Stout, the Superb Dog, Fetcher of Poles: 'If I Meet Another Creature So Noble, Count Me Twice Blessed.'
Stout, a Labrador/Pit Bull/Rottweiler, tried to fetch from the San Francisco Bay sections of Telephone Pole
Stout during Christmastime 2001, with a bow such as Gina gave to all our three dogs.
May we say that Dogs especially have Genius … if Genius is defined as individual distinction and spiritual communication and the ability to touch the quick of human sensibility.
Like Genius, Dogs concentrate their essences. Consider Picasso. Consider Sandy Koufax or Usain Bolt.
Like Genius, Dogs give back MORE than the attention that’s invested in them.
Dogs are beyond mirrors for us. Their beings’ depths offer limitless resources.
Stout was a Boxer-Lab-Rottweiler whom I got to know over five years. He died last night [as I first wrote about Stout in late January 2003)], a few months past 6 years old, of congestive heart-failure that was likely preceded by bronchial pnuemonia.
If I meet another creature so noble, I’ll count myself twice blessed.
Spark and Stout, rescues from Mendocino’s Coast, around two years old in my North Beach, San Francisco flat, aboard the Green Futon which featured in International Dog Wrestling.
In November 1997 my then girlfriend, Gina, and I found Stout at the Mendocino County Animal Shelter in Fort Bragg along the middle of California’s northern coast. We’d stopped there to thank folks for the dog, Spark, whom. we’d picked up at an S.P.C.A. adoption-show in Mendocino the previous Autumn.
The woman beside a pin-board that was replate with snapshots of pets said: “We just got a new onin you might like to see. His name is Stout.”
“Well, we really couldn’t get a third dog” I said, “but we know people in San Francisco who are talking about wanting a dog.”
“Stout” bounded to the end of his tether on the pavement in back of the Shelter. He black and roundly muscled rthough underfed, His eyes shone amber-brown above the square nubbin of his jaw. His proportions were like a cannonball that sprinted on four legs
“He’s beautiful,” Gina said.
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We took Stout out with La and Spark to Jughandle State Park--between Highway 1 and cliffs of the Pacific Ocean coastline--to see how the three dogs got along
They took off for China. All four paws of each dog dug the grassy roadway and they bumped shoulders as they raced. They ran about about a half-mile one way and that half-mile-or-so back to us. They formed a Pack, a Trio, a Shared Song, from minute one.
“Well, they like each other,” I said.
“They love each other,” Gina said.
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Spark was a black-coated mix, too—the “runt of his litter”, we’d heard on retrieving this last puppy’s steadfast appeal from a cage at the SPCA’s show in Mendocino, Autumn 1996— a German Shepherd/Labrador who was also, we thought, based on his combining willfulness and affection, one-quarter Wolf,.
La was an African Ridgeback with the pennant along her spine visible but subdued. Her long, solid hunting-hound’s proportions—her brs\ass-tan iridescence of coat—her intent and loving eyes—were all superb. We’d got her when she was about nine months, the gift of a woman who’d rescued her from Pescadero Beach and was walking her on paved paths between iceplants of Fort Fulton where Gina and I were throwing a football back and forth one Sunday afternoon.
“What a beautiful dog!” I said about the Ridgeback to the leash-holding lady.
“Would you like her?” the dog-rescuer answered.
I demurred then, too. “Well, I would love to, but I live in a small flat in North Beach. A dog that size—.”
“You never know.”
Gina insisted we try this “obviously special dog”, Spring of 1995, and so it was we named “La”—for her tenderness and anxiety and her protective ferocity was “so feminine”—and watched her grow from 75 to 95 pounds. Her mettle sprang forth when she chased barking coyotes from our campground in Joshua Tree that next June, unstoppable in her mission and pelting into the Desert dark. La came back soon, unscratched, unworried, gratified and whole.
La with Spark’s leash, pulling the stubboorn pup home along Stockton Street in North Beach.
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Stout showed himself at every turn. His prior owner was a young guy, we’d heard, who kept Stout in the cab of his truck while he was working nearby the Ocean. On Monday, back in North Beach, I applied a gel and and combed tweezed 38 ticks out of Stout’s rump. His eyes again shone with gratitude.
We walked La, Spark and Stout along trails of Fort Funston that bumped to and from Ocean Beach. Stout proved to be of a dominating quickness like Bruce Lee-as-Kato. That is, we couldn’t see what exactly what happened, as Stout and an approaching, growling dog lunged together on the trail, except that Stout took the opponent by ruff of its neck in his mouth and FLIPPED it onto its back while pinning it upside down with two or more paws. It was a born wrestler’s move. It was split-second. And we never saw Stout bite any dog who was his opponent. He waited for them to yield with astounded squeals and done was done.
We also found Stout intent on fetching such as we’ve never seen a dog do. The Promenade beside San Francisco Bay between the Yacht Club and Fort Point beneath Golden Gate Bridge was another favorite stretch, over a mile long, for exercising dogs,
One afternoon sawn sections of Telephone Pole bobbed in the Bay, drifting Westward toward the Bridge. We’d already marveled at Stout’s delight in carrying us “logs”, each about big enough to base a living-room fire, from the Beach.
“Golly—I wonder if he would try,” I said aloud. “Aren’t those Telephone Poles out there in the Bay?”
“He might. Stout might want to try,” Gina said.
The “Telephone Poles” were each about four feet long—but true to their familiar diameter of about two feet and true to their standard weight of wood. They were too much to fetch.
Stout, however, paddled into the cold, dark-green ripples (Winter in the Bay Area), 20 or see feet to the nearest section of Pole, and opened his mouth to bite its width over his churning legs.
No go. No go again. Let’s try the other side! Stout paddled half-round and next time BUTTED the section of Pole with outsized brow. Well, that moved something. And so—for the next 10+ minutes—Stout tried, pushing the Pole a little Beach-ward as he and Pole drifted farther Westward in the Bay—then lost his gain for his quarry in the Winter currnets as he necessarily paused to regather energy—and then tried—and tried again.
“Alright, Stout! It’s alright! You’ve done great! Let it go! Let it go, Stout? Come on in!”
“Don, he might drown!” Gina said,
We last persuaded Stout to desist—waving and shouting as more walkers and even runners stopped to watch—by throwing “a new stick” close to the beach.
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Stout was also “the model dog,” Gina told me. She had a studio set up for painting on canvases behind the kitchen of her apartment on Guerrero uphill and a block from 24th Street in Noe Valley of Mission District. She asked Stout to sit outside her door during an afternoon when I had La and Spark with me in San Diego,
“Two hours later, there he was. He hadn’t moved a muscle.”
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Gina went to Bali in February of 1997. It was the El Nino Winter of drenching storms. I drove the dogs out to Fort Funston for long runs in the late afternoon. We headed south along the Beach, going far as Pacifica. Every week landslides dropped shelves from the cliffs that mounded higher than elephants. Sky darkened like El Greco’s and thunder and rain rolled suddenly. from the cliffs .
One drizzled-free April afternoon we were running north, toward the Hang-Gliding Platform that shadowed cliff overhead, and a path and V-like draw that would let us climb to ice-plants and parking-lots. I stopped so that the Trio could play among dogs and tall rocks and shallow breakers nearby foot of the draw.
A full-sized male Ridgeback chased other dogs by the shore-waves and tall rocks and trickling eddies. He propped his muzzle on their necks to establish dominance. His name was Scooby Doo, I heard, and he was about 125 Pounds of Ridgeback who galloped like a bullying thoroughbred.
Stout gnawed a choice piece of driftwood beside the shore. The moment that Scooby Doo eyed La with a straightening tail, though, Stout shot up and squared himself. Scooby Doo faced the black dog and they charged straightaway, each meeting the other.
It was furious contest, possible to follow only in its major movements. Stout won the first fall, throwing Scooby Doo’s length sideways and onto its back, improbable as a martial artist’s advantage through torque. Scooby Doo wrenched free and launched himself so much overhead that Stout went down to HIS back before he rolled and escaped. The black dog re-attacked, gripping Scoopy Doo and threw him backward and down a second time. The second throw was decisive. Scooby Doo relented and trotted away without a backward look.
“He’s pretty tough,” Scooby Doo’s owner, a tall and well-kempt fellow himself, said about Stout.
The next week Scooby Doo eyed Spark on that same patch of shore, rocks and eddies. Stout advanced like a sprung bolt to intercept whatever threat Scooby Doo entertained. Stout’s raised head and shoulders in sideways profile toward the larger dog remain like a living statue to me. Scooby Doo turned another way.
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Gina and I broke up.
Stout remained a constant. My admiration for him grew. I realized that he was as intutitively sympathetic as his household’s brother and sister.
Two times after trans-Oceanic flights and days of little sleep I got so flu-ridden that I hardly wanted to lift a spoon. Those nights Stout made sure he jumped into my bed (Spark usually sleeps beside me). He rested that “boulder on his shoulders” against my belly as if he would absorb the sickness inside.
Often our eyes would meet. His always gave complete attention. What was it? He wanted to know and help. He was a perfect friend.
He also was tireless in play. Back and forth he chased the football that my brother Kenton and I threw in a San Diego park on holidays—a cannon-ball
Our Three-Dogs-and-a-Human rounds of International Dog Wrestling cavorted round the North Beach flat, My big brass bed was Mat Central. We might, however, dash for the Front Room Futon for sport on its green. Or jostle into the Kitchen for glimpse of escape out the back door and down wooden steps that upstairs Neopolitan ladies for stringing laundry o’er the courtyard. But we always returned to International Dog Wrestling on the bed. Oh, the jumps! The scrambles! The headlocks! Leglocks! “240 Pounds of Dogs Striving to Pin the Crafty Human under Kisses!” Tolstoy and his suddenly springing into galloping games of “Numidian Horsemen!” with children and even wife in their fire-lit living-room of Yasnaya Polyana partly inspired our I. D. W.
These three dogs tended to sleep with their bodies touching.
The Tolstoys’ Yasnaya Polyana, site of the novelist’s “Numidian Horsemen” predecessor for indoor. “International Dog Wrestling” in San Francisco;s North Beach,
The fantastic musician Dhyani Dharma Mas in the courtyard that I shared with Julia and Lucia, the sisterly immigrants from Naples, behind our three flats in North Beach.
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Around 2002 Stout, then turning five years old, or about 36 in human years, began to be a little less superlative in the wonders he could perform.
That Winter another storm raised the tide along Ocean Beach toward Pacifica into lapping against cliffs and a young Seal got stranded between rocks on the beach. Spark the part Wolf charged for this youngster that was his ancient prey; the Seal took flight for the breakers with its flippers scraping like paddles into the hard sand; Stout followed Spark; I followed Stout; and the whole, little melee of dogs and Seal barking and snapping while lurching Oceanward in the cold Pacific water became a mess that raised both my anger and fears. What could a Seal do to dogs if it got them into deeper water. Spark’s old memory at last turned, but the young Seal had bitten off about half of one of Stout’s ears.
Still, the two shinily black-coated males could not be deterred from chasing Raccoon or Skunk, whether scented along the Trail to Land’s End, or by the Promenade, or between lower Lakes on Godl Gate Park, and they with La still formed a Troika as they breasted breakders, side by side. October of 2002, the month in which Spark and Stout nominally turned six, or 40 human years, they and La easily completed a 12-mile run along Ocean Beach—north from Fort Funston, south to border with Pacifica, and back.
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How fast a dog may pass from life due to sudden illness shocks us.
Stout slowed after he and Spark had torn after skunks two evenings running nearby Crissy Field. He hadn’t the same Three-Mashing-Gulps-and-I’m-Done appetite. He watched his forelegs. He was less attentive in his gazes even as I saw him strive for energy. I thought he must be recovering from skunk-bites. He lagged behind Spark on runs. He coughed and his eyes grew more sunken as he stared.
On December 17 and then December 27—following a road-trip for Christmas in San Diego with my sister’s and brother’s families—I took Stout to a Veterinarians’ Offices in the Mission District of San Francisco. I wished then that I’d insisted on the taking of Stout’s temperature and the prescribing of antibiotics. I wish now that I’d done and spent more to treat the infection that I believe eventually caused Stout’s heart to give out.
“This looks like a very healthy dog.”
When I did try antibiotics (given by a friend after her bout with bronchial pneumonia) along with human cough-syrup, Stout appeared to revive. I let him run with the other dogs every afternoon. I obstinately wanted him to be “our old Stout—the great Stout.” Within a day or two his big head lagged again.
On January 16 I tried another vet. This office did a X-ray and ultrasound analysis prescribed two weeks’ supply of “pretty intense”, the youngish veteranarian said, antibiotics. The X-ray and ultrasound indicated “possible vegetative endocarditis”—meaning that bacteria from animal or fungus may have infected one or more valves of Stout’s heart and becoming like vegetation there.
Stout’s condition thereafter was hard for me to gauge over a span nearing two weeks. I wish that I’d kept a chart of his feeding and behavior. He did not improve markedly--but he did wiggle and jump in quarter-turns of eagerness when we all were about to go out in the morning to Washington Square Park. He did jump on the bed. He did swing the somewhat diminished “boulder on his shoulders” into nuzzling my forearm or cheek. He did still crave and give affection.
The Tuesday of Stout’s last week, one day after Gina visited North Beach and cooked a bowlful and then handfuls of lean hamburger and rice, he somehow lost appetive. I then reduced his Clavamox antibiotics to one tablet a day. I didn’t know what to do that might “work” … save to trust in that spirit and strength that had always proven immeasurable.
“Stout looks much better!” Gina said on Thursday. She’d come to cook for him and to set up humidifiers before she flew to Florida. He’d risen to greet her at the door. He’d wagged his tail happily with his first mouthfuls of chicken. Then, though, coughing caught him and he declined to eat more. He hacked up kibble-size gobs of foul-smelling saliva and bits. He said that “it’s good he’s getting stuff out.”
Next day was Stout’s steepest downturn. He averted his mouth from chews, from chicken, and even finely chopped steak. He stretched his neck and muzzle and stared at a wall or at me as if breathing was all he could do. He expectorated in bouts, his chest quaking like a bellows. I tried to cheer. ”That’s right, Stout! Way to go! Get all that bad stuff out. Get that poison out. You can do it! … Oh, I wish I could help you, guy!”
Saliva hung like yellow-brown syrup from his jaw, smelling of antiobiotics, and Spark looked intently and licked that chin
From midday onward I called Veterinary Clinics and other Offices. Neither of the two that had treated Stout in December returned my calls before 5:00. I must have sounded like distraught humans whom they hadn’t been able to help, many times before. The Clinic at UC-Davis did not return my messages at all. The eldest Vet I knew, semi-retired, the one who had prescribed antibiotics in mid-January, said: “If it’s vegetative endocarditis, you might have to let him go.”
Past 6:00 this January evening I drove across San Francisco to the Mission and exchanged old antibiotics for new.
Stout dutifully swallowed the new pill. His stare now was devoid of imploring me for relief. He simply wanted to maintain connection. His eyes were deep as Rembrant’s paintings of woe,
I’d made a date early in the week to meet a friend at Mario’s Cafe on the Columbus corner across from Washington Square. I couldn’t not reach her by phone. Stout’s head began to shake uncontrollably less than a half-hour after he took the new antibiotic. He was resting for support on the futon.
I squatted beside him and patted his head, and said I would be back soon. Another seizure of coughing raised him up. He slid off the futon on all legs and followed me into the entry-hall toward the door, as so many times before and as he always wanted.
His legs wobbled. Those on his right slipped out from under him on the linoleum tiles. He keeled over on his side with mouth agape,
“Oh, Stout! Oh, Stout—don’t! Don’t go! You’ve tried so hard! You alway try so hard!”
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So I wept then. So I weep now, bent toward a keyboard again.
I buried Stout that January night at Fort Funston. He was happiest there with Spark and La. Them I left in North Beach, as who knew what they might encounter in the dark. Both were already withdrawn, absorbing their loss of Stout, and even unlikelier to obey voice-commands.
It was a cold, long dig, shoveling out a place a yard long and wide and deep for the limp, lolling body of Stout. The grave lay away from parking-lot and paths. It fronted close to cliffs and hillocks that descended to the Beach and Ocean. It was meant, the two or three hours it required to dig, move and shape seacoast earth, to be proper and private for one so great as Stout.
He was honor himself. He was the purest of friends. He gave evermore. He was of lessons unending as to what can and should be done.
He was of Genius individual as any hero’s or heroine’s. He was that kind of light you see whenever you remember the great and the good.
Blessings from Stout! Hail, Stout!