A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich

hated, and mice, which frightened him. He loved music, favoring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Sunday mornings, certain operatic arias, and, most of all, Ravi Shankar. The movie Gandhi seemed to entrance him, and he watched it sitting up in a chair all the way through.
    Rusty was “tuned in” also to the movements and problems of the animals at the ranch. In the fall and spring, when migrating herds of elk came through and bedded down in our upper and lower meadows, he clawed our arms, whined at the door, and led us to an overlook where we could see the animals, just so we knew they were there.
    Once, during calving, his favorite cow was having trouble giving birth. She was half a mile away, the light was going, and it was beginning to snow. Unaware of her problems, we went into the house for dinner but Rusty didn’t follow. This was most uncharacteristic. I called for him but he didn’t come. Then I saw his silhouette on top of a hill of manure in a sorting corral, where he stood looking toward the lower field. Finally, my husband, Press, went out to see what the problem was. Rusty led him to Spot. By then the calf had been born, half under a barbed-wire fence, and a coyote was gnawing at its frozen back legs. Press chased the coyote off, wrapped the calf’s chewed legs in his own socks, and carried him a half-mile to the warming room in the barn, which was piled thick with fresh straw. Because of what we called “Rusty’s ranch ESP” that calf was saved.
    Too much has been made of evaluating animals’ intelligence by their ability to learn human language. Is language the only tool we have for abstract thought? There must be other symbols, ideas, and images that have no names; there must be ways to retrieve them from memory: a smell, a texture, a color, a form, a need flung telepathically across a ranch. Theirs is another alphabet, another string of sounds used to express intuitions and feelings or whatever a dog knows. Just because we can’t hear, smell, feel what they do and have failed to decipher their codes doesn’t mean they are stupid and we are smart. I’m sure they know the opposite to be true.
    I sent for a mail-order bride for Rusty. She was fancy and black and, like all thoroughbreds, too high-strung and smart for her own good; but Rusty didn’t mind, he loved her unconditionally. Their affair went on for ten days, during which Rusty was a tireless suitor, gazing at her, even as she slept, with adoring eyes. In the middle of ardent and frequent lovemaking, he’d look back at the house, as if to say to me, “You humans think you have fun—look at me!”
    Soon enough she had a litter of six: two blacks, two browns, two blonds—an ecumenical assortment—something for everyone. Sam was one of the brown puppies. We gave his brown brother to Grady, who named that pup Sam too, after the original grandfather who started this dynasty. My Sam’s spiritual bent was less devout than his father’s and his intellect less astute than his glamorous sister’s, but that’s what was charming about him: from the beginning he was footloose and fancy-free, with a casual, “What, me worry?” look, not because he was disengaged, merely confident that all problems had a resolution.
    I watched his mother wean the pups: she turned weaning into a game. Fending the six pups off was the way she taught them how to be aggressive, when to be submissive, how to use their paws and to roll. In all his chasing, rolling, and jumping, Sam stayed on top, not out of toughness but charm and a disdain for repeated failure. Even his anxieties manifested in curious ways: once, while moving cattle off the mountain into the valley for the winter, he stopped in the middle of town and started howling. For five minutes he couldn’t be moved as if to say, “I’ve never been to town before, and I’m not quite sure about it, but I just wanted everyone