In the dry and sunny day, the drooping trees did not whisper in the motionless air, but at a higher altitude, a breeze chased clouds toward the faraway coast. In the perfect stillness, shadows of clouds undulated across the ground, and seemed to be spirits invading this tranquil reality from a more turbulent parallel universe. Trixie’s radiant coat shone red blond in the fleeting forms of shade, blond red in the brighter light, her flags fluffy and white in either condition. Perhaps the strangeness of still air and rampant shadows contributed to my impression that our golden girl’s beauty was more ethereal than ever-even though she strained mightily on the leash, as if determined to pull me to my knees.

When we arrived at CCI, I hoped Trix would stop pulling, but my hope wasn’t fulfilled. She hadn’t yet arrived where she wished to be.

A few hundred people were in full celebration, standing in the hallways and between buildings in the courtyards. There might have been a hundred dogs in attendance, not just those who had graduated this day with their team partners, but also younger dogs in their training capes, with their puppy raisers, and release dogs, like Trixie, who were companions to the volunteers who gave so much time to CCI and made it purr like a high-performance engine.

Straining at the leash, Trixie led Gerda and me through the crowd, not the least interested in the double score of dogs she passed or in the people who called her name and reached out to pet her. At last she stopped nose to nose with another lovely golden retriever, their tails lashing with delight. Clearly, this must have been her destination from the moment she exited the SUV.

As the two dogs communed, Gerda and I chatted with the woman who had the other golden. When I described how determined Trixie had been to get to this very spot, she said, “Do you know what dog this is? It’s Tinsey, one of Trixie’s litter mates.”

Most experts will say that a few weeks after the pups in a litter are separated, they no longer recognize one another as brothers and sisters. Insufficient long-term memory.

Hah. Years later, Trixie caught the scent of her sibling from a couple of hundred yards and would not rest until they had been reunited. Considering all the other dogs present that day, this bit of evidence, though anecdotal, convinces me that dogs can remember not only what they learn from repetitive training or what knowledge directly assists their survival, but also what most matters to them otherwise, and they can remember it for a long, long time.

XVII dogs and death

WHEN A BELOVED character in one of my novels dies, I must write about that death with the emotion and the reverence I would bring to a eulogy given for a real person. We all go into that dark, which is the darkness of God, the ultimate humbling of our prideful kind; therefore, death is a sacred subject requiring me to consider the native knowledge with which I was born, whether I am writing about the death of a fictional person, a real person, or a dog.

Current theory claims that dogs are unaware they will die. Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with our intuition and common sense, which are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity.

We might take comfort in this claim that dogs are unaware of their mortality because it lifts from dogs the fundamental fear with which we must live. But it’s a false comfort, as anyone knows who has loved and been loved by a dog, and who has not surrendered his common sense.

Worse, in believing such a thing, we rob dogs of the profoundly moving stoicism that gives them immense dignity. When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.

We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women-meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices-live as if death is not a part of life but only an end. They worship youth, live for the moment, in time and of time, with no capacity to imagine anything outside of time. They do not deny death as much as they repress the recognition of their intimate relationship with it. Death is given a place in their thoughts similar to that occupied by a childhood friend not seen in twenty years, known to be still out there in the old hometown, a thousand miles away, but not currently relevant.

A life-altering lesson can be learned by considering what dogs know about mortality and how they know it.

Intuition + common sense = dog wisdom.

Contention One: Dogs know. Dogs know they die.

Contention Two: By intuition, dogs know more about death than the mere fact of it.

A neighbor of ours heard commotion in the backyard and stepped outside to discover that a mountain lion had come out of the canyon and over the fence. The big cat, one of the most ferocious of all predators and seen seldom in these parts, was after the family dog.

Around the yard, across the patio, around the pool, the dog-let’s call him Winslow-raced for his life, spun-jumped-scrambled from one hoped-for haven to another. Happily for both Winslow and his owner, the mountain lion allowed itself to be chased off with loud noise and a makeshift weapon. This is fortunate because the lion could have decided to go for a Big Mac instead of a small burger, and could have killed the owner as easily as it could have chowed down on Winslow, who was a third its size.

If dogs have no concept of their mortality, if they don’t know they die, why did Winslow strive so frantically to avoid the mountain lion? Maybe the big cat only wanted to play. Maybe they could have had a great time with a tug toy.

We could say that instinct inspired Winslow to flee.

Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity or a tendency to action, a natural impulse, genetically programmed. Bird migration in winter is one example, as is the pattern that the spider spins in its web.

Intuition is a higher form of knowledge than instinct. It is a direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning, knowledge neither derived from experience nor limited by it, such as that the whole is greater than a part, that two things each equal to a third thing are also equal to each other. Intuition also includes perceptions of space and spatial relationships, and an awareness of time.

Although instinct may exist in every creature from human beings to whales to field mice, it’s also a quality of essentially brainless creatures like ants and goldfish, which have no intuition. Common sense tells us a dog is more like a human being than like an ant.

But even if it was just instinct that told Winslow to run from the mountain lion, did it tell him merely to run or specifically to run because he would be eaten?

You might say it doesn’t matter which, because in either case, the action taken by Winslow was the same. But if Winslow knows he will be eaten, surely he knows he is mortal. Therefore, if one wishes to insist dogs are ignorant of their mortality, one must stick with the idea that it is enough for instinct to impel Winslow to run even if he does not know why he must escape the mountain lion.

But there will be many instances when Winslow or another of his kind will have seen a family dog or a house cat attacked and killed if not by the rare mountain lion, then by coyotes, which are more plentiful in these canyons.

So my next question is: Once Winslow has seen Fido or Fluffycat consumed by a coyote, does he finally realize what almost happened to him that day with the lion? Does he now recognize his own mortality?