This Is Maisie

We’ve been looking for a dog since the beginning of the year.  We had a lot of requirements, maybe too many: female, forty to sixty pounds, young but not a puppy.  We also didn’t want a dog that pulled us on a walk or a herding dog that tried to drive us like sheep.

We searched a lot of web sites for rescue organizations and looked at a lot of dogs, but none of them fit.  A few times we arrived to meet a dog only to find that someone else had just adopted it.  It began to seem impossible.  Surely, I thought, finding a dog that needed a family couldn’t be that hard.

Last month I saw a dog on a rescue site and we went to visit her.  The dog had looked like a German shepherd in the picture, but she turned out to be smaller and maybe even part dachshund.  We’re looking for something bigger, we said, and they brought out a gorgeous dog (I thought, anyway), black and wheat-colored like a shepherd but leaner, more delicate.

“Forty pounds, three years old,” they said, which sounded perfect.  We walked her: no pulling.  We played with her: no bad behavior.  She seemed heavier than forty pounds, though, so they put her on a scale and she weighed sixty pounds, the extreme limit of what we wanted.  And after a while we were pretty sure she was younger than three years old, closer to one year with a strong puppyish disposition.  At this point I was starting to wonder if she was even a dog.

It was too late, though.  I’d fallen in love with her.  And so, Reader, we adopted her.

The adoption had happened so quickly that we knew very little about her.  Later I read her paperwork: she’d been found about three weeks before we met her, wandering around farmland near Bakersfield.  The rescue people had named her Lilly, but on the drive home I thought she looked more like a Maisie, and since she hadn’t been called Lilly for very long she was OK with the new name.

She seemed never to have been in a house before; she looked for the tiny people behind the television set, and she jumped the first time she heard a toilet flush.  She’s still fascinated by the handsome dog behind a floor-length mirror, still wonders why her nose hits a hard surface when she tries to make friends.  It’s possible that her last owner(s) had never let her indoors.

Unfortunately, it turned out that she had been overwhelmed by her new surroundings at the rescue place, and so her behavior there was more subdued.  When she got comfortable with us her true character came out.  Not only does she pull on walks; when she sees a squirrel she jumps, she twirls, she cries out in ecstasy, she tangles herself and us in the leash.  We used a collar called a Halti — it turned her head to the side whenever she tried to pull — and she chewed through three of them before we finally wised up and got something else.   When she sees a squirrel from a window she runs crazily around the house, climbing the walls.  (Literally.  There are paw prints.)  She has strong herding instincts, nipping at us to wake us up or to go for a walk.  (Oh, German shepherd.  I get it.)

Doug and I talked seriously about taking her back.  The only thing that saved her, I think, is that she’s so incredibly cute.  She saw a squirrel in a tree in the backyard, jumped up on a wide banister on the porch and tried to reach it from there, then ran completely around the yard, jumped on the banister, and did the whole thing again.  Because… she’d thought the branches might have gotten closer in the meantime?  She did the same thing indoors with a rawhide bone, running around and then pouncing on it like the tiger from Calvin and Hobbs.

She’s also very affectionate.  She puts her head on my feet when she lies down, and my heart just melts.  She bonded with us almost right away.  And she’s beautiful: a few days after we adopted her I saw a picture of a Belgian Malinois and realized that she has that breed in her as well.  She’s smaller than a shepherd and her nose is black up to the eyes, as if she’d dipped her head in a vat of dark chocolate.  Her face is narrow and her expression alert, taking in everything around her.

We called a dog trainer who showed us a better way of walking her.  We talked to a woman in the neighborhood who volunteers at a dog shelter, and she gave us some tips.  Sometimes Maisie seems to understand something, but her progress is slow and uneven.  Still, it’s clear she wants to be a good dog, though her puppy brain sometimes gets in the way.  She’s learned Sit and Stay and No and Maisie, and she will come if you have a treat in your hand but rarely otherwise.  She also knows the words Bad Dog, which are only used for something terrible.

Doug and I think there’s a good dog in there somewhere, like a sculpture in a block of marble.  We’re both working hard to bring it out.