ISHA

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Carolyn See

When my life partner, John Espey, and I first moved into a new little house in Topanga Canyon, we found ourselves out in the sticks — literally. It was a rough part of the canyon, arid, parched, unwelcoming. John killed maybe six rattlesnakes in the first two weeks. Tarantulas jumped in the basement. Scorpions were plentiful. It was, as my old Texan dad would say, hotter than a policeman's pistol. My daughters, eighteen-year-old Lisa and eight-year-old Clara, were highly skeptical of the whole project. I think we all had second thoughts in those first weeks. This was the first time we'd tried to live together as a family.

Raccoons, possum, more snakes of the harmless kind. Our house was at the top of a cliff, at one end of a crescent of raw earth. From the back our view was literally endless. In front, a narrow road ended in a cul-de-sac. Every night at the end of the crescent, maybe a dozen coyotes gathered to howl. And there was another animal, not readily identifiable — probably half coyote, half German shepherd — starved down to the bone, cowering, skulking, skidding back into the underbrush whenever she saw one of us looking at her. But she began to look marginally better after a few weeks. That was because separately we'd all been feeding her on the sly.

John named her Isha, a feminization of the Indian name Ishi, which was the name of the last member of an Indian tribe that Kroeber, the anthropologist, had immortalized. But Isha had it better than Ishi, by far. Since she played so infernally hard to get (what else could she do, really? She was wild, she was mad as a March hare), we competed slavishly for her attention, talking baby talk to her, handing her little treats, trying mightily to get her to eat from our hands. All this took weeks. And it took over a year to coax her inside the house. People anthropomorphize their pets all the time, and it's a trait I scorn in others, but it was hard not to project human meaning on her diva ways. She was mistress of the injured look. She cringed every time she got near John, until he raised his voice to a falsetto. "She must have been mistreated when she was young," he said, but who was really to know? She'd already had one litter of pups before we knew her; during that first year when she prowled the borders of our house, she had another — she ate a few and squashed the rest. She had a different frame of mind than the rest of us.

Finally she'd come inside the house, but the house was tall and narrow — three stories. The living room was eight steps up from the kitchen: what a production to cajole and wheedle and generally carry on to get her to the living room level! We all adored her, but her plain favorite was Lisa, who was as hard to get as she was; they spent time giving each other scornful looks. But then as we'd be watching television, John and I on one couch, Lisa and Clara on the other, Isha would come up and lay her head on Lisa's knee. Lisa would reciprocate by bopping Isha on her snout (can't there be a prettier word for the space between a dog's eyes and her nose?), bopping her gently but negligently, then doing it with more and more decision, until it might have been called abuse by an animal rescue person, but Isha loved it, pushing her head up under Lisa's hand, wanting more. It had a particular sound, like a champagne cork coming out; celebratory.

Stories about pets often carry something silly and intrinsically embarrassing about them. Lisa, a bestselling novelist now, used to spend fifteen minutes bopping Isha's nose, while we all watched fondly? Unimaginable, really. But once, when I was cleaning up the living room, Isha was sitting on the couch and I wanted to sweep off the dog hair. I said "Down, Isha," and said it again. And again. Then I put my hand to her body to give her a little shove. She laid back her ears and snarled, showing all her teeth, and she wasn't a dog anymore. She was Isha, and she could lie on the couch as much as she wanted. She was also Isha when the coyotes, about ten o'clock at night, would gather in the cul-de-sac or out on the crescent and howl, and Isha, living her dog life, would pause on a landing and pitch back her head and howl along with them. I would watch the hair on my forearms rise up.

One morning a Chinese moving man brought a new easy chair for the living room. The house, as I've said, was on three levels — the kitchen at ground level, then eight steps up to the living room, then another eight to where the bedrooms were. The chair was enormous, and John helped him push and pull the thing from the kitchen level up those first eight stairs. John took the "up" side, pulling the chair with all his might. The moving man took the "down" side, pushing the chair up. His muscles strained; his legs were bowed. Isha was outside, but the door to the house was open. As I watched from the kitchen, she sped past me so quickly I couldn't focus on her, ran up about four stairs and chomped down from behind on the mover's defenseless crotch. Then she hurtled back out again.

The mover, in the living room by this time, let out an ungodly yowl and yanked down his pants, sure he'd been castrated. John and I were mortified, and also afraid he'd sue us for everything we had, which would have been totally appropriate. But the poor guy, once he found himself in one piece, only said mournfully, "It's because I'm Chinese. Some animals don't like that smell." We weren't going to argue with him.

She was wild! We had to learn it over and over again. By this time she would jump on our beds and cover us with "kisses," and push at Lisa to bop her on the head, and greet our cars coming up the driveway with all the doglike signals of delight. One day we gave an afternoon party full of journalists, and one of them, Digby Diehl, brought along his daughter, Dylan, a pretty but willful little girl. I went out into the yard to stock up on more lemons for rum drinks, and Dylan ran out and put her arms around Isha. Isha laid back her ears and stiffened. Dylan was still small, so that her throat was just about at a level with Isha's teeth. I remembered the Chinese mover and was filled with dread. "Dylan," I said in the low voice you reserved in...