Patch

Our dog “Patch” was a Border Collie, so named by our sons because of the black fur that covered just one eye, giving him a slightly piratical air. As it turned out, the adjective was nothing if not appropriate. Patch was a canine buccaneer.

We got him as a puppy from a sheep rancher in Tamales Bay, California. Although we were looking for a house pet rather than a working dog, the breeder insisted on showing us what his Scottish ancestors could do. Taking us to a locked enclosure with Gus, the puppy’s sire, he sat down the dog and uttered an unintelligible command (it seemed as if the dog only responded to commands in Gaelic), whereupon Gus trotted over to the enclosure gate, nuzzled its slide lock open with his muzzle, sped toward a group of half a dozen sheep on a hill perhaps fifty yards away, and guided them with nips and barks back into the enclosure. Then he re-locked the slide and sat in front of his master, tongue lolling, waiting for praise and a pat on the back, which were duly administered. Impressed? I was agog. A Gaelic-speaking, sheep-herding expert!

It occurred to me that if our new puppy had that kind of genetic potential, he would be seriously under-employed as a house pet. But it was just a fleeting concern, and soon, with visions of newspaper fetching and other mundane chores in mind, we set off for Los Angeles with Patch nuzzling contentedly in my wife’s lap. As it happened, I needn’t have worried about keeping Patch’s canine mind occupied due to an absence of sheep. I had something else entirely to worry about.

As soon as we got home, we introduced Patch to Louie, our regal, ten-year old Standard Poodle, for whose benefit and companionship we bought Patch in the first place. From the first moment, they got along famously, with Patch content to be pack member to Louie’s alpha dog. With one exception. Louie was a stay-at-home dog, happiest when he was hunkering down with his muzzle resting on my foot. He was willing to scamper around our yard with the kids and was perfectly happy to go for a walk in the neighborhood, but he was royally indifferent to ‘fetch’ or ‘Frisbee’ or even other dogs’ behinds. By contrast, Patch was a runner and an explorer. No, Patch was the Ferdinand Magellan of explorers.

If Louie was a stay-at-home dog, Patch was a gad-about. At that time, we had a large, only partially fenced yard, and by the time Patch was six-months old, he had explored its confines and was hankering for wider horizons. He would disappear for hours at a time, and then we would hear him outside the front door, barking to be let in. Or, in the beginning, he wouldn’t come home at all, and I had to get in the car and go street by street until I found him. It quickly became worrisome. He could get lost, hit by a car, dog-napped, attacked by larger, more aggressive dogs. All manner of ills could befall him. So we decided to fence him in, and I had the gaps in our fence repaired. Patch found new gaps, and tunneled beneath the fence. I even had the fence electrified, whereupon Patch, like his father before him, slipped the unelectrified latch. We were at our wits end.

About a month after he started roaming, we began receiving phone calls from our neighbors. At first, the calls were friendly and helpful. ‘Do you own a Border Collie named Patch? (He wore an ID on his collar.) Well, he’s in our back yard. Yes, we’ll try to keep him until you get here.’

Then, as Patch entered doggie adolescence, (do dogs even go through puberty?) the calls grew more annoyed, then irate. ‘Come and get your damn dog. He’s in my yard trying to mount my Beagle, Spaniel, Dachshund, Weimaraner, Mastiff. Name your breed, Patch had had her. I realized that I didn’t own a purebred Border Collie. Patch was a hybrid–part collie, part serial rapist.

It all came to an end one evening when I answered a knock at the door to find a man holding a large, cardboard carton containing seven tiny puppies with suspiciously familiar black and white markings. Behind me, Patch’s bark had a decidedly paternal tone. Holding up one of the vari-colored pups, the man explained that he lived several blocks away and was the owner of two champion Samoyeds that he had been trying to breed for over a year. The pups would have been worth over a thousand dollars apiece. With tears in his eyes, he continued to say that he was headed for our local market’s parking lot, where he hoped to give away Patch’s offspring for nothing.

The next day, we took Patch to the vet to be neutered. For the rest of his long life, except for walks on a leash, Patch became a homebody.