Another important skill of Misha's was his management of traffic.
No car so much as touched Misha, who, like a civil engineer, had divided
the streets and their traffic into categories and had developed different
strategies to deal with each. The worst and most dangerous areas were
congestions of multidirectional traffic, and these Misha completely
avoided. If he needed to be on the far side of one of them, he simply
went around it. The second category was composed of a few limited-access
highways where the heavy traffic was especially dangerous. Misha couldn't
avoid the highways and still go where he wanted, so, adopting a humble
attitude, he approached the cars with diplomacy and tact in an attempt to
appease them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many dogs treat cars as if they were
animate. Dogs who chase cars evidently see them as large, unruly
ungulates badly in need of discipline and shepherding, and can't help
trying to control them. But Misha didn't chase cars. He well understood
that they could be tremendously dangerous, especially when they seemed to
be acting angrily and willfully, as they did on the limited-access
highways. So he offered them respect. At the edge of the highway Misha
would stand humbly, his head and tail low, his eyes half shut, his ears
politely folded.
But the moment the cars became few, Misha's humility would vanish.
His ears and tail would rise and he would bound fearlessly among them,
the very picture of confidence. Over the highway he would skip, and go
happily on his way. Never while I was observing him did I hear a scream
of tires. Sometimes, though, he would lose me beside a limited-access
highway. I lacked his courage, also his speed and skill, and I usually
had to wait much longer than he did before the traffic conditions met my
requirements for crossing. If traffic separated us, Misha would wait for
a while on the far side, but sooner or later he would assume that I had
lost interest and would travel on. Later, when his traveling abated, he
would find me waiting for him at home.
When crossing an intersecting street, Misha used a considerably
more intelligent method than his human counterparts. Unlike us, he didn't
cross at the corner. Instead, he would go about 20 feet from the corner,
cross there, and return on the opposite sidewalk to continue his journey.
At first I couldn't understand this maneuver, although Misha invariably
used it. Then I saw its merits, and copied him thereafter. Why is Misha's
method safer? Because at any point along the block, traffic comes from
only two directions instead of four, as it does at the intersection. By
crossing midblock, one reduces one's chances of being hit by a turning
car. Since learning this technique from Misha, I have noticed almost all
freeranging dogs do likewise.
In the residential streets, Misha's demeanor changed. Here he took
no precaution about cars and never used a sidewalk, but instead moved
daringly and purposefully up the middle of the street, eyes front, head
and ears forward, tail up, the very picture of intent confidence. Even
when he crossed an intersection, he did not alter his demeanor but kept
scanning the street ahead. The trouble was that he couldn't see the cars
speeding toward him on the cross street. Yet, amazingly, he always
escaped them. How did he manage that?
I might never have learned if both his ears had been like the ears
of most other huskies--stiff and upright. But they weren't. His left ear
was soft at the tip when Misha was trotting along in a relaxed manner.
When he was alert and tense, however, the tip would shoot up and stand
stiff like that of his right ear.
One day, while following Misha down a side street on the bike I had
taken to using for my dogological studies, I saw his left ear stiffen as
he approached an intersection. As was his custom, his eyes never left the
street ahead, but the nearer he got to the intersection, the more his two
ears stiffened and rotated outward, pointing sideways, so that by the
time he was ready to cross (which he always did without changing his
speed or shifting his gaze), the cups of his ears were pointing up and
down the cross street.
If a car was coming, he heard it. What was more, his hearing gave
the speed of the car as well as its location, so that all Misha needed to
do to avoid being hit was to pick up his pace or slow down, either to
beat the car to the intersection or else to let it go across ahead of
him. Scanning the street along which he was proceeding, never shifting
his gaze to confirm what he heard coming from the sides, Misha would trot
across the intersection smoothly, radiating coolness and
self-confidence.
Again and again we did this, at least two or three nights a week
for almost two years, not stopping even after Misha's owners came home to
claim him, because by then Misha liked the work we were doing together
and wanted to keep at it. Coming to collect me was not difficult for
him--his community did not then have a leash law, so of an evening, after
his owners let him out, he'd jump their fence and make his way across two
cities and a maze of traffic to find me. Usually, he would arrive just
after dark. By the light on our front porch I'd see him standing in the
street, looking up at our windows like a captain looking for a sailor.
One by one, dog secrets were revealed through a series of adventures,
some of them dangerous, all of them interesting. Misha was Odysseus, and
Cambridge was the winedark sea.
PHOTO: Two dogs
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