The Saga of the White Dog

Come back to me, is all I ask.

When a large white dog showed up at our farm, we thought he’d come to stay.

In fact, I believed that my husband, Raven, had manifested him. Raven is a hardworking oil painter with long and wild gray hair. He’s retired from the post office, where he suffered a fair share of dog bites, so you’d think he’d be done with dogs, but no. When the two of us merged our households we had four—three from him and one from me—but before long that number was five. We almost had a sled-team.

Over the years they grew old and died. Our huge Anatolian shepherd, Sequoia, who came from a rescue shelter near Savannah, had died a couple months before. The bigger the dog is, the more child-sized, the more Raven loves it. When Sequoia died Raven wept over her grave, then planted a lemon tree to mark the spot.

Then we were down to one dog, green-eyed Asa, who was found hanging out next to a dumpster at a river landing in north Georgia when our friend Phyllis landed her kayak. We don’t know what breed he is, but he looks exactly like photos of brown-and-white, short-haired border collies that we see online.

Our last child recently left home, which is a nonchalant way to describe an event that ripped a hole in each of us, and now every sound in our house rang hollow.

Raven wanted to fill the emptiness with more dogs.

I wanted less responsibility to dependents and more freedom to go places, such as visit friends at the coast and spend the night.

Two days before this large white dog showed up, Raven had come across a Great Pyrenees in need of a home. Its owner had died and the dog had been found wandering. Raven lobbied hard for us to drive two hours and bring the dog home. (I wrote about that here.)

I was blunt. “I plan to travel without you,” I said.

So it was like a vision when, two days later, Raven spotted a large white animal waltzing up our driveway. He rubbed his eyes. The animal was a Pyrenees and it kept coming. When it got to the house Raven opened the door, and the large white dog walked in.

Was he a stray? Was he lost? Had someone pulled a wonderful joke and delivered the online dog to us? He looked kempt and cared for. He was wearing a red collar with no identification.

I fell in love. It was easy because he was a very special dog. He liked sleeping next to our bed although he would have preferred the bed itself. He liked to get hugs. He seemed to like everything about farm life and about us.

A week passed before I learned that he danced. If I tossed my head up and down, he would copy me, dipping his head then throwing it high, lifting his huge front paws off the floor, obviously dancing. If I talked to him, he talked back. He made high-pitched noises that sounded like whines but to him were not. Obviously he was talking, even singing.

But sometimes I would see a faraway look come into his eyes. He would look away to the west, as if he were wondering about someone.

“I think this dog has another family,” I would say to Raven, who had begun calling around the neighborhood and posting notices on local “lost dog” sites. Nobody was responding.

“Maybe somebody stopped to let him pee and he ran off after a deer,” I said. We thought a lot about how the big dog had come to us.

Our grown son Silas came to visit. “That dog has another family,” he said.

Raven had read that male Pyrenees wander, and if this dog was a stray, Raven didn’t want him wandering off. So he kept the dog close. He would whistle him back if the dog got too far from him. Two months passed this way, two months during which I called the dog “Beau” and Raven called him “Big Boy.”

“You have to let the dog go,” I told Raven. “If he comes back, he’s yours.” (If he doesn’t, he never was.😂)

Sure enough, one day, out on his own to potty, the big dog vanished.

That was a hard day. For the rest of that day and for days to come, time passed slowly. We waited for the dancing dog to come home. As the weeks passed, like all the other losses in our life, we began to get over him.

A line in the novel Cold Mountain slays me every time I think of it. Ada has written a letter to Inman, which he receives at the Confederate hospital in Richmond. Come back to me, is all I ask.

One day two months later, there was a noise at the door, and the dog was there. We let him inside, fed him a large meal, picked burrs from his coat, and let him sleep the rest of the day in the air conditioning. This time he stayed two weeks. I talked Raven into writing our phone number in permanent ink on his collar, in case he was a congenital rambler, so that someone else in our situation might know he had a good and loving family, and might call us if he showed up at their door.

The dog stayed three days and vanished again. We waited for a phone call.

A month later the dog was back. He always arrived as if he’d missed us, as if he couldn’t wait to return to us—dancing and singing, snuggling, laying at our feet. When Raven checked to see if the phone number remained legible, something looked odd. The number on the collar had a 2, and our number doesn’t. Raven parted the soft long hair of the scruff and unbuckled the collar.

Someone had changed our number into their number. Instead of calling the number on the collar, they wrote their own number over ours.

The long arm of technology allowed us to do a reverse phone search, and we found where the dog lives. I use present tense because he still lives there. His other house is a small farm, with goats and horses. We’ve driven past looking for him, when he’s not at our house, wondering what he’ll do when he hears our car, but we’ve never seen him there. Surely he hears our engine and lifts his head.

He lives 10 miles away from us. Those 10 miles are not straight miles. They are crooked. Most of them are dirt. By car, you make a lot of turns. As the crow flies, you cross a couple of creeks, some cotton fields, and a few patches of big woods.

Early this Monday morning I had just finished yoga when I heard a loud whimper at the door. We had not seen the white dog in probably two months, but there he was, grinning at the sight of me, me grinning at the sight of him. I opened the door and gave him a big hug, and he began to dance and sing and leap around the room.

The leave-takings are grueling, the homecomings joyous. Isn’t that always the way things go?

Today’s Wednesday and he’s still here—still childlike, soft, familiar, sweet-tempered, nameless.

Photos by Silas Ray-Burns, aka

Crumbstarz