Marigold by the Fire

My blind coonhound sits before our fireplace. Staring into nothingness. Caught in the darkness of her own visionless world.

“Marigold,” I call to her. I’m using my high-pitched dog falsetto.

There is an important reason I use this voice. I speak this way so I can effectively sound like an idiot. Dogs love idiots.

“What’re you doing, Mary?” I ask.

Her tail wags, ever so gently. But she simply continues gazing with her dead eye into the whistling, steaming logs.

Before we adopted Marigold, an angry hunter paid a lot of money for her as a puppy. When he discovered she was gunshy, he beat her until she went blind.

She was found chained behind a tire shop, starving. That man is still walking around, somewhere in this world, breathing free air. Whereas she lives in darkness.

I close my eyes and try to join her sightless world for a moment.

The smells of a fireplace are intoxicating. I smell woodsmoke, but that’s about all. Namely, because I am a big, goofy human. Humans can’t smell much of anything.

Humans consider themselves to be God’s most noble and cherished work of art—they’ve announced this to the world many times. But I think it’s important to note, God has admitted that, for a work of art, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For my money, a dog is God’s masterwork. Humans are not smart enough to realize how smart dogs are.

Recently, a Border Collie named Chaser, from South Carolina, learned 1,022 words, and could distinguish between different objects by name. Scientists had no idea dogs possessed this kind of brain power.

And in the early ‘90s, Rico, another Border Collie, demonstrated a dog’s neurological ability for “fast mapping,” a skill human toddlers use for learning new words. Whenever Rico heard a new object-word, he would select the only unfamiliar object in the room, then narrow his choices down.

Scientists were shocked, of course. Scientists are always shocked. Modern science enters most discussions with the assumption that humans are superior. They thought humans were the only species who used “fast-mapping.”

Aside from brain power, a dog is capable of running 45 mph. When was the last time you ran 45 mph?

Dogs hear frequencies from 40 Hz to 60 kHz, from upwards of three miles away. They have 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses. A bloodhound can detect one drop of blood in an Olympic swimming pool.

Imagine that. Imagine being able to smell everything in the whole world, all at once.

Imagine sitting in an average living room, like mine, with the ability to smell every book on each shelf; every piece of upholstery; every bit of floor varnish; every speck of dust.

You can even smell the faint biological odors of your fellow humans—scents which science cannot detect with its high-tech finery. Such as, blood sugar variations, hormone levels, and tiny fluctuations in the pH of human sweat.

Now, imagine that this cold living room is suddenly adorned with a fireplace fire. The room is suddenly overwhelmed with the rich scent of burning hickory and the snap-crackle-pop of logs backfiring.

Now, imagine that your human comes up behind you and softly lays a hand aside your cold haunches. He is slow-witted, of course, because he is homosapien.

He mistakenly considers his species to be at the top of the food chain. Bless his heart. Humans are a species with a natural instinct for arrogance. But the truth is, they don’t even know how to drink out of the toilet.

But you love him anyway.

He pulls you close to himself as you both sit before the fire. You can smell everything about him. His laundry detergent. His shampoo. The scent of his breath. Each odor lingering in his shirt. You even sort of know his thoughts, somehow.

Now imagine that you lean into him. And although you cannot speak his language, you know how to communicate those three magic words humans always say to each other, but too rarely have the mettle to actually demonstrate.

But hey, no biped is perfect.