Staying alive - #117

Cooper is still with us. So are the coyotes.

In a surprise twist, Cooper is still with us. On December 30, Cooper was no longer eating. He struggled to walk. On December 31, he wouldn’t move and he started to throw up blood. Given that it was two days until we could see a vet, we pulled out the small plastic bin from the linen closet full of old pet meds to see how we could help him. These were memories on repeat from May. The pancreatitis was always what would take him. 

By January 2, we took him to the vet, thinking it was time to say goodbye. 

“Do you want to do an X-ray? If there’s liquid in his lungs, then we can all agree it’s time. If there’s not, you might be able to fight this.”

There was no liquid, so we took him home and held our breaths. 

And somehow, he’s still here. The vomiting stopped. His appetite returned. And yesterday, he brought me a toy. He’s still old and dying, but so is everyone else. Today, he’s happy, napping beside me, and I’ll take it. 

In the brief time we’ve lived here, we’ve known three dogs to take their last laps. Cove, a cantankerous and ancient Australian Shepherd doing slow laps around the one block, never stopping for more than a sideways glance. Nash, a red retriever who would wait patiently outside our patio door in the hopes that a treat might show up, as they often did. Jazzy, a dog hiding somewhere under a down blanket of white fur who would always trot merrily from her front stoop perch to give Cooper a good sniff-down, assuming she hasn’t joined another adventure into the backcountry. 

A week or so ago, Nash’s person (our neighbor Andy) called us about a cat in his garage. What does it look like, we asked. Old, black, and lost, he said. We knew that cat. We knew it belonged to our other neighbor up the hill and we knew it was dying. So like a cat to go and try to die in someone else’s garage. Last we heard, he was being carried back to his house. It speaks to the safety the current roster of dogs provide in this valley that a 20-something-year-old nearly blind cat can make a sojourn through a meadow to someone else’s garage. You could hear the coyotes on the hillside the other night. It’s a weak winter. They’re still around. We’ve just never seen them come down to the valley of the dogs. 

Coyotes are known cat eaters, especially in suburban and urban environments. In a study done in LA, 20% of coyote feces contained cats. (22% contained fast food wrappers.) But here, their territories are about as natural as it gets: very few ornamental fruits to steal from gardens, very little accessible garbage due to bear protocols, and very few roaming cats. There are only two other cats besides Old Black that roam this side of town — orange housemates you can hear prowling through the remaining grass because of the giant bells now attached to their collars. They were tiny killing machines we would often see running from dogs that wouldn’t know the first thing to do if they caught up with them. 

Our own cats are housebound, unless supervised. My first pet as an adult, Alistaire, or Al, was eaten. He and I lived together in DC, then the East Village, and finally in Boulder. He was deeply unhappy in the upstairs apartment of an old Victorian in Boulder because for the first time in his life, he could see where he was supposed to be: outside. When his unhappiness started to express itself in aggression, I let him have short stints of outside time. I would sit on the stairs outside my door and watch as he played in the neighbor’s garden. But one night he didn’t come back and he didn’t come back at all. Nine cat carcasses were found in the neighborhood that month — a mountain lion down from the Flatirons. Maybe he wasn’t one of them. My gut told me he was. I still pay for his microchip, nevermind that he would be 24. 

These cats, all three of them, are perfectly content to be inside. In the melted months, they all slip agreeably into their harnesses to get monitored yard time. As soon as it looks like someone might kill a bird, they go inside. There’s plenty to hunt inside, as evidenced by the dead mouse on our bed this morning. In Banzet’s first summer here, he killed some 20 mice and voles in this cabin. They seemed to have reached a type of territorial detente where so long as the mice stay inside the fireplace rock and the door frames, they can live. Any bold Ratatouille venturing into human, cat, and dog spaces is considered an act of war. 

The rest of nature, more or less, behaves. Of course if you have trees on your property you’re particularly fond of, you might find yourself protecting them from the likes of porcupines and beavers, both a type of rodent, despite beavers’ status as a keystone species and porcupines’ cartoon villain charm. Porcupines eat through the bark of trees to get to the delicious layer of phloem beneath. Beavers also do this, they just finish the job. 

In a big snow winter like last year when the drifts reach up (or over) our kitchen window, you’ll see porcupines idle by at faucet level as they nibble down the exposed shrub branches. The beavers are harder to spot this time of year, given it’s so dark so early and their ponds are frozen over. They’re mostly hanging out in their lodges. Neither beavers nor porcupines hibernate. Porcupines are still munching away, only hunkering down if they need to weather a winter storm under your deck or in your wood shed, as we’ve seen. 

The coyotes though, they move on. In the winter, there’s less to eat here. Locally, we have the biggest winter. When I drive the 2.5 miles out of this valley to look out on the broader canyons and mesas, it is often a completely different weather system. Mountains will do that. On Saturday I went skate skiing a ten minute drive from my house. The sun bore down on the fresh groom and I unzipped my jacket to the single layer below. When I drove home and rounded the bend that looks on into our valley, all I could see was a wall of gray. Where it was a bluebird day everywhere else, it was storming at home, the towering mountains barely visible. 

The coyotes had mostly moved east, where the snow isn’t quite so deep and the crossable terrain isn’t patrolled by dogs twice their size. It’s a funny thing, given the current patrol. At least on this side of the avalanche path, the dogs do not appear as formidable and their historical lore. As Cooper waddles to neighbors passing by in his weakened state, and I try to explain through broken breaths that his season is coming to an end, they’re all prepared with stories of dogs that have come and gone here. Only the good ones get names. The bad ones are still referred to by breed and owner alone. Jessie was under voice command from day one and so utterly delighted by watching running water. Dick’s malamute on the other hand was a terror. It feels like every dog here used to be a husky or a malamute. It’s hard to remember whose dog killed whose cat, though I’m sure it’s not hard for them to remember. I would never forget. A neighbor across the street shot a disdainful glance at our house when recounting how his best dog died after drinking radiator fluid the original owner had left out in a bucket. 

There are stories of cat murderers, sheep killers, mountain climbers, 4-day adventures through the backcountry where the dog had to be slid down the mountain into the other town by skiers who found it in a couloir, nearly dead. The dogs matched the reputation of the town: difficult, grizzled, full of people who prided themselves on thriving where others would rather not. As the town has evolved, so have the dogs. Half mutts and half lover breeds, there’s only one I have to posture with. She attacked Cooper once, and I hit her over the head with a traffic cone. Now, we merely glare at each other when we pass, Cooper tucked under my arm. Like the cats and the mice, we have reached a detente. 

Everyone else, I kneel to greet. It’s a rare place on Earth where a neighborhood of pet dogs gets free roam of the town. It’s a big part of why we loved it here. There would still be problems, just like there are amongst children, just like there are amongst adults. But you talk about them. You work through them. Our problems are things we work through together, not struggles we manage alone behind fences. And in reality, not every dog here roams. Some are half-leashed households. Others are off leash but only when with their human. The one I hit with a cone has an adjusted schedule now. And Cooper never so much as roamed as he ambled over to the neighbors’ to smell a few things before coming back to lounge in his own grass.

Before Cooper’s health collapsed at the end of December, we’d asked to meet a dog being fostered locally. If we found the right dog, it would be a nice end-of-life companion for Cooper, and a softer transition for us. His name was Tundra and he was half-malamute, half-husky — a real mountain dog. He was abandoned at a Grand Junction shelter by owner and driven all the way here to find a home in the alpine wonderland. Cooper loves malamutes, and in fact, loves all massive dogs, believing he is one. We decided against it, given Cooper’s decline. All that was left was to love him, not spend our time trying to train a 2-year-old malamute not to jump on people or eat cats. But maybe for the next one. Maybe after the wounds of Cooper healed, we’d get a big dog that tails you and whoever else to the highest ridges.

Cooper is an unlikely hero at this elevation. I won’t eulogize him just yet, but it’s worth noting bringing a 20-lb short-haired short-snouted dog to 10,000 feet did not make us an obvious fit. If you are your dog, we perhaps looked better suited to the mountains of Asheville or Southern California or perhaps not mountains at all. But what makes a dog work here is not their look, but their temperament. 

The best dogs here are a bit goofy, a bit fearless, and very self-sufficient. They are, in their own ways, just like coyotes. They make do and make friends and if it’s too cold, they know where it’s warm. They know and are known to everyone in town. The children learn their names far sooner than you ever learn theirs. They show up at your backdoor asking for a throw or a treat. They greet you in the street on your way back from a run and sometimes even join you on your way out. Two and a half years in, and they’re still my favorite part of living here. What a joy how many more I get to meet.