Letter from Angel Canyon: Scents
This is the fourth in a series of essays by Best Friends writer Ted Brewer chronicling his observations of life in and around the sanctuary.When I adopted my dog McGarr a few months ago, I worried that my hikes in and around Angel Canyon wouldn’t be as eventful as they were without a dog. I liked being able to wander through the canyon alone, unencumbered by another’s company and free to respond to my own whims. I presumed having a dog along would limit my range, would mean I couldn’t climb rocks, couldn’t bushwhack, couldn’t go near wildlife. Of course, the dog I couldn’t refuse was bred to chase wildlife. McGarr is part English coonhound and part bloodhound. Hound to the dire maximum, in other words.
At nine months old, he’s all legs, ears, and nose, especially nose. He compels the people he meets to start speaking in Southern accents, and he elicits from them such folksy remarks as “yep, that’s a hound all right” or “must be a handful, that hound” or “that hound’s nose ever stop?” Around my office, he’s acquired the name “McGarrbage” (but out of affection, I assure you) for how often he’s getting into the trash can, which is, of course, where the most alluring smells are to be had. Nope, that hound’s nose never does stop, y’all. Even when he’s asleep it twitches, as if divining some scent from whatever dream he’s having (which leads me to believe that dogs can smell in their dreams).
Indeed, when we’re out together, McGarr’s nose drives – in the manner of a heat-seeking, or rather, a scent-seeking, missile. When he lands on the source of a scent, he doesn’t merely get acquainted with the smell, he interrogates it with the monolithic attention of an English graduate student reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, as if teasing out the nuances and subtleties of the smell, tracing its thematic arcs, and drawing out the greater, universal truths. So absorbed is he sometimes that no amount of calling or cajoling can deter him. Knowing how he loathes being alone, I usually just keep going until I’m out of sight, at which point I hope he notices my absence and comes running after me. This works on occasion, but there have been times I’ve waited around a corner or behind a boulder for a good five or ten minutes, only to return and find my departure has gone completely unnoticed and his nose rooted in the same spot as where I left it. Only until McGarr has apprehended the scent, deconstructed it into its constituent parts, and stowed them away in his memory can we move on. Or until I grow impatient and put the leash back on him. And even then it’s a struggle to tear him away.
While waiting for McGarr to come down from olfactory nirvana, I of course have to wonder what that smell might be. Is it some scent left by a wild animal? And if so, what is it about the scent that makes it so intriguing, that make the hound nose so fixated on it? Is McGarr gathering pleasure, or is the scent triggering in him something irresistibly primal, in a “Call of the Wild” sort of way? If only to endow these boring moments with some gravitas, I’d like to think he is heeding the call and temporarily casting off his domestication. And frankly, the way he acts sometimes after a prolonged sniff suggests that’s the case, as in the time he charged neck-deep into the middle of a large bed of mud, bucked his way out, and then went chasing, full sprint, after some invisible prey that was apparently scurrying straight up a very steep hillside.
Whenever we walk through Angel Canyon, we usually cut down-slope through the brush and into the bottom’s thicket of cattails, tamarisk and willows. I like McGarr to wade in the creek and have a drink, which often means we have to bushwhack our way to the creek, which is fine by him, because in the tangle of flora is a harem of smells. His nose turns turbine, and he simply cannot decide which scent he will have his way with.
Often operating in conjunction with the nose is the howl. I’ve interpreted some of his many howls, but only the ones that have little or nothing to do with his nose. There’s the play-with-me-dammit howl, the how-much-ferocity-can-I-feign howl, and the for-the-love-of-god-don’t-leave-me-alone-another-second howl. But one day while I was in my office and he outside in the run, I heard him howling in a way I’d never heard before. It was a moaning so low, so rife with lament that I thought my dog was bidding goodbye to the world. I ran outside to find him digging furiously in the soft sandy earth, his nose again at full throttle. Obviously, he was unearthing the smell of something buried in the ground. He would dig and dig, stop, bury his nose in the hole, and howl from what could have been the very heart of despair. And then he would dig deeper and howl some more. Whatever it was that summoned such a cry never appeared however, no matter how much he dug. I went over to see if I could smell anything in the hole he made, but of course I smelled nothing.
Which reminded me that, as a human, I’m woefully constrained by my senses and am not ever going to be privy to the majority of stimuli this desert or any other landscape has to offer. Not that I would always want to be privy (just think of all the horrid scents our low-grade sense of smell spares us of), but I’m at least astounded that there’s so much more to my environment than meets the…well, the nose. Every time McGarr hones in on a scent, I must acknowledge that I’m just floating along the surface of a deep ocean swimming with life, death, regeneration, deterioration and all their respective smells. In this regard, McGarr isn’t limiting my range at all. Instead, he’s showing me how limited it was to begin with.
Photos by Troy Snow Letter from Angel Canyon is published on or about the last Friday of each month. Here are links to past essays:TracksTrailsTurkeys