A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich Page A

to know that I’m here!”
    Herding and attentiveness came naturally. All those dogs really wanted to do was work and please us. There were no yelled commands, but rather, soft-spoken discussions. “See those cows over there on that hill,” I’d whisper, pointing to a few strays. “Why don’t you go get them, take them down the creek to a crossing and meet us at the bottom,” and off they’d go. All we ever had to teach them was to come back, a kind of self-control that, admittedly, in the first year seemed a hopeless task, but by age two they knew how to move cattle and come back.
    Coming from a long line of workers, Sam earned his keep most of the year—except now, during this winter vacation with me in California—so if he wanted a hamburger with french fries, he got it, as all the others before him would have, if there had been a fast-food place nearby.
    The beach house was dark when we arrived but the moon was bright and we could hear the surf. I called to Sam to follow me out to the deck and down the stairs to the sand. This he did happily until he saw a wave. As it crested, the foam brilliant in moonlight, he ran backwards, terrified of the white water racing toward him, then gave me a hurt look of betrayal. That was enough for one night: he ran for the house and wouldn’t come out until morning.
    We slept peacefully, his head on the pillow beside mine. Under us, the house shivered with each breaking wave. In the four months since my injury, no one had held me. Now one of my saviors was here at my side: we had both been struck, we had both survived, and I knew that if during the night I fell unconscious, he would bring me back alive.
    In mythology, animals are most often the messengers of divine power, and dogs have always had a place in the geography of death. Women are said to be the domesticators of dogs, and in European myths dogs were the companions only of goddesses, guarding the afterworld and helping to receive the dead. In Iran, dogs were allowed to gnaw on corpses before burial. In fifth-century Greece, there was a canine god featured in the Osirian mysteries. He marched in religious processions, standing on his back feet like a human, and when acting as the messenger between heaven and hell his head was sometimes gold, and at other times black. In Asia, the dog was a god called Up-Vat (meaning “opener of the way”), who was said to have started out as a wolf but developed a face like a greyhound, then merged with a jackal, and fed on the dead, swallowing their hearts.
    The role of supernatural helpers—guides, ferrymen, or harnessed dogs—stands for the guardian who carries the human spirit forward, whether from death back to life or the other way around. Did my unconscious choice of dogs to aid me come from the intimate living situation I had with them, or was it linked to some collective memory of a time when dogs were associated with funerary customs? In an old Norse myth, the goddess Hel gave birth to wolf-dogs who ate the flesh of the newly dead, then ferried their souls to paradise. I’m not sure if Sam would care to dine on my flesh—he prefers rack of lamb—but he is my guide, my Virgil through these never-ending gaps, these bardos that seem to lie before me.
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In the morning after toast and coffee, outside, Sam followed me timidly onto the sand. Nothing smelled right. Where were the horses, dogs, and cattle? He explored, never venturing far, and when he tried drinking seawater, the same look of betrayal came over his face. Can’t we even find a camp with decent water? he wondered. He watched the incoming tide carefully, never daring to get his feet wet: these dogs are fastidious, everything has to be in working order at all times, just in case there’s a cow to catch. The seabirds went unnoticed.
    I knew how he felt. The day I came out of the hospital on my father’s arm, the world kept collapsing. There