Hearing Voices
Nikki came to live with us last May after a friend’s battle with health issues made it impossible for him to take care of a dog. The transition has been hard on all of us. Nikki, a twelve-year-old Siberian Husky, was never socialized. Our lives were turned upside down when we learned she couldn’t be around other animals, as her strong predator response led to biting our dogs and cornering the cats. To keep everyone safe, we surrendered our backyard and my office for her needs, leaving our dogs without a place to bask in the sun or to do their morning business. While Nikki seeks cover among my tomato plants, Ron and I walk the other dogs three or four times a day.
The first few months were tough. She was fearful of her leash, the sound of cars, and people walking with or without dogs. Stark white with glacier blue eyes and weighing about seventy-five pounds, she is a formidable-looking animal that folks tend to avoid. This is the thing I hate most. Because if people knew her history, they would shower her with affection. She’s come a long way, and I often tell friends she is one hundred percent better than when she first came to live with us, but sadly, still only about fifty percent of the dog she could be.
Being alone in a backyard, she wasn’t exposed to other dogs, and maybe this is why she had never made a sound—no whining or barking or alerting her owners of visitors with the telltale husky howl. Even neighbors who had known of her existence for years said she never made a peep. That was until a couple of days ago when, while in my kitchen, I heard something like a yipping coyote, a howling wolf, or was it a goat being slaughtered in my backyard? Startled, my friend Diane, who was visiting, asked, “What the hell is that?”
We ran out the back door. Nikki was in obvious distress, back legs shaking, keening like a mourner, and I couldn’t find the source. Then I noticed the nine-foot-high, thick ivy that separates our yard from our neighbors’, quivering, and figured their dog had attacked Nikki. Peering through the giant leaves, I couldn’t see a thing. When I looked up, I noticed Jameson, a seventy-pound Labradoodle, suspended in midair eight feet above us in the ivy. Before I could grab Nikki by the collar, Jameson pushed himself free, hurling toward us like an acrobat. No plan. No safety net. Terrified, Nikki lunged toward the back door. Jameson, with his human-like amber eyes, looked up at me as if to say, “My God, I did it! I did the impossible! Where’s my treat?”
Holding each dog at arm’s length, I shouted to Diane, “Get a leash on Nikki!”
With my dog secured and out of harm's way, I snapped a leash on Jameson and took him home, where I related the harrowing experience to his owner, who got a big chuckle out of it.
Both Nikki and Diane looked as though they had just survived a home intrusion when I returned. “Are you okay?” I asked Diane.
“Wow, that was something,” she said.
We had plans to go to Tucson, and it was getting late. I gave Nikki a handful of treats and a kiss on the head. “You’ll be okay,” I said.
It was clear all the animals were still out of sorts, and it took plenty of dog biscuits and cooing to calm their nerves before Diane and I left.
It wasn’t until my morning walk with Nikki the following day that I had time to think about what had transpired.
When Nikki came to live with us, I committed to creating a better life for her. This included daily morning walks. At first, she was afraid to leave the yard and trembled while hiking the wash behind our house. I narrowly escaped injury when she first heard the slap of pickleballs on the tennis courts at our local park. But eventually, we were walking for an hour every day, something not even my doctors would have thought possible. Slowly, she was showing me the path back to myself, the woman I had been before chronic illness. I didn’t question or even mind that she never made a peep. She was a quiet guest who was easy to overlook when life got busy.
The incident with Jameson changed all that. Nikki found her voice when she felt threatened. To her, Jameson presented a real danger; a lion stalking her from eight feet above. Instead of cowering or ignoring him, she made herself known. She would not go down without a fight. The sounds that came from her were foreign and rudimentary. There was no dogness to them, no coherence. But it didn’t matter. This was her yard, and she would not succumb to a perceived enemy.
These days, I struggle to find my voice, even in the friendliest of environments. Instead of engaging head-on or even holding the line when conversations turn cynical, or people point fingers at those who do not resemble them or speak like them, I am hard-pressed to find my voice. I stumble over words and sometimes even remain quiet, my politeness or nervousness dictating my behavior. These are things that I am not proud of.
Nikki has taught me that speaking out, especially now, may be uncomfortable. I may make mistakes or be called the enemy, but like Nikki, who believed she was being threatened, what choice do I have?
