Toby the Dog had a white patch on his chest as big as a tuxedo shirt, a black coat that got as thick and ragged as a K-Mart parka, and soft brown eyes and little folded ears. “Daddy was a Malamute. Momma was a Labrador.”
The lab in him was so sweet that he met people I didn’t know. He rolled on his back to let puppies bite his elbows.
Once, when we lived in Jackson Hole, we jogged by an estate in The Pines with serious signs that warned, “Verboten! Shutzhund!” and two giant German Shepherds rushed out from the house, barking and snarling as my heart froze for the worst.
But Toby calmly stopped and wagged his tail. And then the shepherds seemed as if they were apologizing. As if they hadn’t known it was Toby. And he barked to let them know, “A-roo-roo-roo.”
The Malamute in him was crazy though. We’d be playing fetch when he would suddenly drop the Frisbee and sniff the air. He would look over his shoulder to give me a disgusted glance as if to say, “There’s no way,” then take off running across the Village Road before I could even say, “No!”
That road is ruthless, to black labs especially, leaving them like little broken carpets with their fur still rustling with the passing cars. And some dogs that followed Toby are buried under rocks down by the river, as stiff as boards. Toby was just smarter or luckier enough to get to the Calico Pizza parlor to beg for crusts or gorge on horseshit in the neighboring pastures then run down to the river to search for the bloated bodies of long dead trout and wet, drowned deer.
He could have stayed wild if he wanted to. He had a first burst that could stun a squirrel, holding them in his jaw with his eyes as black as marbles until they ran out of air. He ate mice like sour apples then lay out on his back until the sun burned his fur. I was back with an old girlfriend after he showed up at her cabin for a party, before I said something stupid and Toby lifted his leg on her Christmas tree and she threw us both back out the door.
His snout got clowned with porcupine quills. He got skunked. He was always hungry. And it cost $20 every time he got caught to get him out of the pound. You had 10 days before they put down your dog. Some guys kept waiting. It sucked to see those guys out at the bar.
I taught him how to sit and wait just by watching my hand, and bounced a check once to get him a bag of food. And one day when we were lying beside the woodstove in the sun beneath the huge bay windows, he reached out to touch my hand with his paw.
When he died, I took his ashes up Teton Pass and hiked him to the top of Glory Bowl. It was July, and as I was spreading them, a young lady with a severely short haircut marched up to me and demanded to know, “Is that snow?”
My father had a dog named Toby, the first Toby, a German Shepherd with the black fur saddle, the red legs and mule-y ears. He would herd us away from the curb and sleep between my brother and me and the door. He would sit in the front seat of dad’s little green Austin Healy before he started throwing up on the gearshift. Before mom came along.
Dad was polishing that car when two Dobermans came up the street and Toby went up in the air with them and crashed down on the hood in a pile of fur. When Dad was in the Air Force, that dog tore the clean white sheets off the line at the colonel’s house and rolled in them in the grass the day the First Wing was leaving for Vietnam, sitting in the back of the Jeep with that long shepherd grin when the MPs came to the door and the sky filled with the jet engine roar.
I remember how my dad told me, “He’s gone to doggie heaven now.”
I like to believe in Doggie Heaven, that all that sweetness has a place to go. I believe in it the way people believe in Christmas after they figure out Santa Claus isn’t real, dreaming of a valley between the clouds like a stratospheric Shangri-La—a clear white lake across the sky with deep slow streams, pizza and steak on Friday evening and fat lame rabbits that can’t run far.
I think it exists in the memory of malamutes, as serene and serious as wolves, as watchful as nature, and in the everlasting love that emanates from the earth-eyed Labradors. It is in the smile-wagging memory of Golden Retrievers where ten million joys are reborn, in Rottweilers laid out like Cossacks in a sauna and in Australian Shepherds finally relaxed without the need to herd anyone anymore.
It is a place where other than the tough little Jack Russells and busy Blue Heelers, there are only big dogs in Doggie Heaven, big enough to hug and dream and hold. And it is always warm enough to nap and cool enough to run.
–Peter Kray is Elevation Outdoors’ editor-at-large. He is a co-founder of The Gear Institute (gearinstitute.com) and the author of The God of Skiing.
