Faithful Companion

“Shell Lake Morning” painting by Hank Feeley

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

I dreamed about him when I was working in the prisons of California. I felt him one night in the room as I was falling asleep and thought I could smell him. I missed him at a subliminal, subconscious level all the time but missed him consciously, in ways I’d never anticipated, on the days after work when I was tired and saw no hope for my students, most of whom were going to be behind bars for a long time and, if they got out, would have no families, no jobs, no future.

It was a relationship that had snuck up on me, without my knowing. One November day some years earlier, with the weather one minute raining and hailing and the next sunny and bright, that strange, fitful weather we get at that time of year, I’d finished an uneventful day of substitute teaching in Traverse City and gone to the Humane Society when it was still on South Airport. There in the open corral behind the cinder block building was a happy-looking creature, red-furred, with a ruff of fur around his face like a lion and a tail like a Fourth of July sparkler. I paid whatever the fee was and he jumped into the front seat beside me with a little chuff, or huff sound, like, “Let’s go!”

When I brought him home my daughter said, “He’s so noble. What’s his name?”

“Maybe Red?” That had been the name of the dog on my grandparents’ Hoxyville homestead.

She looked disgusted. “I can do better than that just going through the dictionary.”

After a minute or two, still in the early part of the A’s, she said, “Achates, Aeneas’s faithful companion.” The name is Greek and is pronounced Ah-kay-tees. We called him “Ahkee” for short or “Ahkee-Kahn” when we were being formal because he had a kind of regal yet wild, Ghenghis Kahn persona.

I learned, by people noticing him with me and telling me, that he was a Chow-chow. They would invariably say, warning me, that Chows were known to be biters, sometimes adding that veterinarians wouldn’t treat them because they would bite. This made no sense to me since this dog was mild-tempered. I thought that the information was wrong. A bad rap for a good dog was my idea about that.

Julius Bunek, the man who had always fixed my furnace, came that fall to do the routine maintenance and decided not to come in. “Your dog just looked at me through the glass,” he said. “The look in his eyes was, ‘I’m not going to bite you. I’m just going to kill you.’” And Julius, a big bear of a man who knew more about animals than I did at that point, wisely decided not to come in.

Achates came into a home with an old dog and a young cat. From the start Achates was polite about letting them have first shot at the food, the water, the love and attention. He was friendly with us, but not a lap dog. If we petted him too much or too affectionately he would look embarrassed. He did not want to play fetch. He did not want to get up on the bed or the sofa with us and watch TV. He liked riding in the car and going for a walk, but with a kind of watchfulness, or on-the-look-out quality. He hated rain and going in the water.

He had golden eyes. He had a black tongue.

He never barked. We thought he couldn’t. One day he did bark, a short barely audible, not unfriendly sound, like someone speaking who hasn’t spoken in a very long time. “He can bark,” my daughter observed dryly, “he just prefers not to.”

He was a member of the household. I seldom thought about him, as one doesn’t when someone is a member of the household. I liked having him there but I wasn’t too interested in him.

One night I woke up and found him standing over me, straddling me on the bed. This was surprising. No dog had ever done this. The look on his face was, “You will not die.” I got out of bed, drenched in perspiration, realizing I must have had a fever that must have just broken. Perhaps I’d been delirious, thrashing in the bed, I don’t know, but that was my first inkling of his protective instincts.

The next time was when he chewed through the car door. He had apparently decided that I’d been in the dentist office too long and he was going to come and get me. He had ripped away the door upholstery and was working on the metal part when I emerged from the appointment.

But other than those rare times, he was so laid-back that I basically didn’t think about him at all. He was there. I liked having him around. That was all there was to that. He went with me and stayed in the car when I worked at a school near my home, a mile away, or when I was on the road doing research. He was easy to be with. No trouble.

After Achates had been with me for about three years, I took a teaching job in a summer program that was 30 miles from my home. I had to be gone too long to take him with me. He couldn’t stay in a hot car all day. I had Invisible Fence but since he would disregard it, I couldn’t use it with him. I had a kennel, too, but since he hated it, I left him in the house. He never destroyed anything. He was good in the house.

That first Monday in July when I came home from teaching, Achates was waiting for me in the driveway. He’d gone through the screen in the living room window, not that hard to do but he’d had to have backed way up, gone to the far end of the living room, and then taken a long, powerful flying leap to do it.

Tuesday, I closed the windows. That day he was also waiting for me in the driveway. He’d gone through the double, plate-glass picture window, unscathed because of his thick fur.

Wednesday I left him in the garage. That day also he was waiting for me in the driveway, a big hole behind him in the fiberglass garage door.

Thursday I put him in the kennel, a roofed space about 6 feet by 6 feet, with a chain-link fence, anchored into concrete. That day, too, he was waiting for me in the driveway. He’d pulled the supports out of the concrete, apparently by hurling himself at the chain-linked fence so hard, repeatedly, that he eventually pulled it loose.

It was Friday and I had no place else to put him, no way to contain him. There were dog-sized holes in all the places I’d had. I had to work that day and there was no time to repair everything. I couldn’t have a dog who destroyed things. That would never do. I was going to have to put him down.

A friend of mine—I confess I wouldn’t have thought of this—told me to get down on his level, pat his stomach and explain to him that I had to go to work and he had to stay and take care of the house. This was my last gambit. I was sure it was nonsense, but I did it. I had nothing left to lose. That day, Friday, I came home and he was in the house, where I’d left him. He could have easily gone through the hole in the plate glass picture window. It was still there. But he hadn’t.

I bought a book on Chows. This was before you could Google everything. I discovered they had been bred by the Mongolians to go into battle. They were known for never leaving the side of their assigned warrior, for fighting to the death. The Chinese, when they negotiated a treaty with the Mongolians, requested a number of these dogs as part of the settlement. Chows are the traditional stone dogs, spirit guardians, found like gargoyles on the steps in front of Buddhist temples and Chinese palaces. DNA tests show Chows to be an ancient breed, one of the earliest to evolve from the gray wolf, probably on the high steppes of Outer Mongolia and Siberia.

One year Achates tangled with a porcupine. He had no problem with my pulling out all the quills, even the ones that were way back in his throat.

Another year I took on the job of baby-sitting for another Chow-chow, Abby, a female who’d been tied out in Detroit in the hot sun. This dog was crazy. But we worked with her. If she went off, Achates would get her by the throat and nail her to the ground with a definite, ‘We don’t do that here’ message. Then Abby would have her “time-out” in the kennel. Achates, gentle creature that he was at heart, would go and sit outside the kennel to keep her company.

Abby was more aggressive than Achates and liked to chase raccoons. She would find a raccoon to irritate and then race back to the porch, while leaving poor Achates to actually do battle.

One early dawn, before daylight, I awoke to a terrible racket down on the edge of the swamp.

I go down, barefoot, still in my thin white summer nightgown, and in the dusky air, see Achates fighting two raccoons at once. Raccoons are not as cute and cuddly as they look. They are formidable fighters, with lethal claws and teeth. Their manner of fighting is to jump on the head of their adversary and claw their eyes out while at the same time trying to sever their victim’s jugular with their teeth. One raccoon is a dangerous combatant. Two raccoons are an unfair fight.

I go back to the house and change into Levis, boots, and a heavy jacket and get a pitch fork, but once down at the edge of the swamp again realize I cannot help Achates. If I get in the middle of the fight, between me and a raccoon, it will be no contest. I return to the house and close the windows so I can’t hear the war screams of the coons. I wait for quiet. It seems to take an eternity.

When it comes, I go outside. There is my poor dog, in a heap on the porch, bleeding and exhausted. He has a nasty gash in a hind leg and another in his throat, exposing his windpipe, but he’s alive. The coons had been dispatched but not before they’d inflicted serious damage. I clean his wounds and give him a shot of whiskey. It took Achates two or three months to recover, but he did, and once again he was as good as new.

The year I worked in the prisons of California, I rented the house to another single mother with two teenagers, letting Achates stay with that family while I was gone. She said that for the first time since she’d been raising kids alone, she’d slept soundly. “I knew he was there,” she said. “I could sleep with the windows open in the summer and the doors unlocked in the winter. I felt totally safe. It didn’t even enter my mind that I wasn’t. I didn’t listen for those little sounds, the way you do, or wake up at 3 a.m., checking to make sure everything was okay. Nothing was going to get past Achates. You just knew it without even thinking about it.” And, as he’d been with me, he was sweet and discreet, like Kevin Costner in “Body Guard,” there in the background. No drama.

Achates taught me something, as all creatures will, if we let them. He taught me that I was like the character, Sid, the sloppy, strong, uncensored, very smart but seemingly witless teen-aged boyfriend, played by Nick Krause in the George Clooney movie, “The Descendants.” Sid’s always saying things people don’t want to hear and finally his girlfriend’s senile, former Army general grandfather punches him full in the face. Afterwards, sitting with his girlfriend in the back seat of the car, Sid’s in obvious pain, holding an ice pack over his eye.

George Clooney is driving and, looking at his daughter’s Slacker boyfriend in the rearview mirror, asks, “Do you get hit a lot?” Yes, in my case. The men in the jail said I was the scariest person they’d ever met. “You just don’t quit,” one said. I’ve been in trouble all my life, and needed a body guard all that time, but never knew it until the universe brought me Achates.

Sometimes a pet is more than that. And if it happens, you have to let it.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Arc of the Universe.