a second child, we began to have a better sense of Ranger’s eccentricities after Indigo joined our family. Indigo had a passion for tennis balls, and for swimming, and developed an unsettling habit of climbing on top of the kitchen counters and rooting around in the flour container when we were out of the house. But there was one weakness that was Ranger’s alone, and that weakness was porcupines. His interaction with them never ended well. We’d hear him yelp in the backyard, and we’d all exchange glances. It could mean only one thing.
Moments later the dog would slink back into the house with a face full of quills. Sometimes, we could pluck them out; we learned that the quills inflate with air once they’re embedded, so you have to clip them with scissors before yanking them out with pliers. But unless the total number of quills was fewer than a baker’s dozen, this was not an operation that could be done with any safety at home. Usually what was required was dropping everything we’d had planned for that day and driving Mr. Needle-nose over to the vet’s.
On one of the first times this occurred, the vet asked us if we wanted to have Ranger neutered while he was out cold—it being necessary to knock him out with anesthesia while the quills were yoinked out, one after the other.
We’d been planning to have the dog fixed anyway, so sure, we told the vet. Let’s do that.
I wondered, after Ranger got home, whether he associated what had transpired with his ill-considered attack on the porcupine. Like, was the abiding lesson of this exchange that if you stick your nose where it should not go, you sometimes end up losing your doghood?
I am fairly certain this was not the Labrador’s takeaway, because the very next time a porcupine appeared in our yard, Ranger wound up with another snoutful of quills.
I will say, however, that no one, after the dog’s procedure, wrote an angry op-ed to The New York Times cleverly asking, Is a dog who has been fixed REALLY a dog?
Which is more than we could say about some other people in not wholly dissimilar situations.
Our house was visited frequently by wildlife. We still saw moose and deer, a silver fox, heard the calling of loons and Canada geese. Now and again there was an issue with skunks, a misfortune that Indigo seemed particularly subject to. It was as if the dogs had decided to divide the animal kingdom between them, in a manner not dissimilar to the way our sons had evenly divided the world of boys between dinosaurs and things that go.
You take the porcupines, Indigo seemed to have suggested to Ranger. The skunks are mine.
This is something of a side note, but I will state at this time that tomato sauce is really not much of a remedy when it comes to skunk bombs. On the other hand, seeing the person you love stripped naked and pouring tomato sauce out of a can onto the head of a dog in the bathtub almost, although not quite, makes the experience worthwhile.
I did wonder why it was Ranger found porcupines such an irritant. After the third or fourth time, there surely wasn’t any mystery about how these interactions would end. What was it that kept Ranger from learning the simple truth about porcupines and their quills, a truth he was given a chance to learn over and over again? Was it simply a matter of principle, like Sean and his early disdain for trousers? Or was there something deeper at work?
Could it be that whatever drove the dog to these doomed battles was love itself? Compared with other dogs I’d owned, Ranger was a more modest soul, certainly compared with Matthew or, for that matter, Playboy, two dogs that considered themselves the unquestionable centers of the universe and whom everyone else in that universe had been sent here to serve. Ranger wasn’t like that—he was humble, withdrawn, diffident: in his own way, not unlike my own father.
Ranger loved our children. Each afternoon he sat by the door, waiting for their return at the hour the school bus approached.
So maybe it was just that he felt the porcupines posed an unbearable threat. They scampered into our yard with their needles pointing in every direction. All Ranger could think was, What happens if one of the boys gets punctured? Who will they blame then?
It would be me, he concluded. And that’s why that’s