A Good Nose

Fast Friends: Porgy takes center stage for a family photo in 2004 on Daufuskie Island. credit: Photo courtesy of Roger Pinckney

It was two days after ice-up and we were swabbing down the guns. Wind rattled the windowpanes, the woodstove popped and crackled, and Hoppe’s No. 9 hung heavy in the air. Chris ran a patch down the bore of his battered double while I poured each of us a healthy dram. The tincture of wood smoke in the icicles I broke from the eaves made good whiskey even better. Porgy was coiled by the stove, but he slept with one eye open, the way he always did when anybody did anything with guns.

This was all up in Minnesota, a good long while ago. Porgy was a Newfoundland, 140 pounds. Broken to harness, he’d pull the boat to the water, fetch up the birds, retrieve the decoys, and drag the boat back uphill when we were done. If only I could have taught him to wind up the strings.

“Hey Porgy,” I hollered.

In an instant he was by my side. There was a sack of decoys in the corner. The green head of a mallard protruded from the top.

“Decoy, Porgy?”

His eyes told me he knew the command.

“Go fetch me up a mallard.” He worried it from the sack, came back with it, his tail wagging, the anchor rattling along the floor.

Next decoy up was a bluebill. “Now fetch me a bluebill.”

He did. Ditto for a wood duck.

Another mallard on deck. I asked for a teal. He brought the mallard.

“What the hell, Porgy? Didn’t I teach you better than that?”

Halfway to my knee, he recoiled as if I had slapped him. He dropped the decoy, cringed, and rolled on his back, four doughnut-size paws in the air.

Chris raised one eyebrow, swirled the liquor in his glass. “I believe you and Porgy are playing a card trick on me.”

Card trick indeed.

It was bacon, beans, and kerosene in those days. Porgy kept rabbits and coons away from the garden, found downed deer when I could not. Ten below zero, he’d sleep beneath the meat pole, exploding in baritone outrage whenever coyotes or wolves dared venture into the yard. When winter clamped down and the snow piled to the windowsills, Porgy pulled the groceries home on an L.L. Bean folding sled. When I lugged armloads of firewood onto the porch, Porgy would dog my bootsteps, never happy unless he could carry wood, too, if only one stick at a time.

Things up there did not work out as I’d planned. The woman got the farm but I got Porgy and you’ll never hear me complain. I sold what I could, gave away what I could not, threw what was left into the truck, and lit out back to where I had come from. Porgy took up the whole second seat.

I was heading south with the finest company. Leif Eriksson carried a great black bear of a dog on his longship when he explored Newfoundland in the eleventh century. In 1804, Lewis and Clark took a Newfie on their Voyage of Discovery, astounding various tribes all the way from St. Louis to the Pacific and back. Another Newfoundland rescued Napoleon Bonaparte when he fell overboard escaping exile on Elba Island. And the infamous Lord Byron claimed he bedded 250 women a year during various Italian excursions but wrote one of his best-known poems to Boatswain, his Newfoundland dog, dead of rabies at age five. Byron nursed him to the end, rabies be damned, and never got bitten.

Porgy took well to salt water, though he could never quite understand why it did not taste like the lakes he had known as a pup. He developed an affinity for dolphins and would wade in among them whenever they lolled in the shallows. He’d get nose to nose with the river otters that lived under the floating dock and never made a snatch at one—good thing, as an otter has all the social graces of a chain saw with a stuck throttle. Summers were a little tough. I kept him shaved till he looked like some oversize goofy Lab, and I spent more money on his hair than I ever did on mine.

But it was a string of female companions that Porgy wouldn’t tolerate. He had no use for the tattooed wonder from New Jersey I met online. I forget her name. He didn’t like Mary Ann, either. She was one of those fire-walking women—you know the type, those perpetually wounded souls who self-actualize by walking barefoot through hot coals at midnight. And down at the beer joint when I’d get a bit soused and try to dance with the local gals, Porgy would circle and bark. And if I wouldn’t stop, he had the good sense to nip me, instead of one of them. I’d just about given up on women when Susan came for a weekend. And when she left and Porgy carried one of her shoes around for the next three days, I knew I had finally gotten it right.

Of all his gifts, this was his greatest. It took us a year or more, but Susan and I eventually threw in full-time. She came with a quick bright smile, neon blue eyes, a giving heart, and an extended family numbering in the dozens. Porgy passed judgment on each of them, found all of them good. And they surrounded me with a love like I had never known. Except from Porgy.

He disappeared right before Christmas three years ago. I walked, I called, I cried. Two days later, there came a faint yipping from beneath the house. Struck by a copperhead snake, he had come home to die. I buried him where the digging was easy.
Oh, Porgy! You never let me test Lord Byron’s score, and I never wrote you a poem.

But you have given me one good woman. And I have written you this.