Read My Life in Dog Years for Free Online

gone after, he would gently guide her back to the play area.
    All day, or nearly all day, he stayed with the children. When the girls went in for lunchRex took the time to patrol the yard again, and I noted that when one of the girls went near the pigpen—she was never closer than fifteen yards—Rex stopped her and used his shoulder to physically move her back to the house.
    At intervals throughout the day he would take moments—never more than one or two minutes—to make a quick run of the yard and the stock to make sure it was all doing well, but the rest of the time he watched the children. He didn’t just sit with them, or doze by them, or stand near them. He literally watched them. He played with them as well, but he was truly working the whole time and his eyes rarely left them.
    “Isn’t he a caution?” Emily said, noticing me watching Rex. “It’s like having a nanny for them. When I’m gone visiting with them he stays with Warren and follows the tractor in the fields but anytime the girls are herehe’s with them. It’s so nice. There are so many things to worry about on a farm.”
    It made a very full day. When we milked at night Rex ran for the cows, circled the yard and took care of all his business. When supper was done and it was getting dark I looked through the window expecting to see him sleeping, or at least lying down.
    He was sitting on the porch, the evening sunlight and breeze catching his hair, his eyes open and calm, watching the yard, the pens and stock. While I looked he stood, trotted off around the yard one more time before dark, then came back to the porch to sit again, always at work.

The dog was enormous.
    We lived in a small cottage in the mountains of Colorado, where I worked in construction, mostly hitting my fingers with a hammer and making serious attempts at cutting something off my body with power saws while I tried to build houses during the dayand write at night I had been looking at the local consumer guide, called
The Shopper’s Bulletin,
when I saw an ad:
    E MERGENCY ! A M LEAVING FOR H AWAII FOR A CAREER CHANGE . M UST FIND HOME FOR LOVING G REAT D ANE NAMED C AESAR AS THEY WON’T ALLOW DOGS IN THE I SLANDS . P LEASE HELP !
        All right—I know how it sounds. Nobody who lives in a small cottage in the mountains of Colorado with a wife and baby should probably even consider a pet, let alone a dog, let alone a large dog, let alone a
very
large dog—at least nobody with a brain larger than a walnut. But I had once been associated with a female Great Dane named Dad when I was in the army and had ever since had a warm place in my soul for them. The secondary force, the force that kicks in whenever I visit a dog pound, roared into my mind, the force that says,
If you don’t take him, who will?
This drive has brought me dozens of dogs andcats, a few ducks, some geese, a half dozen guinea pigs, an ocelot, several horses, two cows, a litter of pigs (followed by more and more litters—my God, they are prolific), one hawk, a blue heron, a large lizard, some dozen or so turtles, a porcupine and God knows how many wounded birds; chipmunks, squirrels and one truly evil llama (am I the
only
person in the world who did not know they can spit dead level for about fifteen yards, hitting your eye every time?).
    And so this man brought Caesar, who looked more like a
Tyrannosaurus rex
than a dog, into our small cottage.
    His measurements were astounding. He stood forty-one inches at the front shoulder, his head a bit higher, and when he got up on his back legs and put his feet on my shoulders he could drip spit (his favorite hobby seemed to be disseminating spit and slobber) on top of my bald spot.
    But size is relative. Had we seen him out inthe open, say from half a mile away in the middle of a large field, he would have looked magnificent. Here, in a small room, he overwhelmed the furniture.
    “Isn’t he, you know,” my wife said, moving to a position of relative safety in