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By Root 476 0

paws on two other Inuit men. In the center of these four figures is the face of another Inuit man. Each half of his face is looking in a different direction at one of the dog-man pairings. The two large dogs look exactly like Oogy. They have the same prominent snouts and stocky bodies, the same muscular rear haunches. They are standing on their hind legs the same way Oogy often does. I am not sure which dog is protecting whom, or from what, but my sense is that the four dogs actually represent one single dog and that they are protecting the man with two faces. This print has always spoken to me of the best of bonds between people and dogs, and looking at it has never failed to give me an appreciation of that relationship. Given the level of devotion Oogy exhibits toward us and the physical similarities he shares with the dogs in this print, it is almost as though he has stepped out of that picture and come to life — and perhaps this is why I felt I recognized him when I first met him.

A second prescient picture cropped up years later in an entirely different context. When the boys were in seventh grade and Oogy had already been with us for a year, Dan did some research on our house for a school project. We live in the original farmhouse in our neighborhood, a part of which is about one hundred and fifty years old. Among the things Dan learned was that a former owner of the property, a veterinarian, began buying up small amounts of acreage from various neighbors until he owned about two hundred acres. During his research, Dan found a picture, which appears to have been taken in the 1930s, of the veterinarian’s son standing in front of a cornfield next to a white dog. The boy is wearing an Irish-style cap, a plaid sweater vest, and knickers. And the dog looks exactly the way Oogy would if he had both ears. Something about that fact has always resonated with me — that before any of us was alive, a dog that looked just like Oogy lived here.

These pictures, both strikingly similar representations of Oogy, one frozen in time eighty years past not far from where Oogy sleeps now, the other from an artist’s imagination twenty-five years ago, create a continuity of Oogy in our house, pre-dating his actual presence by decades. I hear Oogy echoing down the halls of time and back again like magic. He has been here for a long, long while.

When he was just over a year old and we were having trouble coping with Oogy’s energy, we hired a trainer at the recommendation of a friend. The trainer, our friend told us, claimed to be able to talk to animals, but she herself was skeptical. The morning the trainer came for her first visit, I introduced her to Oogy, who was lying on his blanket in the family room. The trainer sat on the floor next to him for a full five minutes. Jennifer, Noah, Dan, and I stood just outside the doorway to the room, in the hallway, watching the trainer bend and put her head next to Oogy’s, watching her lips move next to his ear; then she would pull back a few inches and focus her gaze on him before leaning forward to whisper to him again. The four of us were exchanging skeptical glances with one another. We could not hear a word she said — or anything Oogy said back to her, for that matter. We had hired the woman to train Oogy, not to talk to him.

When the trainer lifted her head after her discussion was complete, her eyes were brimming with tears. “Oogy wants you to know,” she said, “how much he appreciates the love and respect you’ve shown him.”

We were not sure how to react to this statement. We could understand the truth of what she said, of course. It made sense he would have felt that way. But the statement presented a number of possibilities. Had Oogy actually communicated that to her telepathically? Or, because the trainer could see that Oogy was well loved and could also see he had been abused in the past, was she simply making a logical deduction? In the end, though, I realized that it didn’t matter — the important thing was that she had learned this about Oogy. Even if she was only stating the obvious,