walking franklin

Yesterday afternoon, as the sun was setting, I took Franklin the dog for his evening walk. On one side of our townlet, the road is divided by an esplanade with tall trees and grass. Each lane is only a little wider than a car. I like walking along here, between trees and houses. We are off the beaten path away from major automobile traffic -- with the exception of the person trying to find a short-cut through our winding roads or the teenage child of a neighbor who has not yet made the connection between speed and the discomfort that it causes folks with dogs walking along the road. With no curbs, a small lane, and a culvert alongside either side of most of the roads, the walker in our townlet has to share the road with the driver.

I work at getting us off the road when I see or hear a car coming. Because Franklin is a Scottish Terrier, and noises associated with rolling wheels push all his buttons, I have to be careful to hear the sneaking up of a bicycle or roller blade before it passes us. I work at keeping him quiet during these interruptions to our walk, but I am not always successful. Scotties are fearless, and have no sense of priority in being indignant or eager to hunt and attack. I got him at eight weeks, and socialized him with the neighbors, with children and with neighborhood dogs. I could never get him to not react to the wheels of the trash can, the vacuum cleaner or the local school bus.

But most of the time, morning and evening, we take our stroll around the townlet, just us two observing the light and its play through the trees, or absence of it now that the sun goes up later and down earlier. Morning and evening light is the most interesting in the landscape. I wish I had the talent of a painter to capture the brighter lights on the tops of trees facing the sun, the darker greens at the bottom, and of course, the leaves of multiple yellows, oranges and reds still clinging to the deciduous trees, or having made their final dive, now flowing across the street, across lawns, moved by the wind.

As we started our walk, down alongside the esplanade, I thought I saw a familiar sight. It was my old Snapper riding lawn mower. A neighbor got it from the dumpster, re-built the carburetor, fixed a wire broken by a mouse or some other little rodent, and now he was merrily mowing the yard. This year's dumpster swap (see below) was a real success. I could never fix that lawnmower. I have more room in my garden shed, and I have my new-found rocks. We are all happy about this transaction.

Franklin has a routine, and for the most part we walk in silence. I use an expandable leash, something I hated to encounter in DC, when I was walking along on the sidewalk and I had to wait for the dog owner to reel in their pet before I could pass. But here in my wooded townlet, we rarely pass crowds of people, and when we do, we often stop and chat. Better than a newspaper, these chats are very informative about the life and health of my neighbors.

My partner and I got Franklin right after we moved here. It was a few months before I got a job, so I literally took care of him day and night. The bonding stuck. I am his mother/daddy (in the words of a neighbor). Dogs are important in the townlet. Lots of people know Franklin by name who have never known mine. I am sure that he has been in more neighborhood homes than I. This happened when he started climbing up and over the chain link fence around the backyard. I thought I was prepared for all the characteristics of a Scotty, but I missed the one about how agile they are at climbing. Six inch legs, and he gets over that fence in about ten seconds. There was a period when he would get out a lot. Getting him back became a game, one that I could never enjoy because the whole time I was imagining him being hit by a car or getting picked up by somebody else. When he is running loose, he runs close to the ground, his eyebrows and beard pushed back by his speed, his dark black eyes in the midst of his dark black face looking with all the intensity of a receiver or runningback who sees open ground to the goal post. I think he is humming Born Free. I would love to see a place where Scotties run free, the way they must have back in the farms of Scotland, when they went off on their own to clean the place up of vermin. They love working on their own, and yet at any time, they like to be around their pack. It is an interesting tension.

I cannot let him out in the backyard anymore unsupervised. The dear airedales next door, Fred and Penny, and Murphy, another neighbor dog, join him in the backyard for improvised dog park. Murphy sometimes joins us in the morning for our walks. He is a noble mutt, with a serious pose and large brown eyes. Franklin teases Penny, the leader of this small pack, by trying to steal her toys. He loves owning things. Back when he spent days in the backyard, he would re-arrange his things in a circle. He often buries bones in the house, with a ritual scooping of his head as if here were covering them with dirt, an air guitar kind of move.

During his first year, I took him to our parish's blessing of the animals in celebration of St. Francis. I held him. The ratio of adults with pets to children with pets was almost equal. Everything was fine until the Rector began to make the circle for the blessing. Little girls started unzipping animal totes, pulling out hamsters and cats. I thought Franklin was going to brake my face as he lunged with his face back and forth. I held on, thinking that if he did get loose, it would be bloody.

His first spring as an adult dog, he killed on what was a beautiful Saturday a squirrel and a mourning dove. He almost caught a rabbit. I told him that I knew he was bred to hunt and kill, but that I was not prepared psychologically for the carnage. We have managed to keep him free from killing, although this past winter, out on drifts I wouldn't wade through to get him, he batted a baby mole around for about thirty minutes.

Franklin lives with us and our three cats. He loves to chase them. He'd like to play puppy games where they would chase him back. Only Jake, the big one, will tolerate much of this. Glenda is too old and cranky and full of disdain to ever let him too close to her. Scared Chloe, our torty, is too fast. She often finds herself on table watching him from above. We used to keep the cats off of the table and kitchen counters. Our standards have fallen. If a chair is left pulled out from the table, Franklin can jump up on it and then on the table. That is my standard now: no dogs on the dining room table.

Franklin will be four in January. He has a jaunty walk -- Scotties' gaits are different from other dogs, and his tags clang together lightly as we move through the neighborhood, stopping at rocks and mailboxes where he can make his mark. He didn't raise his back leg to pee until he was about a year and a half. I broke out laughing when I first saw him do it. He didn't appreciate this response. After the first couple of stops on a walk, he is shooting blanks, but he continues doing it as if were making a grand mark the way the bigger dogs do. I know way too much about his pooping and peeing, but we are both comfortable with this. Sometimes when I am in the bathroom, the door will fly open and he will walk into the door looking as if he is perplexed why I would be separated from him.

As a child, I always wanted a Scotty, but never got one. I drove one day to Decatur, Alabama, about 9 hours from Indy, spent the night, got up the next morning and picked him out after going through the behavior steps suggested like throwing keys to the side to see if they hear it, putting him on his back to see how long it takes for him to struggle to turn back right (too quickly and he might be too head strong, too slowly and he might be too cowed). Franklin had a brother who had a little gash on his nose. I now realize that Franklin probably gave the puppy that gash. They were in a child's portable play pen in the lady's living room. I picked Franklin, and then we drove together back to Indy. He was a little bigger than my hand. At some interstate rest stop south of Nashville, I let him out and we walked back and forth. Two old ladies walked up and asked about him. I told them that I had always wanted a dog like this. "You are never too old for your dreams to come true," said one of the ladies. In this case, she was exactly right.

Sometimes as we walk, Franklin gets lucky and sees a rabbit or a squirrel. One day recently, he perked up and tried to chase a cat that happened to be chasing a chipmunk. Twice we have seen a coyote. In Texas, he chased one of the many deer strolling along the lawns of his grandparents neighborhood on the bluffs of Canyon Lake. He is not a garden dog in the way that Glenda was a garden cat. In Austin and in DC, she would follow me into the garden and contentedly sit by while I planted or weeded. I have a tether and leash so that he can join me in the front garden, but I cannot get him too close to the earth. He is a born digger (terra/terrier). He doesn't go around digging up, but that little desire can be ignited easily. I don't encourage it. Hanging around on a tethered leash is not his idea of fun. He wants to bark and chase and smell. Movement is his favorite mode.

And yet at night, he goes into his crate on his own, calm and peaceful. If the alarm doesn't go off the next morning, he will bark until I wake up. It's not a big bark, just a little nudge. A very insistent nudge.

I need these neighborhood walks twice a day, and Franklin does too. When the time comes to go out for a walk, I try not to think too hard about who is calling the shots here. It is a mutual decision.