This morning, while I packed my lunch for work, Hank lay on the kitchen floor with his chin across my foot. The light comes in low through the back door window in October, and in it his whole muzzle looked frosted. I keep trying to remember when that happened. Gradually, I think, and then all at once last winter, when he spent eight weeks lying still enough for me to really look at him.
Today is October 2. Five years ago today, we brought him home.
Then
The Hank who came home with us on October 2, 2021, was about 18 months old and skinny enough that you could count his ribs. He'd been picked up as a stray in Oklahoma, ridden north overnight in a crate on a rescue transport van and spent a few weeks with a patient foster family in Anoka who taught him that the kitchen trash is not a buffet. At the meet-and-greet he sniffed my shoes, walked over to Caleb and sat down on his boot. Caleb, who'd told me he was "not really a pet person," looked down and said, "Well."
We were renting a duplex in Coon Rapids then. The first thunderstorm that fall, we found him wedged behind the toilet, shaking. On day three Mabel swatted him on the nose, no claws, and the house rules were settled for good. The next August we bought this house, with its chain-link fence and a maple full of squirrels, and he acted like we'd bought it for him.
In between
Two scares, three years apart. At Thanksgiving 2022 he ate the roast twine, drippings and all, and we left an emergency hospital two nights later with a $3,912 bill and no insurance. We enrolled him in a policy the week after. Then, on December 28 of last year, he chased a squirrel across the icy backyard and came up toe-touching on his left hind leg. TPLO surgery on January 8, eight weeks in an exercise pen beside the sofa, six sessions on an underwater treadmill, slow walks that grew from five minutes to a mile and a half and finally, on May 15, the phone call that cleared him to run in the yard again. By August he was swimming in his life jacket.
Both times, he was more patient than we were.
Now
- Weight: then, ribs. Now 67 pounds, down from his crate-rest high of 72 and staying there on purpose.
- Where he sleeps: then, pressed against whichever door we'd last walked through. Now the back door, every night, like he's guarding it.
- Caleb: then, "not really a pet person." Now he can't get from the truck to the house without a golden shadow, and on plow nights Hank waits up for him.
- Mabel: then, a swat on the nose. Now they stand shoulder to shoulder at the dining room window whenever a squirrel shows up at the feeder, and last February she moved into his bed while he was on rest and has never fully moved out.
- Thunder: then, behind the toilet. Now the basement den, the blanket over the crate and the white noise. Still scared. Just better set up for it.
- His chin: then gold. Now white, with gray creeping up toward his eyes.
- Insurance: then, none. Now a policy that paid $6,653.70 toward a knee.
Tonight
I left the clinic a little after four. Caleb was already home, and Hank was at the back door talking before I'd shut the car door. We did all three parts, the same as every year.
The river walk was the same stretch of the Rum, out to the sandy bend and back, a little under two miles. He walked all of it at his own pace, which is slower than it used to be and still faster than mine. At the bend he waded in to his elbows, stood looking downstream for a while and shook off next to me. Last October that walk was a habit. This October, ten months after a slip on the ice, it felt like something we'd earned.
Then the plain burger patty in the cast-iron pan, no salt, no seasoning, cooled by the window and handed over in pieces, with a little kibble taken out of his supper to make room. Then one photo under the maple. One. The top branches have gone orange and the lower ones are still green, and he's lying in the grass with his left leg stretched straight out behind him, the way he's lain since spring, with a white chin, a wet belly and the face of a dog who knows exactly what comes next.
There are five photos on the fridge now, in a row, from the thin one with his ears back to tonight's. He's asleep by the back door, smelling like river and beef, and the fridge door is going to need a second row.
