PUBLISHED 01/15/2004
I'm on the trail with my regular partner, but today she's considerably more energetic than I. Fifty yards ahead, she loops off trail to the right, pauses, bursts back across the trail to the left, then swings out behind me. I can hear her footsteps coming up hard--and she passes by me with a whoosh.
Her name is Snickers. She's my 3-year-old chocolate Lab--the friendliest dog my wife and I have ever had. She likes to lie under my office desk when I write, and follows me into the kitchen when I go for coffee. She's great in our Connecticut house, but she's not a house dog. She's a "trail dog," which is what I call her. Running trails is the best part of her day--every day.
She came to live with us, I think, because I missed having a running partner, especially on the trails.
A few years ago we had Toby, a male chocolate Lab, and Guinness, a golden/springer cross. For years they were our farm's protectors and companions, roaming free over two fenced acres. Periodically, Guinness would tunnel under the fence, and they'd both take off for surrounding pastures and swamp. We'd hear reports--they'd caught a woodchuck near Dodd's barn, had crossed Strickland's fields, were behind the Thibs place.
Gone at sunset, they'd wander home before sunrise, muddy and bedraggled, so exhausted and hungover, they'd sleep for 2 days.
When we left the farm for a smaller place, they became my trail dogs. We'd usually run for 3 to 5 miles, Toby running point, me in the middle, Guinness taking up the rear. In time, I noticed they were both slowing. I would have to stop and wait if we pushed a long hill.
But even when they become older and slower, dogs are an advanced species. When I run, 90 percent of my attention is on the trail--tree roots, rocks, mud patches--so I don't trip. Only when I slow or stop do I really notice the color of fall leaves, the silver of a waterfall, the gurgle of a brook, the song of a bird. Even in their old age, Toby and Guinness noticed everything--sniffing roots and trees, splashing through brooks, noses sweeping the ground like mine detectors. After a run, they'd check each other nose first as if to pick up where each had been and what he'd done, reading him like a book, registering scents I'd never notice.
And they were happy. As much as I love trails--looking for them on unfamiliar roads, fantasizing about them when I'm at home--I have so many competing interests: reading, writing, going to movies with my wife, teaching, making home brew.
For the dogs, there was nothing better than the trail. Nothing. Toby and Guinness were always up for it, never caring where we went as long as we went. At first they would bound into the truck or back of the Trooper. In later years I had to boost them--Toby at 80 pounds, Guinness at 70. We often ended our runs by jumping into Miller's Pond, one of my favorite places on earth. I'd wipe the dogs down, and when we came home, never entirely clean, my wife shook her head and said, "My runners."
