“Mike is in the house!” Vanessa shouts, her tone somewhere between a plea and a laugh.
I’m walking through the living room, on my way to the kitchen where she’s making dinner. “Mike?” I ask.
“He’s in the house!” There’s an urgency in her voice that alarms me, though I can’t tell if she’s disturbed or amused by this situation, or maybe a little of both.
“He’s in the house?” My question has a purpose. Mike had been in the dog run just a few minutes earlier. The dog run is a long, narrow porch at the back of the house. It has a sliding door that leads out to the back deck, it’s lined with windows, and has overhead lights but no heat or air conditioning. It’s a sort of half-inside, half-outside area that connects to the Florida room on one side and to the little room off the kitchen—a room that still has no name, though we’ve named every other square inch of this property—on the other side. The dog run is as close to being “in the house” as Mike ever gets.
Mike is not an inside dog. He’s a working dog, a mix of Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shephard. The American Kennel Association describes Great Pyrenees as a “large, thickly coated and immensely powerful working dog bred to deter sheep-stealing wolves and other predators on snowy mountains.” They describe the Anatolian Shepard as a “rugged, imposing flock guardian of ancient lineage. Protective and territorial, but also intelligent, patient, and profoundly loyal….” That last sentence—protective, territorial, intelligent, patient, and profoundly loyal—describes Mike perfectly. Note, however, that neither description mentions “good to cuddle with while watching TV.” Mike is not an inside dog, but it was stormy, so I’d fed him out in the dog run.
Mike 
“Yes!” Vanessa shouts, “He’s… in… the… house!”
About that time, I cross the threshold from living room to kitchen and look to my left. There’s Mike, all hundred or so pounds of him, his long white fur a tangle of dirt, cockleburs, twigs, leaves, and slobber. He’s standing in the little no-name room, looking bewildered.
Mitty Kitty, our smallest dog, cruelly named, is in the kitchen proper, lying under the over-hang on the island we use as a breakfast table, watching all the Mike excitement unfold with a skeptical and bemused look on his face.
Mike hesitates, partly, I think, because he has two options, and he doesn’t know which to take. To his immediate right, a set of French doors leads into the living room, and one of the doors is open. But the odors—Vanessa is cooking lamb—come from straight ahead. If he darts to the right, he’ll be running into the great unknown. From his vantage, all he can see is the back of the couch, and he doesn’t know that on the other side of that couch lay bedrooms, a hallway, bathrooms, closets, and highly coveted lying-down space in the office. If he goes forward into the kitchen, he’s moving toward the smell of lamb, which Mike finds very enticing, but also the consternation of Vanessa. He freezes long enough for me to emerge from the living room, grab him by the collar, turn him around, and lead him back into the dog run.
Mike has never been in the house by design. When we first got him, nearly seven years ago, the idea was that he would be a livestock guard dog. Theoretically, he would live in the back of the property—the barn, barnyard, pasture, and the back three or four acres we call “the way-back”—with the sheep and goats, protecting them from predators and having minimal contact with us humans. He would bond with the livestock and not with us, so we thought.
Mike had different ideas. He liked us and he wanted to be with us. Try as we might (and, honestly, we didn’t try that hard) we couldn’t keep him in the back with the sheep and goats. When we first got him, we had a fence and metal gate separating the backyard from the barnyard. The gate had grating about three and a half feet high, then a space of about eighteen inches and then an additional bar above that. Mike would look at the gate, back up, take a run, and leap through the eighteen-inch gap. If I closed the gap with rope or wire, he’d just climb the fence beside it. Several times, I’ve watched him climb up a four-foot fence and shimmy over two strands of barbed wire. For Mike, boundaries have always been a suggestion.
For years, though, he seemed happy outside, sleeping in the cool dirt under the back deck in the heat of summer afternoons or resting underneath the magnolia tree or in any number of perches in the yard that gave him a clear view of which trucks were coming down the road. A couple of those trucks, which he can identify by the sound of their mufflers, carry dogs. Mike and those dogs have developed a sort of relationship. When he hears one of the trucks coming down the road, he races down to the pond, and runs along the fence line barking at the dogs who are riding in the truck bed barking back at him.
At night, he naps in a wicker settee that he claimed on the front porch. Livestock guard dogs are nocturnal. They’re bred to stay up and guard the flock from dangers in the dark, and they do this largely by barking. They hear something, and they bark. Then they run to another location and bark again. Then to another location, giving the appearance of being a small army. That way just a couple of guard dogs can protect a large area. I think it’s pretty effective. Even though Mike is alone, lying on the front porch two or three hundred yards away from our livestock, we’ve never lost a sheep or goat to a coyote or any other predator. But he does bark intermittently, all night. That’s another reason for not wanting him in the house.
For years, Mike seemed satisfied with his life outside. When it was really cold at night, in the low twenties or below, we’d lock him in the barn with the goats and he’d nestle into a pile of hay and stay there until we showed up again around dawn. In the last year or so, it’s been harder and harder to get him into the barn on cold nights because he wants to come in the house, with us. He keeps lurking around the sliding door between the back deck, where we keep the barbeque grill, and the dog run. So, I have to be really careful to slide the door shut it if I go out there, for instance, to flip some burgers. As soon as he sees a crack, he noses the door open and takes up residence in the dog run.
Which is okay. It is the dog run, after all. But then, as in the other night, he takes the next step, noses open the next door, and suddenly he’s in the little no-name room off the kitchen, and Vanessa is yelling, and there’s lights everywhere, and Mitty Kitty is laying on the floor up ahead looking skeptical, and Mike gets momentarily confused and hesitant, but, damn, something sure smells good.
I take him outside and rub him in his favorite places—his breastbone, the upper bridge of his snout, the place where his skull attaches to his neck—and I talk to him, yet again. “Mike, you know we love you, and I know you want to come in the house. You really want to come in the house. But it won’t be what you think it will be. You don’t like it when we yell at you for peeing on the wheelbarrow in the barn. You have no idea what’s gonna happen the first time you hike your leg on the corner of our leather couch.”
He looks at me with the kind of loyalty that comes only with a complete lack of understanding.
“You’re gonna have to trust me on this, buddy,” I say, rubbing his ears between my thumbs and forefingers, for who doesn’t like to have their ears rubbed, especially when they’ve just been disappointed. “Trust me.”
Mike moans, and gives me that far away stare, as if to say, That’s it. Right there. Keep rubbing.
