Hey, Norton! Who’s the greatest dog?
Victoria author Anny Scoones has a talent for writing candidly and colourfully about simple things, and many of her tales are of her time living on a heritage farm with countless beloved pets and animals. The majority of her stories, like this one about an adopted dog, are memories recalled with humour, charm and a bit of sadness, and they tell the truth about living.
One of the greatest dogs I adopted from the SPCA was Norton, a huge, white animal with brown patches. John, my husband at the time, named him Norton because we were obsessed with the old Jackie Gleason TV series The Honeymooners, and we already had a rather dim-witted chocolate Labrador named Ralph.
Ralph and Norton were the two male characters in the series; their wives were Trixie and Alice. John and I would watch the blackand-white reruns every night in bed, with hot-water bottles soothing our liniment-soaked muscles after the hard labour of the day.
I kept 12 horses and gave riding lessons all day; John was a contractor. He built seawalls using smooth, granite boulders that his excavator’s big metal teeth lifted and placed together like a jigsaw puzzle along the blustery, sandy beaches of Vancouver weekenders’ homes. John never cemented his seawalls together. They were works of art — an architecture of boulders.
So John and I would lie in our room at night soothing our aches and pains. Dumb old Ralph would be at the foot of the bed, scratching and itching and making the occasional smell. We lived in a shake-and-shingle shack with no foundation. The old cottage sat right on the soil, and when I vacuumed under our bed, the vacuum would get caught in the acacia branches that were growing through the rotten floor.
We didn’t really have room for another dog, but I would visit the SPCA while I was in town doing errands, and Norton and I bonded instantly. John was won over when Norton treed a raccoon in the walnut tree beside the chicken coop on the night he arrived.
We soon discovered that Norton loved to swim, and we would take him to the beach at Galiano Island’s Montague Harbour. Ralph came along, too, but all he could bear to do was paddle. Ralph had come from the Richmond SPCA, and he had always been nervous of three things: water, nudity and bathrooms. But Norton loved the water. John and I would shuck fresh oysters and cook them over a beach fire while Norton swam for sticks and Ralph sat quietly contemplating the world.
Sometimes at night, after supper, John would get out his accordion. He sat on the couch or in his Uncle Paul’s upright wooden chair and played funny old songs. Ralph and Norton liked the music, and they’d lie at his feet resting after a busy day of roaming the property.
One evening, as John played his accordion, Norton began to sing along. He didn’t howl (as Ralph did, when he heard the local volunteer ambulance taking somebody to the water taxi in an emergency), but rather hummed in tune, breathing at all the right places.
After that, whenever John picked up the accordion, Norton would take his place beside Uncle Paul’s wooden chair and prepare for the performance. John and Norton’s favourite song was Today I Started Lovin’ You Again (“and I’m right back where I’ve really always been”).
Ralph was getting old, and he spent most of his later years sleeping in his basket by the fire. One evening at bedtime, he came into our bedroom as usual. When he lifted his leg on the bed to relieve himself, we knew it was time for Ralph to say goodbye to us and to his dear friend Norton. We buried him under an arbutus tree on a cliff overlooking Montague Harbour, where John was removing some boulders for a seawall. Norton carried on singing, swimming and watching the henhouse.
But eventually he, too, began to slow down. On one occasion, when Mum [Molly Lamb Bobak] was visiting from Fredericton, we took Norton for his usual swim. Mum swam, too — it was only March, but she wanted to tell Dad [Bruno Bobak], who was back in the freezing East, that she had done it. When she and Norton emerged from the steel-grey water, both of her big toes were cramped at a 90degree angle.
“Don’t tell Bruno about my toes,” she insisted. I promised I wouldn’t.
After their swim, Norton and Mum and I walked through the cedar forest just down the hill from our house. Mum wanted to do some sketches of a little lane John had made. She called it “the bosky bit.” Norton enjoyed the woods, and he sniffed around the mossy, musky ground while Mum sketched in her black book and I looked for mushrooms. When it was time to go, we set off up the lane, but poor Norton took two steps and then cried in anguish — his hips couldn’t take him up the hill.
Mum stayed with him while I went and got the truck. I had to lift him in, and when we got home I gave him some warm broth and settled him by the fire. That night, after Norton had hobbled outside to do his nightly business, we heard him bark. When John went out, he found Norton crying in pain under the walnut tree and gazing up into its branches. High, high above was a fat raccoon.
That was the last raccoon Norton ever treed, and our crowing hen became a raccoon dinner within weeks. Norton had slept soundly through the night as an old dog should, oblivious to it all.
John and I separated later that year and I moved to a small place in North Saanich that I named, in a fit of fury at John, Ever Lasting Farm. I took Norton with me. The farm was five acres, very flat, and just down the road from Glamorgan Farm, an abandoned and derelict property at the time.
Norton spent his days sleeping stiffly by the wood stove or lying outdoors while I tried to dig a garden in the tough, dry clay. As time passed, I stopped taking Norton to lovely but cold Sidney Beach and instead walked him gently in the racetrack field across the road. He ate less and less, and he disappeared for long hours at a time.
There was a stand of pampas grass on the lawn that I’d been trying to kill by throwing sink water on it. One afternoon, after pitching on a bucketful, I was dismayed to find Norton asleep in the centre, under the mass of stiff stems and fuzzy growth. He had made a hidden bed, like the ones Saint Bernards make out of snow.
The rains began in late September, and one night we had a storm to end all storms. The wind howled, and the rain beat so hard against our Pan-Abode that water dripped down the kitchen walls. A huge piece of blue metal let go from the barn roof and crashed onto the driveway.
In the morning, boughs and branches lay everywhere. Much of the pampas grass had broken off, and the standing plumes looked like a bunch of wet mops. I decided to cut the whole stand down, and I waded into the centre of it with my clippers. After a moment or two, I saw Norton, dead and looking very peaceful, hidden under this horrid bush that I had tried to eradicate, but which as a deathbed looked so inviting — dry and round and padded with soft plumes. Norton’s big head was resting against a flat boulder, and his paws were slightly curled.
When John came to visit the next day — we were friends again by then — we wrapped Norton in a blanket, and John took him back to Galiano, to bury him next to Ralph on the ridge. I stopped trying to kill the pampas grass after that, although I couldn’t bring myself to actually encourage its growth.
When I moved up the road to Glamorgan Farm, I had a garage sale, and a woman gave me 50 cents a plume for the pampas grass. I know Norton would have understood.