john backman

WRONG-WAY DOG

For the first time ever—on the last walk of her life—our dog headed in the wrong direction.

It should have looked wrong to her, because her walks in the woods followed a strict routine: jump in the car, gaze out the windshield, whine like mad when the nature preserve comes into view, exit car, beeline down the wooded trail, white rump bounding up and down as legs flew in all directions. More recently, at fifteen, she didn’t jump so much as struggle, and beeline gave way to amble. But every walk—every single walk—sent her into the woods.

Until the frigid January day when she stumbled out the passenger’s side and pointed the wrong way, up the road we’d driven to get there, toward the cornfields that adjoined the preserve. It took no time at all for my eyes to tear and my cheeks to go numb. Mercifully, the walk would be short: her arthritic legs wouldn’t go far in this weather.

Or so I thought. She had a different idea. After the first few steps she broke into the trot familiar from ten years before. The wind blew straight into her face but her pace didn’t slacken. The glint in her eye was new: a kind of resolution, someone hell-bent on checking an item off a bucket list.

The road stretched half a mile through acres of corn husks before the first curve. At certain points her resolve abated, or at least I hoped so, as the pain in my face and hands intensified. No such luck: her muzzle, the gray hairs now frosted over, never wavered in its direction. Everything around us howled January—biting gusts, cornfields piled with snow, bare trees on the horizon, leaden clouds, not even a crow to break the sound of the wind. One person, one dog, walking in what I still believed was the wrong direction.

My brain had turned to sludge in the cold, so it was left to my body to sense the importance. She needs to get every step out of this walk, my body said. Let her. Go until you can’t, and then some.

Then some came far down the road, almost to the curve, as the wind taunted me with thoughts of the walk back. I turned her around and she reacted according to routine: mopey, plodding well behind me, head down, her signature of displeasure.

I know our bodies have limits and it’s good to respect them. I know the impact of cold and frostbite and even death, and beyond that how everything, without fail, comes to an end. Still, ever since the night maybe a week after—when I found her on the carpet in a circle of blood, when I held her on the futon through the moment of death—the question has nagged at me: what if I had walked her forever? Walked her around the curve, down the hill, into town, across the river? Walked until my nose turned black and my fingers fell off? Would she have gone forever? Would we have joined each other in death? Either way, would it have been worth the effort to avoid the pang in my chest even now, thirteen years later, the etched-in-stone memory of that frozen old dog with her resolute step?

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John Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, wrinkles in the fabric of reality, and occasionally animals. Her personal essays have appeared in Catapult and other journals.