “Sammy Boy? He’s around here somewhere.” She quickly added, “I imagine you’re dying to see the puppies.”

Lori led us through the kitchen into a utility room. The puppies stumbled all over one another as they rushed to check out the strangers.

Jenny gasped. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so cute in my life,” she said.

The litter consisted of five females and four males. Lori was asking $400 for the females and $375 for the males. One of the males seemed particularly smitten with us. He was the goofiest of the group and charged into us. Somersaulting into our laps, he clawed his way up our shirts to lick our faces. He gnawed on our fingers with surprisingly sharp baby teeth and stomped clumsy circles around us on giant paws that were way too big for the rest of his body.

“That one there you can have for three hundred and fifty dollars,” Lori said.

“Aw, honey,” Jenny cooed. “The little guy’s on sale!”

I had to admit he was pretty darn adorable. Frisky, too. Before I realised what he was up to, the rascal had chewed off half my watchband.

“We have to do the scare test,” I said. I had told Jenny the story many times of picking out Saint Shaun when I was a boy. Sitting in this heap of pups, she rolled her eyes at me. “Seriously,” I said. “It works.”

I stood up and turned away from the puppies. Then I swung quickly back around, taking a sudden step towards them. I stomped my foot and barked out, “Hey!”

I didn’t seem to scare any of them. But only one plunged forward to meet the assault head-on. It was Sale Dog. He plowed full steam into me, throwing a cross-body block across my ankles. Then he pounced at my shoelaces as though he was convinced they were dangerous enemies that needed to be destroyed.

“I think it’s fate,” Jenny said.

“Ya think?” I said. I scooped him up and held him in one hand in front of my face, studying his mug. He looked at me with heart-melting brown eyes and then nibbled my nose. I plopped him into Jenny’s arms, where he did the same to her. “He certainly seems to like us,” I said.

Sale Dog was ours. We wrote Lori a cheque, and she told us we could return to take the dog home with us in three weeks, when he was eight weeks old. We thanked her, gave Lily one last pat, and said goodbye.

Walking to the car, I threw my arm around Jenny’s shoulder and pulled her tight to me. “Can you believe it?” I said. “We actually got our dog!”

Just as we were reaching the car, we heard a commotion coming from the woods. Something was crashing through the brush – and breathing very heavily. It sounded like a creature from a horror film. And it was coming our way. We froze, staring into the darkness. The sound grew louder and closer. Then, in a flash, the thing burst into the clearing and came charging in our direction, a yellow blur. A very big yellow blur. As it galloped past, without stopping or noticing us, we could see it was a large Labrador retriever. But it was nothing like sweet Lily. This one was soaking wet and covered up to its belly in mud and burrs. Its tongue hung out wildly to one side. Froth flew off its jowls as it barrelled past. I detected an odd, slightly crazed, yet somehow joyous gaze in its eyes. It was as though this animal had just seen a ghost – and couldn’t possibly be more thrilled about it.

Then, with the roar of a stampeding herd of buffalo, it was gone, around the back of the house and out of sight. Jenny let out a little gasp.

“I think,” I said, a slight queasiness rising in my gut, “we just met Dad.”

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Homeward Bound (#ue354eabb-2d76-556d-bc85-bb2c87b80dcb)

When it was time to bring the dog home, Jenny was at Disney World with her sister’s family, so I picked him up by myself.

Lori brought out my new dog from the back of the house. I gasped. The tiny, fuzzy puppy we had picked out three weeks earlier had more than doubled in size. He came barrelling at me and ran head first into my ankles. He collapsed in a pile at my feet and rolled on to his back with his paws in the air. I hoped it was his way of telling me I was the boss.

Lori must have sensed my shock. “He’s a growing boy, isn’t he?” she said cheerily. “You should see him pack away the puppy chow!”

I leaned down and rubbed his belly. “Ready to go home, Marley?” I asked. That’s what Jenny and I had decided to name him – after Bob Marley, our favourite reggae musician. It felt right.

I used beach towels to make a cosy nest for him on the passenger seat of the car. I set him down in it. But I was barely out of the driveway when he began squirming and wiggling his way out of the towels. He belly-crawled in my direction across the seat, whimpering.

Between the seats, Marley ran into a problem. There he was, hind legs hanging over the passenger and front legs hanging over the driver’s side. In the middle, his stomach was firmly beached on the hand brake. His little legs were going in all directions, clawing at the air. He wiggled and rocked and swayed, but he was grounded like a freighter on a sandbar.

I reached over and ran my hand down his back. That made him squiggle even more. His hind paws desperately tried to dig into the carpeted hump between the two seats. Slowly he began working his hindquarters into the air, his butt rising up, up, until the law of gravity finally kicked in. He slid head-first down the other side of the console, somersaulting on to the floor at my feet and flipping onto his back. From there he easily scrambled up into my lap.

Man, was he happy – desperately happy! He quaked with joy as he burrowed his head into my stomach and nibbled the buttons of my shirt. His tail slapped a steady beat on the steering wheel.

I found I could change the tempo of his wagging by touching him. When I had both hands on the wheel, his tail beat three thumps per second. Thump. Thump. Thump. If I pressed one finger against the top of his head, the rhythm jumped from a slow waltz to a lively bossa nova. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump! Two fingers and it jumped up to a mambo. Thump-thumpa-thump-thump-thumpa-thump! And when I cupped my entire hand over his head and massaged my fingers into his scalp, the beat exploded into a machine-gun, rapid-fire samba. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump!

“Wow! You’ve got rhythm!” I told him. “You really are a reggae dog.”

When we got home, I led him inside and unhooked his leash. He began sniffing and didn’t stop until he had sniffed every square inch of the place. Then he sat back and looked up at me with his head cocked as if he were saying, “Cool house, but where are my brothers and sisters?”

The reality of his new life didn’t really hit him until bedtime. I had set up his sleeping quarters in the one- car garage attached to the side of the house. The room was dry and comfortable, and it had a rear door that led out into the fenced backyard. With its concrete floor and walls, it was virtually indestructible. “Marley,” I said cheerfully, leading him out there, “this is your room.”

I had scattered chew toys around, laid newspapers down in the middle of the floor, filled a bowl with water, and made a bed out of a cardboard box lined with an old bedspread.

“And here is where you’ll be sleeping,” I said, and lowered him into the box. He was used to sleeping in a box, but had always shared it with his siblings. Now he paced the perimeter of the box and sadly looked up at me. As a test, I stepped back into the house and closed the door. I stood and listened. At first nothing. Then a slight, barely audible whimper. And then full-fledged crying. It sounded like someone was in there torturing him.

I opened the door, and as soon as he saw me he stopped. I reached in and petted him for a couple of minutes. Then I left again. Standing on the other side of the door, I began to count. One, two, three… he made it seven seconds before the yips and cries began again. We repeated the exercise several times. Each time it was the same.

I was tired and decided it was time for him to cry himself to sleep. I left the garage light on for him, closed the door, walked to the opposite side of the house, and crawled into bed. The concrete walls didn’t muffle his pitiful cries. I lay there, trying to ignore them. I figured he would give up any minute and go to sleep.

The crying continued. Even after I wrapped my pillow around my head, I could still hear it. Poor Marley. Out there alone for the first time in his life. His mother was missing in action, and so were all his brothers and sisters. There wasn’t even a single dog smell.

I hung on for another half hour before getting up and going to him. As soon as he spotted me, his face brightened and his tail began to beat the side of the box. It was as if he were saying, “Come on. Hop in. There’s plenty of room.”

Instead I lifted the box with him in it and carried it into my bedroom. I placed it on the floor against the side of the bed. I lay down on the very edge of the mattress, my arm dangling into the box. There, my hand resting on his side where I could feel his rib cage rise and fall with his every breath, we both drifted off to sleep.

3 (#ue354eabb-2d76-556d-bc85-bb2c87b80dcb)

Mr Wiggles (#ue354eabb-2d76-556d-bc85-bb2c87b80dcb)

For the next three days I threw myself into taking care of our new puppy. I lay on the floor with him and let him scamper all over me. I wrestled with him. I used an old hand towel to play tug-of-war with him. Boy, was he strong! He followed me everywhere – and tried to gnaw on anything he could get his teeth around.

It took Marley just one day to discover the best thing about his new home – toilet paper. Five seconds after he disappeared into the bathroom, he came racing back out. As he sprinted across the house with the end of the toilet-paper roll clenched in his teeth, a paper ribbon unrolled behind him. The place looked like it had been decorated for Halloween.

Every half hour or so I would lead him into the backyard to pee or poop. When he had accidents in the house, I scolded him. When he peed outside, I placed my cheek against his and praised him in my sweetest voice. And when he pooped outside, I carried on as though we’d just won the lottery.

When Jenny returned from Disney World, she threw herself into him with the same utter abandon. It was amazing. As the days unfolded I saw in my young wife a gentle motherly side I had not known existed. She held him. She petted him. She played with him. She fussed over him. She combed through every strand of his fur in search of fleas and ticks. She rose every couple of hours through the night – night after night – to take him outside for bathroom breaks.

Mostly Jenny fed him.

Following the instructions on the bag, we gave Marley three large bowls of puppy chow a day. He wolfed down every morsel in a matter of seconds. Marley’s appetite was huge, and his poop was huger still. The giant mounds that came out looked an awful lot like what he’d eaten earlier. Was he even digesting this stuff?