Canter Bridge

The voice of our wonderful Colombian-born veterinarian was somber when I called her from Frankfurt to inquire on the results of Tucker’s biopsy. The veterinariological technical lingo added up to just one thing: Tucker is not long for this world.

‘Just enjoy him!’, she counseled with the textured, comprehending warmth of a woman who could have been a pastor, a psychologist, a physician, or a veterinarian. She chose the latter, and not for lack of options.

Tucker is my best friend, at least in one sense of the phrase. It sounds like sentimental hyperbole to say so. It is not.

Our boy entered this world in Costa Rica, product of an accidental mating (as the attempt to speak of such barnyard couplings delicately would have it) that produced a litter of ten pups who bore vague signs of relationship to the line we call Black Labrador Retrievers. Oh, and Golden Labs. You see, half the puppies emerged golden and the other half black. We’d promised our boys during a four-year, pet-less sojourn in a cold flat in England that ‘when we return to Costa Rica, we’ll have a doggy’. The family’s canonical memory declares that it was Johnny, our youngest, who picked ‘Tucker’ out of the scrambling mass of black and gold puppiness that greeted us one gorgeous Saturday morning in our friends’ expansive yard in Birrí. The air is always bracing in that enchanted edge of a mountain that overlooks San José’s Central Valley with a comfortable peasant’s reluctance to descend to it. Things are just fine up here, everything about Birrí seems to whisper, a message that is doubly persuasive when it’s the day to bring home a promised puppy to a home with two animal-adoring boys in it.

Johnny also gave this black love-child his verbal label. He would be called ‘Tucker’, named improbably after a Golden Lab in a SkyMall catalogue tucked into the seat-pocket of the plane that took us back home to Costa Rica. Our little squirmer, of course, bore not the slightest resemblance to the noble beast in the airborne dog-bed advertisement. Yet the name seemed perfect. ‘Tucker’ it would be, a dignified moniker that in the course of his love-engendering life would assume multiple permutations: ‘Tucks’, ‘Tuckster’, ‘Tuckenheimer’, ‘Tuckenheimer-dogface’, and ‘You beast!’.

Tucker’s pedigree being neither trace-able nor hygenic, he fell prey to several life-threatening illnesses. I remember with sadness the evening that he was so traumatized by one painful affliction that he snarled at me from the back of his kennel as I reached in to check on him. It was the only time in nine years that I ever saw him display a sentiment towards a human being that was not flavored—if not saturated—by affection and playfulness.

With the assistance of a probing, genius of a Costa Rican vet and a preternatural gift for survival, he bounced back. Tucker always bounced, whether back or in some other direction. Nine lives were just a beginning for him. We developed an irrational confidence in his ability to survive anything. He seemed indestructible.

During one vacation period, we entrusted him to the mountains above San José for a second time. With the misgivings of parents leaving their child in the hands of a competent but unknown day-care employee, we drove up the green, spent volcanoes above San José to deposit Tucker into the care of don Jesús, a dog trainer of some repute. It became a family joke that Tucker had ‘gone to be with Jesus’, although this was not in order that he should collect his eternal reward but rather than he should learn to ‘heel’, ‘sit’, ‘speak’, and perfect his furry grip on a short menu of other canine competencies that it was determined he should master.

When we returned eagerly to collect our boy from don Jesus’ training regimen, we were treated to an awe-inspiring panoply of tricks. Tucker had, it seemed for one brief moment, become an obedient and highly intelligent dog! The thought was too much to be taken in. Perhaps that’s why it did not last five minutes.

After displaying Tucker’s new-found feats of dexterity, don Jesús turned serious. Tucker would not, we learned, be allowed to attend ‘Elementary Obedience II”. Though to our untrained eyes he seemed to have single-handedly—or with four paws—yanked his species several evolutionary steps down its long, Darwinistic path, in truth he had been a failure at education. Our hearts sank. ‘He is too jugetón‘, we learned from our chosen dog-master. The word jugetón employs its three syllables to evoke deeply resonant images of a child too playfully bloody-minded, too resilient against pedagogical pressure, too distracted and fun-loving ever to get beyond D’s and F’s in kindergarten. It is the quintessential Dennis-the-Menace word, an accusing adjective against which there is no appeal. ‘There is really no hope of him becoming trained’, don Jesús expostulated with exquisite authority. ‘What you’ve seen is all I can do with a dog like this.’

Paradoxically, Tucker’s stature seemed to grow with this announcement. After the 45 seconds or so it took for our initial, embarrassed dismay to pass, Tucker seemed to us almost a conquering hero. He had vanquished the invincible don Jesús. There would be no stopping this dog! Our hero …

In truth Tucker has maintained the elementary obedience he had attained with remarkable consistency throughout his enchanted life. When complex manoeuvres are requested of him—one thinks of the elevated degree-of-difficulty performance that most dogs learn to produce when one stares them in the eyes and says ‘Paw!’—he counters them with a look of utter, impassive incomprehension. While his Rhodesian Ridgeback sister would gesture vigourously in the air at the slightest indication that her paw was wanted, Tucker would sit beside her and unresponsively contemplate the unbearable lightness of being in a manner worthy of the most extreme French existentialists. Yet when it came to his short-list of behaviors (‘Sit!’, ‘Lie Down!’, ‘Stay!’), his fealty to learned behavior is comparable to that of the most unquestioning Ottoman slave. He virtually threw himself in eager submission against the commands directed at him.

Tucker prefers his obedience to be simple, not complex. It is perhaps his only demand.

Tucker emigrated back to the U.S. with us four years ago. While others of us struggled with that irreducible trauma that from a remote distance can be abbreviated as ‘culture shock’, Tucker was unperturbed by temporary apartment life, the joyful discovery of squirrels, further brushes with cancer, the manifold possibilities represented by ducks in our White River, and others of life’s unsettlements. He seemed to have negotiated a fixed peace with the world and, having concluded that pact, lived simply to please others.

But his cancer has come back.

Just before we left for the Middle East and Germany a week ago, a biopsy was required, with all the ominous eventualities that accompany such an evil day. I took him in to the vet and left him for the day so that the necessary excision could be accomplished. When all was done, he leapt into my car and helped me finish my errands as though general anaesthesis were no higher a hurdle than, say, an ant in his water dish. Woken by life’s worries at 2:30 a.m. the next morning, I took to reading in my easy chair only to become aware of a huffing and puffing in the backyard darkness. Tucker, from his basement repose, had detected an adventurous raccoon in the backyard and risen energetically to the challenge. Before the coon could do him damage—the opposite outcome was virtually unthinkable—I discovered an excuse for a flashlight and brought him in to lie by the side of my chair and share the dawn with me.

We sensed Tucker’s end was imminent, even though his high-velocity runs in the park were as recklessly joyful as ever.

Now the vet’s voice, over the phone in our Frankfurt hotel room, confirms the worst. The cancer is very, very aggressive.

‘What should we expect?’, I ask, attempting on the fly to master the grief that one feels slightly embarrassed to feel for an animal.

‘Just enjoy him’, she responds. ‘I mean, he’s like So what?, right?’

‘Yeah. He is’, I answer.

Spring came late to Indianapolis this year, all the more welcome for its tardy arrival. Tucker greeted his ninth Spring as though it were his first. Don’t get me wrong. He loved winter, too, it not having occurred to him to grow weary of snow. ‘But this Spring thing …’ he seemed to shout on our shared runs, ‘… this is like the best ever!’.

This will be the last Spring Tucker shares with us. Succeeding ones will have to bloom on their own merits. Tucker will not be there with us to proclaim with his tail-wagging life the deep joy of the thing. Perish the thought.