I first met him when I lived in a small apartment at the back of a publishing house that did a twice-weekly local newspaper. I worked as an editor and writer in the back-office magazine division, and lived exactly one door away from my work. My commute was all of 10 feet.
The town was called Mammoth Lakes, and it was a summer-winter resort that offered skiing (and way too much snow-shoveling) in the winter, and hiking, camping and fishing in the summer. I can’t say whether it was the altitude, or the innate dryness of the air, but fleas were unable to survive at the 8,000 feet elevation, which made the place a paradise for dogs. Add in the limitless trails due to the fact that the town stood on the edge of the High Sierra mountain wilderness, an uncountable number of crystal-clear, ice-cold streams flowing out of those mountains and into cold, clear trout-filled lakes, and the plentiful wildlife – deer, bears, coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks and lightning-fast bunnies – and it would have to be the place every good city dog dreamed of finding as his reward after death.
After moving there for a single ski season back in 1974, I’d lived in the town for fifteen years.
There were other apartments upstairs. For this particular ski season, a bunch of snowboarders fresh out of high school had pooled their money and moved to my little mountain town, five of them – and one large dog – in a one bedroom apartment.
I had my own dog, a big lanky black-grizzled German shepherd named Ranger who was my constant companion. I gave Ranger enormous amounts of freedom – he was three years old before he ever wore a collar – and on this day he was snoozing in the shade on my front doormat while I lazed in the bedroom reading.
Ranger rarely barked. Because we went on hour-long hikes twice a day, he was seldom bored, and any warning barks he might have had a tendency to make were answered with instant attention on my part, so he never had to do it for long. His warning bark, which began in his youth as the typical German shepherd Rargh-rargh-rargh! had gradually devolved into a single syllable, a pirate-like exclamation of “Arr!”
I rolled off the bed onto my feet instantly when he did it then.
Ranger’s food and water bowls were on the carpet between the kitchen and living room of my small apartment, about 5 feet, on this day, from my open door. Standing in the doorway with a happy grin was a large black and silver mutt with floppy ears and intense golden eyes. He stood there patiently, wagging gently at me, as Ranger poked around on him with his nose.
“Hey, big guy!” I said. “Where’d you come from?” He took this as the invitation it was and stepped in to greet me, glancing sideways at the food bowl as he passed.
This was my first sight of Tito, and my first experience of his ability to charm his way into or out of anything. He sauntered casually over to me, tail wagging gently in cadence with his walk, and leaned his hundred-or-so pounds against my leg.
I went down on one knee to ruffle the fur under his jaws with both hands, and he swept me briefly with that golden gaze before looking off into space and soaking up the pats.
He had a thick wolfy undercoat of silvery-white, completely hidden over most of his body by an overcoat of glossy black guard hairs. The intelligent-looking dome of his head was soft black, as were the outsides of his floppy ears, and that black sloped down his forehead to meet a friendly explosion of expressive silver brows and vibrissae. The silvery fur of his face was an island that lapped down onto his throat and met a perfect horizontal line of black at his chest. His inner legs and belly were the same silvery-white.
He was a solid pup, about two years old, I guessed, with firm muscles and thick bones under the fur. He had the sturdiness of a work dog combined with the lankiness of a distance runner.
And there was something about him …
If I described it as “amiable contentment,” you’d imagine it as something low-key, but this dog somehow projected it outward from him in a high-wattage signal. He had enough of it inside that it lapped over onto anyone around him. If I’d paid attention, I probably would have noticed the level of innate tension I live with dropping by half. Instead, though, I felt it as “What a neat dog!”
I scratched the point of his chest where the black met the silver, and he responded as if I’d pushed a button: he reared up instantly and placed his paws on my shoulders so his face was on a level with mine.
“Well, you’re a friendly guy, aren’t you?” It was then I took in his distant look and noticed the slight oscillation of his back end. I glanced down and he was sporting an enormous hard-on.
I shoved him away with a laugh. “Hey! I’m not that kind of date!” I thumped his ribs and pushed him out the door, closing it behind him.
The next day he was back.
Ranger and I both had a thing about food. If I cook something and eat it right away, everything’s fine. But if I spoon it into a covered bowl and put it in the fridge, somehow it turns into not-food, with all the culinary appeal of aluminum siding. Likewise, if I prepared a bowl of food for Ranger, he ate it with every sign of enjoyment, but after he walked away from it, it turned into not-food. It lay congealing into a muddy brown mass, and at the next feeding time I invariably shoveled it into the garbage and scrubbed out the bowl before putting more real food into it.
Tito was nowhere near as picky, and the next time he sauntered in, he helpfully cleaned out Ranger’s food bowl as he passed, scrubbing it down to the stainless steel with his rough tongue. He was equally thoughtful on every succeeding visit.
In a week, Tito was accompanying Ranger and I on occasional hikes. One of the snowboarders, Sean Pogatchnik (or something sounding equally Polish, or Czechoslovakian, or whatever it was), was Tito’s actual owner, but he seemed perfectly content to have a complete stranger drive off with his dog a couple of times a week.
Of course it also solved a problem for him. At the age of two, Tito was passionately possessed by canine wanderlust, and the days he walked with me were the days he was less likely to go off and have adventures of his own.
I went up to the snowboarder haven for a visit one evening, sharing a beer and getting introduced to Renn & Stimpy on TV, and the lot of us – six guys, including myself, two limpet-mine girlfriends and a dog – regarded each other in uncomfortable bemusement for an hour or so before I departed. They were into snowboarding and heavy drinking and I wasn’t, I was into reading and thinking, horseback riding and wilderness camping, and they weren’t. And they seemed to think Renn & Stimpy would shock and horrify stodgy, solidified old me. The list of conversational topics – TV and Tito – was soon used up, and eventually I realized the couple of girls in the room had other things on their minds than humoring an ancient 30-something, so I just left.
Winter came to an end and Sean and his posse split up. Sean hung in town for a while, living with Debbie, a girl whom I knew as a waitress from a local eatery, over in a part of the town we called The Ghetto. Pretty soon Sean was off south of the equator to do some mountain climbing or reverse-season skiing, and Tito passed into Debbie’s ownership.
I saw him tied on a cable run one day when I passed by, and stopped to ask if I could come pick him up occasionally. Debbie was fine with it, and I felt good about saving Tito from being tied up all the time, so he started coming with Ranger and I even more frequently.
One day he wasn’t there. He’d gotten loose and gone off to have an adventure, but it ended in incarceration at the local dog pound. Debbie bailed him out, but it wasn’t cheap.
It happened again. And again. One day when I saw Debbie at the eatery, having not seen Tito for more than a week, I asked after him.
She was almost in tears. “He’s down at the dog pound, and I can’t afford to get him out!”
Every dog owner in town was familiar with the local dog pokey. It was captained by a guy named Ray, who was a trapper and hunter as well as the dog catcher, and everybody called him Death Ray.
Two weeks at the Casa Canidae was all a dog got. After that, it was bye-bye via what I once heard described as “the lead pellet method.” Cheaper than gas or injections, it was an ugly but sure-fire – literally – way to do away with a dog.
The fine was about $140, as I recall. More than I wanted to spend, but then Tito wasn’t just the dog of a friend, he was a friend in his own right, and also a friend of Ranger’s, who seemed to enjoy having him along on our hikes.
I mulled it over for several days and finally decided I’d adopt him and find him a good home.
I almost waited too long – the day I went down to adopt him, he was already scheduled for a lead pellet the next morning. But a bit of paperwork and $140 later, I had another big dog in my small apartment.
I could tell Ranger sensed the change. He stepped up the dominance displays – hounding Tito out on the trail, coming up and putting his head on Tito’s back, even biting at his face on frequent occasions. In three days it boiled over on one of our hikes into a roaring, rolling, fur-ripping dog fight.
If you own a little foo-foo dog, you won’t like this next bit. But every owner of large dogs knows that there are certain times when nothing less than shock-and-awe violence will control a dangerous situation. You can’t stand back and scold while two large carnivores give each other $300 wounds.
I waded into the two of them, kicking and punching and shouting, trying to get them separated before they killed or maimed each other, and Ranger in full fight mode whipped around and latched onto my leg.
Ouch. The lot of us were fine just a few minutes later, and went on with our hike. My leg hurt, but there was no blood, and I just ignored it.
It happened two more times. The third time, Ranger’s teeth actually penetrated the denim fabric of my jeans and opened up two bloody holes in my leg. Ouch again – and I still carry the scar.
Ranger was lanky and fragile looking but tough as an old boot, and he would have been up for more rounds with Tito, but fortunately Tito was not up for more rounds with me. He learned to put up patiently with Ranger’s dominance displays at home, and dealt with them out on hikes by staying well ahead of us on the trail, so that Ranger could seldom catch him.
The “find him a good home” idea eroded away under that intense golden gaze and the obvious joy Tito took in our hikes. Two weeks into having him in my life and I couldn’t have given him up for anything.
For better or worse now, I had another hundred-pound-plus dog in my already cramped home and stretched budget.