The Old Broke Rancher Refuses to Get Another Puppy

As I write this, or rather, attempt to write this, my every movement is being scrutinized by a strange, mop-headed hound. As I type, he cocks his head and stares up at me.

I want to try to focus on writing my regular piece here, but this dog's persistent staring makes it difficult. There's something strange in its slightly doleful brown eyes; it looks up at me much the way I imagine devout tourists to the Vatican stare up at the Pope's balcony.

The hound is a puppy named Ernie. Curiously, Ernie is a girl. I didn't pick the name, so don't ask me. She was a shelter dog, and the name came with her.

I didn't even want to get another dog, to tell you the truth.

It's not that I'm not a dog lover, because I certainly am. In fact, I've already got four of the darn things.

Part of the reason that I didn't want to end up with Ernie sitting on my feet and staring worshipfully up at me is that I've had to part with too many of them over the years, and each one takes a piece of me with them to wherever good dogs go when they leave us. Perhaps I feared I was depleted by missing so many important pieces of myself.

I'm at an age where I've lost a hell of a lot of friends, family members, and dogs. It hurts each time, and you can kind of reach a point, eventually, where you feel that all that loss is preventable. Maybe you get to thinking you've gotten your last dog because you don't think you can bear to lose any more of them.

Over the last year, our family has had to put down two dogs, both elderly, and both beloved. My kids were raised with them - often under their watchful gaze. They trotted alongside my kids on long walks and endured my kids' indelicately heavy petting with gratitude. Eventually, they got old and began to slow down. Their eyes clouded over and filled with cataracts, and their breathing became ragged. Finally, you have to make the decision which is best for them and hold them in your arms while a doctor puts them down. I thought I was holding them to make their death easier for them, but I think somehow we both knew it was for my sake.

Maybe it's easier to do without. Or, in other words, is it better to have loved and lost, or never to have loved at all?

Here's another unanswerable question: how do these furry little goofballs manage to conquer so much of our hearts? Why do we let them?

But enough being moribund. How did this strange little ball of brown fluff end up sitting on my feet, eating a morsel of chicken breast off an actual human, porcelain plate like she's somebody's Aunt here for a visit?

You might as well ask why I checked the animal shelter's website every couple of days to see who had arrived. I looked at the website dutifully but with no intention whatsoever of adopting. I'm sure you get it. I'm sure you've looked at hotels in places you might want to go online, knowing that you aren't going to go there. Sure, you might want to go there, but that doesn't mean you're going to book a room or buy a ticket. In the same vein, I will sometimes look at Zillow and think, "maybe I'll sell the ranch and we can buy a family houseboat and become swamp people somewhere down south and warm." I'd never do it, I'm just entertaining myself by looking, get it?

But then, one morning a few weeks ago, there was a picture of a new dog named Ernie. She's five months old, a rescue from Wolf Point. Reservation dogs, if you don't know this already, are the best dogs in the world. Now, all dogs are cute, so they all tugged at my leathery heartstrings a little. But there was something different about Ernie's lugubrious eyes, seeming as they did to reach through the screen of my battered iPhone. They said, "Gary, why haven't you visited me yet? Don't you wuuuv me?"

I shuddered and put the phone down. "Never again," I intoned. "I shall adopt no more dogs forever."

On the way to the shelter, as I sipped my gas station coffee and nibbled my gas station burrito, I reasoned with myself. I'm only going to confirm that she's a mad dog, a cat killer, a sandwich-stealing floor urinator. It will only take a few moments in a room with her to confirm what I already know: that she's a nogoodnik.

"Where's Ernie," I asked the lady behind the desk, my features already forming into a protective frown. Don't fall in love. Don't fall in love. (With the puppy, of course, not the lady. Although I'm sure she's wonderful.)

Ernie was brought into the room and set down like the offspring of a mop and a pillow but with melancholic eyes. She looked at me with them. I tried to frown, but she performed a series of flops that brought her closer to my chair. Haltingly, I reached out to pat her, as if to say "there, there."

But she stretched out her neck to intercept my hand and plopped her fuzzy head into my palm. She planted me with those big wet eyes and held my gaze.

Ok, so I'll get the damn dog.

On the way home, as Ernie sat next to me in the cab of my Ford, I tried to have a heart-to-heart with her.

"I'm getting to be an old man, Ernie," I said. "So I'm going to ask you to try to live longer than me, ok? I'll work it out so that one of the kids gets you when I can't take care of you anymore, but if I live to be 92, I'm going to need you to live longer. Got it?"

The bouncing of the truck on the slushy road almost made it look like she nodded.

"But if I die and you are alone with me for a few days," I've since told her, "I really don't want you to eat me. I've heard a lot about dogs and cats eating their late owner. I don't think you should do that, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to be as tough as mutton. In fact, you probably shouldn't eat me because there's some that say I'm full of shit."

I eye the dog for signs of canine hilarity, but I guess the pup's sense of humor isn't very well-developed.

"Ah fine, I give in. You can eat me, you little monster. Alright?"

She hasn't left my side since.