Louise is some kind of shepherd, a combination of shepherds, a Malinois, Groenendael, something. Belgian, Dutch, German. She came from a rescue in Tennessee; some damn fool bred a litter of puppies to sell and then found he could not sell them and then dumped them on a rescue. We found her on the internet and brought her home when she was four months old; she is six months old as of yesterday. Working backward from what she is like, you can conclude that the rescue just let them shit any old place where the urge struck. You can conclude that she is the scion of a long and prestigious line of anywhere-shitters.
Louise is the smartest and most precocious puppy I have ever met, which is a nice way of saying that she is from hell and they kicked her out of hell for being too diabolical for hell. I love her a preposterous amount. Every morning, she wakes me at 5 a.m. by dive-bombing my wife from the stratosphere and then just kind of wiggling around like a maniac, nipping and slapping everything in reach with her ridiculous tail. I make her wait until as close to six as I can tolerate before feeding her and Grover breakfast and waking the human children to get ready for school. It's still dark and cold outside, however much Louise would like to go play Fetch just then, and so we begin our morning ritual: I try to sit down or do literally anything for more than 20 seconds at a time, while she methodically gathers every ball of socks the world ever had in it or will have in it and brings them, one at a time, into the living room. This goes on for three hours, and then for 13 more hours.
This is Louise's game. She does not particularly care to eat the socks—which she finds no matter how firmly all the house's interior doors are shut against her—nor even really to have the socks. Moreover, she knows she is not supposed to have gotten them, and drops them, voluntarily, at the very moment she knows that I have seen her with them, before I even have to say "drop it." The game, which she has invented, is to make me pick up the socks and take them back where they came from. She only does this when I am trying to sit down to work or relax; when I am up and moving around, her interest in balled socks evaporates. She is training me: If I will not play Fetch with her, then she will play Reverse Fetch with me.
She has other games. In one of them, she perches on the sofa farthest from the living-room entryway, and waits. When Grover, our geriatric, docile, and endlessly patient Boxer, ambles into the room, she takes off as though fired from a cannon and sprints at him. If there is a toy or ball (or ball of socks) anywhere near him, then she will snatch it up and sprint back to her perch on the sofa; she likes to pretend that that's what he was after, and that they were racing for it, even though Grover has not shown interest in a toy or ball that did not have peanut butter inside of it since years before she was born. If there is no toy or ball nearby, then she will sprint past him, as close to his face as she can manage, careen off the opposite sofa, sprint back to her perch, and repeat. Sometimes she will mix it up by laying her gigantic ears back and frantically licking his jowls, at the speed of light, until he gets annoyed, and then she will sprint back to her perch. There she waits—for him to pick out a place to curl up, at which point she will sprint to that place, get there before him, and wiggle around as though covered with fire ants, until he picks somewhere else to go. No points for guessing what she does next.
The sound of all of these games, and of her approach, and of nearly every waking second of our lives now, is the jingling of her collar and the ID tags on it. Grover has a jingly collar too, in theory, but his only jingles a normal amount, because he is a normal dog. Louise sounds like a brass marching band falling down an endless spiral staircase, because she is a nutbar from hell whose heart pumps lightning. For this we call her "the Jingler." As in Oh no, here comes the Jingler! and God help us, that sounds like the Jingler!
The other day, Louise and I discovered at the same time that she is now tall enough to get her paws up onto the kitchen counter. We learned this when I turned my head for roughly 14 seconds and she ate an entire plate of raw chicken and a sheet of thawing puff pastry. We did not have pot pie that evening. Or anyway, I guess in a manner of speaking, she did.
On Thursday nights I take Louise to an obedience class taught by a very impressive professional dog-trainer whose own dogs are shepherds and Malinoises. She is a focused, eager, and warp-speed learner; she does not bark at the other dogs, or strain against the leash, or really do anything but actively work out what I am trying to teach her and then do it. She watches me with her big lovely almond-shaped eyes and tries so incredibly hard. She is a dream of a student, the absolute star of the class.
We've been to two sessions; tonight will be the third. On the way to the first one, Louise shat hugely on the back seat of the car. I pulled off to the side of a dark rural road and scooped dogshit out onto the tarmac with what I could find: an old soccer sock (naturally) one of my kids had left under a seat months prior. On the way to the second class, I got leery at a random moment and pulled over at a gas station and she shat on the grass there; then we got back in the car and continued on our way, and she puked a huge pile of barf the size of her head on the floor of the car. There were no socks this time, so I pulled over and scooped barf out onto the tarmac with a church bulletin pamphlet. I am sort of surprised it didn't burst into flames. I shudder to imagine what she will uncork on the way to class tonight.
Right now Louise is sleeping peacefully on a blanket spread on a corner of the living room rug, surrounded by the shattered chips of a wooden log she ate. She is so wonderful it makes my chest hurt. When she wakes up all of my hair will turn white.
