ANIMAL AFFAIRS
home
he’d run under the house rather than
risk tangling with a ladybug, loved Otto
from the start. Here was a huge, blundering retriever with a constantly wagging tail that, with a single flick, could
send a tray of wineglasses flying across
a room. Yet Silver couldn’t resist him.
Otto was so easily distracted that at
any moment he was likely to forget that
the cat was under his legs and collapse
to the rug, overcome by the urge to nap.
If he’d heard the refrigerator door open—
Otto could recognize from a block away
the sound of the rubber vacuum seal being released—he’d have trampled Silver.
Yet here Otto stood, a noble beast
wearing a gentle, quizzical look, as a
small gray animal rubbed against him.
“Silver, do you like Otto?” my husband
would ask. At the sound of this stranger’s voice, Silver jumped up in alarm and
ran off to cower behind a shower curtain. But the next morning he was back.
We watched through the kitchen window as the big brown dog and little gray
cat patrolled the backyard, side by side,
sniffing the grass. They looked like two
cows companionably grazing in a distant
field. Later, while Otto lay snoring, Silver
crept up and settled himself against the
dog’s haunch. It was like some kind of
perverse animal buddy film.
“Now do you admit Otto is special?”
my husband asked.
S oon after the hamburger
incident we moved to California. We drove from the
East to the West Coast,
but Otto flew out in a huge, hard-sided
crate. Silver traveled alongside, in a separate container labeled WARNING: SMALL
LIVE ANIMAL. It was as if they knew.
The day we moved into the new house
the pet transport people unloaded both
crates on the sidewalk. They opened the
big cage first. Otto, excited to escape
captivity and no doubt ravenous after a
transcontinental flight, bounded out. In
the first frenzied seconds, he ran in circles, relieved himself on a boxwood
bush, inhaled the remains of a sandwich
one of the movers had left on a stray
table, jumped up to lick the faces of all
five of us and, with a careless tail flick,
knocked over his crate.
It fell against Silver’s with a huge
crash. The metal grate slammed into
the back of the smaller carrier at the
instant the cat’s door swung open.
Out bolted Silver, like a bullet shot
from a rifle. He flew through the air before landing, shaken, on the driveway.
“Silver!” our daughter Zoe said,
opening her arms. “Come here!”
Silver looked at her without recog-
nition. His eyes darted everywhere. Our
house’s front door was open, but to get
inside to safety Silver would have had to
cross the stoop, on which stood another menacing stranger—my husband.
“Silver, it’s okay, boy,” Zoe said. She
held out her hand for the cat to sniff.
That sent him over the edge. With
a shrill wail Silver turned and ran. We
watched dumbfounded as he jumped to
the top of a six-foot-tall wooden fence,
landed in a thorny rose patch on the
other side and ran crazily through a busy
parking lot beyond. And disappeared.
We stood in silence for a few minutes.
Then my husband said, “Silver, come
back,” in a voice that might be described
in a court transcript as “[unintelligible].”
“Here, Silver,” I whispered.
But the cat was gone forever, having
run off without once setting paw into the
pee-free environment of our new house.
My husband and I looked at each other,
and then down at Otto, still wagging his
tail and sniffing expectantly inside the
abandoned cat cage.
Otto was like that TV detective,
Columbo. He might appear to be a
buffoon, but he’d bumbled his way into
solving our problem. At that moment I
would have loved him even if he were
someone else’s dog.
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