XV water, wonder, work

GOLDEN RETRIEVERS ARE water dogs, bred to swim into a lake and bring back the duck you shot. Because I loved Daffy and Donald since childhood, I never shot a duck, which would have felt like toonicide. Trixie had no opportunity to prove her merit as a hunter’s dog.

Our house in Harbor Ridge had a pool, however, where we learned she was a better swimmer than her mom or dad. Prior to adopting Trix, we had seldom used the pool, but when she stood at the French doors, staring at the sun-glistered water and sighing, we couldn’t resist taking the plunge with her. Gerda, who never had the opportunity to learn to swim, decided to teach herself with the assistance of a strap-on flotation device. As Gerda paddled earnestly from one end of the pool to the other, Trix swam with her, but not at her side; instead, our golden girl continually-literally-swam circles around her mom all the way from one end of the pool to the other, as if to show how it should be done, or as if making another joke.

Although she loved to swim, Trixie wouldn’t enter the pool until invited. Sometimes she used the steps, but usually she gathered her legs together, tensed, and launched off the coping, making a huge splash. During an hour of play, she returned to the deck ten times, rested for a few minutes, then barreled into the water again.

We have pliable-foam pool floats coated in rubber, on which we can stretch out to tan. The second time I took Trixie to play in the water, I drew one of these floats into the pool when she climbed out to take a rest. Aboard it, lying on my back, I glanced at her. She watched me with great interest, head raised and thrust forward, intrigued to see me drifting languidly on the water without effort.

I basked in the sun until overcome by a feeling that I was about to find myself in a Daffy Duck cartoon. When I opened my eyes, Trixie stood at the edge of the pool, legs bunched under her, grinning maniacally. “No!” I cried, but she jumped, slamming onto the float, turning it upside-down and dumping both of us into the drink.

Surfacing, I saw her pawing frantically at the float, trying to clamber onto it, while it bobbled and turned in the water. I held it steady, forcing one side under water so her forelimbs could easily slide onto it, and then, by holding the float with one hand and giving her butt a boost with the other, I got her aboard.

Judging by her expression, this was one of the most amazing and delightful experiences of her life. She lay with her back legs splayed, her forelimbs bent at the elbows and straight in front of her, head raised, looking around in wonder. Floating! On water! Without paddling! Genius! My dad’s a genius!

When I towed her from one end of the pool to the other and then back again, she panted with excitement. And she made the most winsome sound, not a whine or whimper, but a thin sweet expression of total doggy ecstasy. I’m moving! Through water! Without swimming! Brilliant! My dad’s brilliant!

At first shakily, then with confidence, she stood on the float while I pulled it the length of the pool again. Surfer girl.

Over the years, she spent more time being towed around than she did swimming. She taught herself to get aboard without help, by pushing the float into a corner of the pool and wedging it there, where it couldn’t bobble away from her while she climbed onto it.

I marveled at the chain of reasoning necessary for her to reach the conclusion that she could take control of this situation.

While lying on the float, Trix liked to play a game with me involving a thin, hollow rubber ball with an air hole in it. I held the ball between thumb and forefinger, moving it back and forth on the surface of the water while she watched intently. Suddenly, I pulled the ball under without squeezing the air out of it. Excited, she thrust one paw into the water, trying to grasp the treasure as I moved it left, right, and in circles. Then I brought it in front of her face again, still under water. Because the air remained in the ball, and because the air hole was toward the bottom of the pool, the ball soared to the surface when released, rising with enough energy to erupt a few inches into the air. Trixie watched it rising, trying to gauge the ascent, and often snatched it from the air, with her teeth, as it popped out of the pool.

One day, as I towed her around on her raft, she took the ball between her paws and pushed it under the water as she had seen me do. As we moved along, she stared contemplatively at the submerged blue sphere. When I paused and the raft grew still, she released the ball, which popped out of the water. With her mouth, she caught it in midair. She repeated this a few times, intent on the process, and then raised her head and met my eyes.

I held her stare for a moment and then whispered, “You are one smart little girl.”

She grinned and panted, pleased by the praise.

Short Stuff was learning new tricks, and-like us-even a new perspective. During her first few years as a Koontz, Trixie seemed focused exclusively on things at ground level. She was uninterested in birds, as if oblivious of any realm above a rooftop. I hadn’t thought how strange this was until I considered that in its historic role as a partner in the hunt, a retriever must track the flight and fall of the shot fowl if it is to find the bird and return it to its master’s game bag. Perhaps Trix’s education as an assistance dog trained her out of her appreciation for the sky.

When encountering rabbits grazing on a lawn, she greatly enjoyed stalking them, though she never chased and would not actually seize one. She always approached the target bunny with exaggerated stealth: slowly raise one paw at a time, freeze on three legs, wait, wait, leisurely reach forward, place the paw on the ground again, wait, wait, and now the next paw… She crept up on the prey in a slow-motion doggy ballet, and even when the rabbit saw her from the first, she often got quite near before it bolted. If she didn’t close much of the gap, she continued on her walk without comment, but when she got near enough to have taken her prey if she had wanted it, she looked up at me and grinned as if to say, See, Dad, I love the ways of people, but I still know the way of the wild.

Trix and I were swimming-well, she was lying on her float while I pulled her back and forth in the lap pool-when the Goodyear blimp, a fixture in southern California skies, appeared at low altitude along the coast. It turned inland toward the ridge on which we lived.

Cruising at a height of perhaps two hundred feet, the blimp was an impressive sight. Its engine and propellers made less noise than the swimming-pool pump, therefore the vessel loomed as silently as an apparition.

Because of the blimp’s low altitude, Trixie spotted it during its approach, and she expressed her astonishment by letting the ball fall out of her mouth. She watched in wonder. When the vessel passed directly overhead, seeming so low that I could throw the ball and hit it, Trixie’s gaze remained riveted on it. From the back of her throat issued that sweet, high-pitched sound of delight, and her wet tail thumped on the float. She tracked the blimp for several minutes, until it was a dot in the distance.

After that summer day, though she still stalked rabbits until she spooked them away, she remained aware of the sky as she had not been previously. She became interested in birds and passing aircraft. Like a door, the world above had opened to her.

By Trixie’s striking intelligence, by her sense of humor, by the uncanny moments when she seemed to reveal a spiritual dimension, she renewed my sense of the mystery of life. Now it seemed that the looming blimp restored to her a small lost measure of her own wonder.

And at our beach house one morning, a similar incident deepened Trixie’s appreciation of the harbor.