The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Finally, I would like to mention a personal matter, with the desire that it need never be discussed again. Our night at “The Hollow” (as I believe the establishment was called) culminated in a rather unfortunate—indeed, foolish—incident. The young lady you introduced me to has mailed several letters to my home address since then, indicating that she would rather not put the event into the proper perspective. Rest assured, I have determined that this is only a matter of misplaced affection and not something medical in nature. I believe you know her, if my memory of that night was not completely destroyed by whatever was in those shot glasses. (I shall never again hear the name “Leinenkugel” without some degree of nausea. I am grateful the beverage isn’t sold here.)
In any case, I’ve suggested to her that the best thing might be a subtle remembrance in the form of a puppy related to the famous “Buddy,” which she would acquire from you. I’ve explained to her that this would be Buddy’s paternal nephew or niece, but as you well know, those not involved in animal husbandry have little interest in exact filial relationships, and no appreciation of their significance. In any event, if you would agree to make that possible, I would be happy to send Conrad a letter endorsing the mating. And you would have my deepest gratitude.
I believe you have undertaken a particularly interesting project, Mr. Sawtelle. If my prior letter seemed harsh, please accept my apologies.
Most anxiously awaiting your reply,
Alvin Brooks
Postscript: As for naming, I see no reason to call them anything other than “Sawtelle Dogs,” or perhaps just “Sawtelles.” If they amount to anything besides well-trained mongrels, they will, after all, have been the product of your vision.
And then a third letter, postmarked almost five years later:
November 18, 1938
Morristown, New Jersey
John,
I do not share this desire to wax philosophical about the nature of men and dogs. It leads to discussions that are unscientific at best and a waste of intellectual force at worst. You are talking religion, not science.
One part of your letter intrigued me, however—your discussion of Canis posterus—the “next dogs,” as you call them. I am familiar with the theory of the dire wolf, that gigantic ancestor of wolves that trod the prehistoric earth. I, like you, believe that our modern dogs are descended from the wolves of antiquity, perhaps one hundred thousand years past. As you say, that gives us three points—more than enough to plot a trajectory—if they belong to the same evolutionary branch of the species. That is, the dire wolf may have been something entirely separate from Canis lupus, an alternative form that natural selection toyed with and discarded.
I must make something clear before I go on. You speak of natural selection and evolution as if they were one and the same, but natural selection—the undirected survival of an individual or individuals—is merely one mechanism of evolution, and not the only one. Mutation, for example, is another mechanism—one way in which novelty gets introduced. As you well know, conscientious animal husbandry serves the same function in domesticated animals that natural selection serves in the wild.
Yet, in geometry, given two points, a line may be drawn. Perhaps the same is true in biology. Suppose those two points we take are the wolf and the domestic dog. That does imply something else farther along the same line—the “next dog,” as you like to phrase it.
But this is where your thinking goes awry, for along any such biological line, the farther points are not more advanced than the earlier points, they are only better adapted. That is, evolution and sophistication are not necessarily one and the same. And so your endless speculation on the nature of Canis posterus, and hence the next small change that will make them better workers (which is my dream) or companions (yours) is futile, since the forces of selection would either have to know in advance what small change is desired, or be able to recognize it when it happens by pure accident. The latter is not a realistic possibility—mutations occur at an extremely low rate in any population, and of course the chance of a specific mutation that would better adapt a dog for companionship…well, it is possible, but statistically unlikely.
Which leaves you in the uncomfortable position of speculating on a change that cannot happen unless you already know what it will be (or have the sort of time on your hands that natural selection has). That is the crux of the layman’s trouble in understanding evolution: it works on a time scale so far beyond personal experience that one must train oneself to think in eons, not decades. Here at Fortunate Fields, we have carefully defined objective criteria known in advance by which our animals may be measured for fitness; we know exactly which behaviors to select for. Therefore, though our progress must be slow, we are confident it will also be steady.
Since you insist on speculating, however, I will say this much. There are limits to what even the most rigorously scientific breeding program can accomplish—based not only on the foundation stock and the limits of precision we have for measuring the dogs, but on limits that come from within us—limits, in other words, of our own imagination, and of ourselves as conscientious human beings. In the end, to create better dogs, we will have to become better people.
And that, sir, is the last speculation you will hear from me along these lines.
There was more in the letter, an exchange of kennel techniques, clarification of older letters. What interested Edgar was how Alvin Brooks had signed the letter. To move such a formal man from that first outraged letter to one in which he closed with “Affectionately” must have taken dozens if not hundreds of exchanges. Why had these, of all the letters, been kept? Probably chance, he knew. But he dug back into the file cabinets to see what else he could find, opening letter after letter and setting it aside.
It all made him think about their records. The paperwork on a dog didn’t end when it left the kennel. At his father’s request, new owners sent back letters every few months describing how the dog they’d adopted was getting along. When a dog reached five years of age, his father had contacted the owners to fill out another form. And when the dog died, yet another form was filled out, recording the age, cause of death, behavior late in life, and so on. Edgar’s father sometimes even called the dog’s veterinarian. As a result, the file for every dog expanded over time until it was stuffed with notes, letters, photographs.
“A litter,” Edgar’s father once told him, “is like an x-ray of its parents and its parents’ parents, but an x-ray that takes years to develop, and even then it’s faint. The more x-rays you have, the better the picture you get.”
This made sense. A dog might sire half a dozen litters, each with six or seven pups. That meant forty or more pups who reflected the qualities of the sire. If, for an extreme example, cleft palates showed up in every litter—meaning pups that had to be put down—you knew that the sire carried a propensity toward cleft palate. (Of course, if a sire produced cleft palates more than once, they stopped breeding him, and a red slash was drawn across the dog’s folder.)
Just before a dog left the kennel, it was evaluated one last time. They called this “the finish.” There were no special tests in the finish, just the same things they’d always tested for, the same exercises, the same measurements. The difference was, this time the results were rolled up into a numerical score representing the dog in maturity. That finish score was the best indication of what its ancestors had passed on—the best x-ray.
Once a finish score was assigned, Edgar’s father recalculated all its ancestors’ finish scores, going back five generations. This was how evidence accumulated about how true the dog bred, how reliably it passed on its qualities, good or bad, to succeeding generations. A second number told them how many of a dog’s progeny had contributed to the master score—an index of confidence. When planning litters, the choice between two dogs with nearly identical finish scores favored the dog with the highest index of confidence—the one who had been tested most thoroughly. This was a system Edgar’s grandfather had
It wasn’t a perfect scheme, of course. While the finish score gave an idea of how well a dog fared in testing, there were intangibles to consider. Not temperament, which they broke down into individual behaviors and assessed, and not physical qualities, which were easily measured, but how the dog combined all these things, for the whole of every dog was always greater than the sum of its parts. Some, for example, seemed capable of inspiration: they clued in on a new way of doing things more often than others. There was no way to measure this. And there was the dog’s personality, which was distinct from its temperament. A dog with a keen sense of humor would find ways to make jokes with you, and could be a joy to work with. Others were serious and contemplative, and they were good for other reasons.
Edgar’s father had sometimes grumbled that all he did was keep track of a dog’s faults, though what he meant was, even the best records in the world couldn’t capture the whole of the dog. They could record only what could be measured. And the measuring and testing of the dogs, the follow-up calls and letters, the reassessment of the ancestors of a placed dog, all served to remind his father of a dog’s total character. When it came time to plan a litter, the scores and numbers were only a guide. It hadn’t been unusual for him to select against the numbers based on intuition.
But his father’s complaint also pointed to the fact that the records mainly prevented bad pairings—breeding, say, two dogs that tended to produce weak fronts. That was the interesting thing about planning a cross. Two brilliant dogs couldn’t be bred if it risked a litter full of stifles so straight the dogs would be crippled by the time they were five years old. And so the first question about any potential pairing was not how great the offspring would be, but what problems it might produce.
Thinking about all this, Edgar began to understand what his mother meant when she’d claimed not to have the words to describe what made their dogs valuable. Partly it was the training. They spent long hours doing crazywalking, stays, releases, shared-gaze drills, and all the rest until the pups paid attention to where they were going and where they were looking; they learned that a certain expression on a person’s face meant that something interesting lay behind them, or in another room. He’d taken that for granted, but now that his mother had pointed it out, he saw how uncommon this was.
So a dog’s value came from the training and the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines—the particular dogs in their ancestry—and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told them the story of the dog—what a dog meant, as his father put it.
Sometimes when Edgar got an idea, a whole series of other ideas clicked into place right behind it, as if they had logjammed somewhere in his mind, waiting for the way to clear. Suddenly, he saw how the training, the breeding, and the record-keeping worked together, how the training tested the dogs for their qualities, their ability to learn different kinds of work. That explained the training notes and why the Sawtelles had to raise the dogs to maturity: if they placed a pup, they wouldn’t know what kind of dog it became. But the Sawtelles could compare them because they trained every dog. So it made sense that a dog’s finish score could alter the scores of its ancestors, which in turn influenced the dogs used for the next mating. As if every dog had a voice in selecting the following generations.
Edgar closed his eyes and waited until he could hold it all in his mind, and once that happened, he wanted so badly to ask his father about it, to be sure he’d understood things correctly, that it nearly made him cry. But the only way left to him was through the records. And yet—he felt this, but couldn’t find the words for it—something else made the dogs valuable, too, something that hadn’t been among this sudden cascade of ideas. He wished he could read his grandfather’s side of the correspondence to understand what he’d meant by “the next dogs.”
No matter how naïve or wild-eyed his grandfather might have sounded to Brooks, Edgar thought John Sawtelle’s vision might not have been so quixotic.
He had a feeling, in fact, that it might already have come to pass.
Lessons and Dreams
A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE FUNERAL, AFTER THE SHOCK HAD WORN off and some of the kennel routines were established again, Edgar’s dreams began. In them, his father did the most ordinary things—walking along the driveway to fetch the mail, reading in his armchair, lifting a puppy in the dim light of the whelping room to take a closer look. Edgar looked for some connection between his last waking thoughts and what he saw when he fell asleep. One night he found himself walking creekside with his father, the sumac and chokecherry green and jungle lush, though he knew, even in the dream, that outside his window the fields lay buried under thick drifts of snow. Then his father turned and said something, something important. When Edgar woke he lay still, trying to fix those words in his mind, but by the time he shuffled into the kitchen, he couldn’t even remember whether his father had signed or spoken.
Trudy peered at him over her coffee cup.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
Nothing.
“Was it a dream?” she asked. “Your father?”
Her guess surprised him. He didn’t know how to answer. Was she having dreams, too? It seemed possible—some mornings she looked as fragile as a baby bird. She was trying to shield him from whatever bad feelings she had, he could see that. She stayed up late sitting at the kitchen table and pretending to work. Half the time he cooked dinner for her because she seemed to have forgotten to eat. She only pushed the food around on her plate, then stood and began to wash dishes. When she talked with people in town she was calm and poised (though tired-looking), but beneath it Edgar saw something fractured.
And there was, he discovered, a kind of selfishness in him about those dreams. They might have been false memories, but they were memories nonetheless, stolen time. In the end he just shrugged and headed out to start the morning chores. He hadn’t fooled her, but they didn’t talk about it, either, which, for the time being, was good enough.
HIS MOTHER HAD HIM set up a low barrier in the mow—a pair of uprights with dowels sticking out, like a track-and-field hurdle. A rough curtain of red ribbon hung from the rod. She asked Edgar to bring up one of the dogs. At first he intended to use Essay, who loved to climb and jump. Then he remembered his mother’s admonition about training the dogs on exercises they had already mastered, so he chose Finch instead. He stayed the dog on the far side of the barrier, then walked to his mother’s side.
“Have him jump the barrier,” she said.
She wasn’t asking for a stupendous feat: the rod was on the lowest set of dowels, six inches above the floor. Finch could step over it. When Edgar signaled a recall, Finch wandered forward. He sniffed the uprights then skirted them without stepping over the rod. He trotted the remaining distance and finished in front of Edgar, swishing his tail and glancing back and forth between the two of them.
“What did you think of that?” his mother asked.
He did it wrong, Edgar signed.
“All right, let me put it another way. What did you do wrong?”
Nothing. He knew exactly what I wanted. He had to go out of his way to avoid it.
“Is that so?”
Edgar looked at Finch, whose mouth was hanging open slightly, ears erect, eyes shining with mischief. Of course Finch knew he was supposed to jump the barrier—not only had Finch seen other dogs do the same thing, but Finch himself had jumped that barrier many times, even when it was set much higher (though never reliably, Edgar had to admit). Certainly, Finch wasn’t scared of the barrier, as some dogs were. And on top of all that, it was obviously the shortest path between them.
Yes, he signed. You saw him.
“Okay,” his mother said. “We’ll forget for a moment that when Finch finally got here, you
Abashed, Edgar scratched Finch’s chest and smoothed the fur over the dog’s forehead. He looped his fingers through his collar, but before he could take a step, his mother said, “Stop!”
He turned to look at her.
“Why did you just praise Finch?”
He laughed, silently, shoulders shaking. His mother seemed determined to ask absurd questions.
Because he came when called.
“Really?” She looked puzzled. “Okay. Well.” She raised an arm and signaled them forward with a limp hand, a queen dismissing courtiers. “Proceed.”
He led Finch across the mow, giving the uprights a wide berth so as not to accidentally reinforce the incorrect path. When they’d gotten halfway back to the starting position, his mother again shouted, “Stop!”
They stopped. The barrier was within reach of Edgar’s left hand. Far away, near the mow door, his mother stood with her fingers woven into her hair like a madwoman, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” she said.
This was an act, he knew, and it made him laugh all over again.
Taking Finch to his stay-spot.
“But you didn’t go over the barrier!”
You didn’t ask me to go over the barrier.
“Exactly,” she said. “You see? You can’t train a dog to do something if you don’t know what you want him to do. When you recalled Finch, you didn’t know what you wanted. How can I tell? Because you said one thing to him and expected something else, just like I did. If I had known what I wanted from you I would have asked for it. But I didn’t know until you were already past the barrier. Now I know what I want. Come back here. You’ve taught me what I want.”