A Real Survivor

Last week, a golden retriever named Buck was reunited with his family after six months of fending for himself in rural Montana. Buck had been on a trip with his people when they stopped in the town of Chester. Buck was alarmed by the blast of a train whistle, and, in accordance with his instincts, bolted. The Halter family of Bonney Lake, Washington, stayed around a while to look for him, but eventually left after posting pictures, descriptions, and contact information.

Stories about Buck's time in the wilderness appeared this week in the Liberty County Times (Paul Overlie, "Buck makes it home," Feb. 3, 2009) and the Associated Press (Amy Beth Hanson, "Dog found after being missing for 6 months," February 7, 2009).

The Halters left Montana in August, and got a call at the end of January from a local resident who'd found a dog fitting Buck's description, first sighting him on a day the temperature reached 27 degrees below zero. Buck was holed up under a collapsed building, and the farm family that found him lured him out with food--he'd lost a lot of weight.

I wondered briefly when I read these accounts if the dog had been named for another Buck, the dog who goes from a slow-paced easy life in a sunny California valley to the harsh and competitive environment of the Yukon in Jack London's The Call of the Wild. London's Buck just gets stronger in the wilderness, besting dogs, wolves, and men around him in a series of contests for survival and dominance. In the course of all his trials, he becomes legendary. I read Call of the Wild for the first time when I was in elementary school and was utterly enthralled by it. Leafing through it now, almost 50 years later, I'm still drawn to the tale.

And yet the Buck from a town near Seattle who spent from August 2008 to January 2009 on the loose in Montana is a more plausible story. He got separated from his protective human family because something--a train whistle--really scared him, and he took flight. Railroads these days often carry an aura of history, and in this country, what we like to call "Americana." But to animals who don't understand their uses, they're just something huge, fast, extremely noisy, and altogether incomprehensible.

The Buck of 2009 inspires with the sheer force and efficacy of his survival resources. Just enduring the cold seems a remarkable achievement. What are ordinary dogs capable of? Their wolf ancestry may hold unexpected possibilities. In his fascinating Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez writes of some of the ways canis lupus deals with bitter cold:

In extreme cold the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin and conserve . . . heat. A team of biologists in Barrow, Alaska, found that the temperature of the wolf's footpads was maintained at just above the tissue-freezing point where the pads came in contact with ice and snow. Warmth there was regulated independently of the rest of the body.

So maybe Buck's body knows something about conserving heat. Bodies do have a wisdom built into them, a fundamental, pre-rational kind of wisdom that bolsters survival. Dogs, people, and other animals may well have resources beyond what we believe. How else would people endure some of the things they endure?

Buck's family wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing all that time. I also find that unanswerable question interesting. In the 1970s, my wife and I had a dog named Maxwell. One night he was accidently left outside. We spent the next day looking for him and posting "lost dog" notices on utility poles around the neighborhood. That night, a still-warm September in Tennessee, we slept on the couch in the den with the windows up, so we could hear him if he barked at the door. The next morning, he scratched on the door. I heard and immediately recognized the sound of the paw on wood, jumped out of bed and welcomed Max home. He was damp in spots, and carried a load of cockleburs and beggars' lice. We gave him a royal meal. And naturally, wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing. He'd been gone less than 48 hours.

The story of Buck's Montana sojourn is life-affirming in and of itself, with its overtones of a capacity beyond what anyone might have expected--separated from his accustomed civilized support in a hostile environment, he held out.

As for Jack London's Buck, he ends as the Buck of legend. Maybe a Ghost Dog who continues to threaten the native people who killed his closest human companion, his last link with what was not wild. Maybe in one of his progeny, who continues to lead a wolf pack. London's yarn closes thusly:

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Thoreau recognizes the way of nature's wisdom: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Not wilderness--wildness. "A song of the younger world," maybe. Human culture, itself an extension of nature, is smart. But nature is smarter.