For me, the greatest dog book I have ever read and believe I will ever read is Jack London’s Call Of The Wild. It is powerful enough story in its own right, but I love it especially – and it influenced me greatly – because London understood where dogs came from and what their loyalty and ecstasy was truly about.

More than any writer, he captured the mystical appreciation for the binds that hold us to dogs so powerfully.

London wrote about Buck in the days before dogs were given anti-depressants and confined to back yards and considered to be children and emotionalized beyond their history or recognition. Before we got so close to them they caught our craziness and fear.

Dogs came from wolves, after all,  and their spirits were formed by great loyalty and blood and the call of their own wild.

The greatest dogs I have known – Rose, Frieda, Red, even Fate in her own way – are like that, they have kept a sense of wildness and ecstasy about them, they are loyal unto death, parts of them are unreachable, and there are parts of them that are simply beyond the range of human understanding.

Red is dedicated to me in this way, as he is to his work. I sat out on the hill with him this afternoon, a new and pleasant ritual for us, and he never once looked at me – only the sheep – yet I knew he was completely connected to me and aware of me. He is doing all of this for me. I have a copy of Call Of The Wild in my cell phone and I was reading the book while I sat with Red watching the sheep.

I thought of Red as I read this passage: “But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest,  reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

I often feel this powerful thing in Red, as much as he is devoted to me, that is always seeking something beyond us, beyond the narrow visions and ideas of a human being. He is always reading signs as I might read a book, and seeking the mysterious something that calls him to come.

And then in the book London wrote a passage that spoke to me, as well as Red:

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-made in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”

There is a mystical part of dogs, big and small, and a mystical connection that binds them to us and us to them, I felt it sitting on that hill with Red, understanding I was experiencing something larger than myself.