Do Dogs Dream?

            Although I don’t think it could be said that my wife Charlene and I have an animal rescue operation, the truth is all our pets have been strays or their offspring, at least since we moved to our current home about sixteen years ago. At one time, we had thirteen cats; the result, I suspect, of word being passed among the homeless that food was to be had with us. We started out with one, but with the regional predilection to dump unwanted animals, a series of weary, bedraggled felines made their way to our door, all of them needing food or love in no particular order.
           Now we are down to two, after coyotes dispatched eleven of them two years ago. Along with the other animal lovers on the creek where I live, our losses were staggering, until one of the residents hired a professional hunter who bagged five of the varmints and probably spread fear among the rest of the pack.
            The coyotes are still around, but during the summer, wild game abounds and these unwelcome intruders from the west are most likely content with what they can snatch in the woods. The danger will increase, of course, as animals pack into their dens for the winter, but our two remaining cats are survivors and they will have an additional defense this year.
            Charlene and I live on Grassy Creek in Pike County, Kentucky. That is not the Greasy Creek of my books, although my readers may remember that my property was the home of my great-great-great grandfather, who acquired it with a land grant in 1873. He moved away after his lover died and gave it to her family. No one in the family knew this until I began research on my books.
            Grassy Creek is a pleasant community, except for the coyotes, but no different in that regard that almost anywhere else now.  I read recently that coyotes have been spotted in Washington, DC. I refer to the four-legged kind, of course; the bipod variety has lived there since L’Enfant laid out the city.
            I still go to Greasy Creek, about a forty minute trip, every day and in fact, I have dogs and cats at my mother’s house there. She has been a resident of a comfortable Assisted Living center for the past five years, but my brother and I maintain her house for the odd occasion that she comes back to visit or when family from out of town need a place to sleep. My brother lives near her house, but we share responsibility for it. In addition to one cat, an excellent mouser, (which is necessary because her old house has many possibilities for entry) I have two dogs. The cat stays in the house (she sensibly prefers air conditioning to the heavy humidity of late summer in the mountains), and showed up the day her predecessor, an ancient feline who was old when she came to my mom’s house, suddenly passed away.
            Clara Belle, my old cat, showed up over ten years ago and graced me with a litter of kittens (her last), and promptly became the matriarch of my mother’s estate. When the two dogs later drifted in, she wasted no time in establishing her dominance. Scooter, the first to arrive, greeted her with loud barking when she they first met. About an hour later, he slunk back, nursing his scratched nose and never bothered her again. When Jake arrived, she gave him no chance to bark and whacked him in the snout immediately. I suspect he still wonders what he did to tick her off.
            Two weeks ago, I found Clara Belle lying on the back porch as if she were sleeping. I had noticed she was not as sprightly as she usually was, and I attributed that to the heat, since she had apparently tired of staying alone in the house and seemed to want to stay outside to torment the inferior dogs she commanded.
            That same night, a walking bag of bones dashed over to the dog bowls, begging for food, and after an intense flea treatment, she has assumed Clara Belle’s role as mistress of my mother’s house. I wasn’t sure how it would work out, but I am pleased to report she uses the litter box scrupulously, does not shred the furniture, and has gained weight. She has also proven her worth by dispatching two mice who thought there would be easy pickings in a house where no one lives.
            The two dogs at my mother’s house are learning to defer to the new cat, probably because they remembered Clara Belle’s wrath. Jake, a German Shepherd, showed up a year ago, hungry and dehydrated, since few people on the creek wanted a huge black dog around. Jake has seen his better years, and his worn canines indicate there were many of them, but he is sleek and healthy now. Scooter, the small terrier that arrived before Jake, is young and hyper, but the two make a great combo and spend most of the day rolling in mock combat across my mother’s large yard.
            After the coyotes decimated my Grassy Creek cats, I thought about transferring the Greasy Creek dogs to protect my remaining cats, but my work schedule makes it difficult for me to spend much time at home during the week. I would have had to pen the dogs if they lived with me and I do not want to do that. Dogs, unlike cats, need attention and constant reassurance, and additionally, since my mother’s property has plenty of space for the dogs to run free, I decided not to move them from Greasy Creek. There are no neighbors close enough for them to bother, and they never leave the confines of the property. My brother lives close by, and his dogs frolic with mine. Happily, new renters have moved into an apartment we have there and my dogs and the renters love each other.
            Aside from the necessity of penning my dogs if I moved them to Grassy Creek, another reason we didn’t have a dog at our house is that I suspected my cats would not welcome a dog into their midst after what happened with the coyotes. They intensely dislike any visitors, and on the rare occasion that visitors brought their own dogs, the cats took a month to forgive us.
           Charlene and I have always wanted a dog at home, however, and there are plenty needing homes. It seems to be a special tragedy of the Southern Appalachians that there are so many churls throwing away dogs and cats after they are no longer cute and cuddly and so few people who can afford to take them in. The Pike County Animal Shelter is understaffed and underfunded and I suspect the reason I have never taken any of my strays there is because I would probably walk out with more than I came with.
           Some day, we told ourselves, when we retire and have the time to tend to a dog, we would get one. I’ve never expressed a preference for a particular breed, but Charlene has always wanted a collie. That remained mostly a fantasy, since we agreed that the heat and humidity of July and August would be cruel on such a wooly animal, and we certainly could not keep such a huge dog in the house. On top of that, collies are expensive to purchase and maintain, and we both felt it unfair to spend money for a purebred, when so many needy animals are euthanized every day.
            But then, on May 29th, along came Molly.          

Molly the Mystery Dog in a pensive mood.

            I do not know the name she was given, but that was the name we gave her. Since she arrived, she has learned to respond to it, and her intelligence confirms what we had always heard about her breed. The vet told us she was six to eight years old with good teeth and a touch of arthritis in her hips; in other words, a normal healthy dog for her age. She is also a complete mystery to us, to all the vets in Pike County, and to everyone within twenty miles of my house.
            We do not believe Molly was a throwaway, and neither do we believe she just drifted our way accidentally. The only thing we know for sure is that she arrived in our house and rushed up to play with us as if she had been born there.
            Last year, we remodeled our house and developed the grounds and my wife said jokingly that we needed a collie to complete the effect. Our house has quite a bit of native stone, and collies come in sable (light) or dark colors, sable being the perfect match. I agreed, but the old argument still made sense. That did not stop her from looking at collie websites at the Pikeville Public Library, where she works, and I now suspect someone may have overheard her mention her unrequited desire or had seen her browsing.
           But that answers only part of the question; the rest of it has to be why someone would give up such a beautiful animal. It was almost as if she magically appeared on our doorstep.  She could not have come through the hills, since her coat, while needing grooming, had no burrs or debris whatsoever (her first grooming cost me $140). None of my neighbors saw the dog anywhere but in our front yard, none of the businesses had any missing collie reports on their bulletin boards, the radio stations knew nothing, no one responded to our “found dog” ads, and none of the vets even had collie patients.
            When Jake and Scooter showed up at my mother’s house, it was easy to find their former owners, who each said the equivalent of: “You can have him. I don’t want him anymore.” We have spent two months searching for Molly’s family, and had we found them, I don’t think we would have had the same response.
            On the day Molly arrived, we found one of our rock flower planters disturbed, with tire tracks in the mulch, indicating someone had run into it and hastily attempted to straighten it back up. I suspect that whoever dropped her off, was in such a rush to leave (or couldn’t see for tears) that he or she ran off the driveway.
            What surprises us about this is that she gets along with our two cats. If any other cats, dogs, rabbits, squirrels or other animals intrude into our yard, Molly immediately sends them packing, but she has never displayed the slightest aversion to the cats. I no longer worry about coyotes. Now that our cats have gotten over their initial pique, all three of them wait on the back porch every day for us to get home for work.  Interestingly, Oscar and Autumn, our two cats, are siblings and generally hate each other for living, but even they tolerate each other better now than they did before Molly arrived.
            In some ways, things have changed at the Hopkins household and in other ways, not much has changed at all. Oscar and Autumn were born in a neighboring barn and never became used to a litter box. Instead, they come in or stay out at night according to the weather and their own personal calls of nature. Oscar normally has no compunction at waking us at odd hours of the night when he wants to go out. Autumn generally settles in and sleeps all night. That hasn’t changed, but now Molly snoozes peacefully in her own bed as well. She has her own “private” places on our property that I am confident she uses during the day, but she likes to be walked before we go to bed and after we get up in the morning. Now Oscar accompanies us on these jaunts, adding his share of compostable material near Molly’s.
            After the cats determined there would be no quantitative loss of attention due to Molly’s arrival, they treat her as part of the household and as unlikely as it sounds, it seems like she has always been here. She even has her own doggie door to the garage, which I had to have specially built since none of the off-the-shelf items would accommodate her girth.
And like Timmy, I suspect she would rush to save me if I fell down a well. Molly is a gorgeous, long-nosed, somewhat clumsy (with a scar on her nose to confirm this is not a recently developed trait), devoted, and beloved, certified family member now.
I just don’t know who she is.
            I used to see her run in her sleep when she first arrived, and I wondered what she was chasing. She doesn’t do that much anymore and I take that as a good sign. Maybe whatever dreams she had of her former life are fading, although I wonder what they were. Had there been children in her former life, children she ran after, children now grown and gone on with their lives? What happened to them? Even if she is nine or ten, the children she may have been raised with should not have gotten so old as to discard her.
           Did she live on a farm and in her dreams relive her adventures with neighborhood animals, with the rabbits slipping farther and farther away? Was she chasing the family that gave her up? There had to be some tragedy in her previous life for her owners to have released her: a death in the family, a divorce, finances gone awry; something at least profound. No one could have given her up willingly. If she had sad dreams, I hope they are fading. If her dreams were happy, I hope she files them away while we replace them with even better ones.
           I wonder if dogs dream in color. Do they relive their experiences: happy or sad, joyful or traumatic? Or are their dreams completely unlike ours? Is there something more inexplicable than simple dreams of fleeting rabbits? Do dogs have something in their DNA that will allow them to go even farther back, and is Molly following ancient highland paths all over again? Does she dream of fog-drenched meadows she has never seen and long-departed sheep she has never herded, and does she try to answer the call of her ancestors’ masters, all of whom returned to the Scottish heath ages ago? Do all animals have that faculty? Is it something more than mere instinct?
            I sometimes wonder if humans have that undiscovered faculty, or if we had it long ago and it is now too enervated by modern life to be useful to us. Maybe that’s what our dreams are too: visions from neither the present nor the future, but images we conjure when we need them, when we require the past to make sense of a bewildering present.
            I suspect that if I asked Molly that, she would try to find a way to answer.