In the internet age of pet Instagram accounts and Twitter empires dedicated to rating dogs out of ten (and never going below an eleven), it’s easy to make an animal into a character. To give your dog a personality is one thing, because you know it well enough to see its quirks and habits. Convincing others of the soul, the inherent being of any animal, is a different task altogether. But then, maybe it isn’t our job to do the convincing. Enter Fenton. In “Mother’s Day Storm,” Pam Houston introduces her Irish wolfhound not to argue on behalf of his – for lack of a better term – humanity, but to show it self-evidently to those of us unlucky enough to not have known him personally. Houston imbues her description of Fenton with the overwhelming sense that he cannot be just another dog, that Fenton could go toe-to-toe with some of her human friends and come out on top. 

“To say Fenton was intelligent;” almost feels like an interrupting thought, and the semicolon here severs it from the rest of the paragraph (68). The phrase stands alone as though Houston wants to trail off wordlessly into her own memory. Instead, she turns half-jokingly (though certainly with some truth) into a comparison between Fenton and the humans she’s known. This will not be the first time she makes this turn, but in this moment, we have just come out of a lengthy description of Fenton’s dog-like traits: playing in the snow, drinking from his bowl, wagging his tail. To now describe him as having “a wider range of emotions than anyone I dated in my twenties and thirties” tips the scale back towards us, makes us consider our own range of emotions and how a dog could so deftly outmatch us. Even Houston’s choice of language here colors the impression we have of him: Fenton is “a magnificent creature” – not just a dog, but also not just a human. There is something about the “creature” that is fundamentally ungraspable, hence Houston’s assertion that talking of Fenton’s intelligence is “to only scratch the surface” of his being. 

After this, Houston spends time trying to define, to sharpen for us just who Fenton is. In succession, we see Fenton as “ranch manager,” “hypervigilant but not neurotic,” “watchful,” and “ready to be of service.” This description moves beyond the observant intelligence expected of a working dog and into an intentional, careful attention. Houston also adds an important nuance to the way in which Fenton watches – “keeping his eye on everything – animals, people – making sure no one was out of sorts or out of place” (68). The phrase “animals, people” connects the two literally and figuratively to raise a subtle point; Fenton does not distinguish between animals and people in his caretaking, so why should we? Once again, Fenton outdoes his human counterparts in “anticipating what would happen next better than any person could have.” It’s not quite a competition, but Houston continues to make careful comparisons that give Fenton the edge. 

As Houston’s description builds to its height, her phrases elongate and run into each other to create one crowning sentence. Each facet of her memory triggers another until we are faced with a full image of Fenton’s days: “moving the sheep… walking the fence line… riding into town… cheering me up… resting his heavy head… reminding me” (68). Fenton is agent, actor, catalyst for these actions. Houston removes herself from these phrases (unless Fenton is specifically acting towards her), so we imagine Fenton taking the initiative, understanding that a break in the fence line is something that needs to be fixed, knowing where and how to drop off the recycling in town. This sentence is six lines long, yet for all its crescendo towards making Fenton downright human, Houston keeps the image grounded. She doesn’t lose a sense of Fenton’s canine-hood, and she doesn’t allow us to lose it either. At the end of the day, even if he is saving her from “too many hours of writing,” his aim restores a bit of the owner/pet dynamic: he just wants to go on a walk. 

Fenton the Irish wolfhound: surprisingly attentive, creature and ranch manager at once, emotionally intelligent yet still beholden to nature’s calls. We could be tempted into writing him off as a special case, an exceptional dog exceptionally loved, his personality filtered through the bias of affection that Houston has for him. But that would be to write off the ways in which other animals can blur the line between creature and companion. What if instead, we took a closer look at those encounters we have where the dynamic of “animals, people” is complicated, called into question, and revised? Though dogs tend to take the lion’s share of our attention, what if we looked at, for example, a brownish, orangish, grayish cat with piercing yellow eyes? What if she were not a pet, but a passing acquaintance – decently liked, but certainly not close enough (one would think) to have a personal connection? Enter Ella. Enter college. Enter an existential crisis and the “magnificent creature” who showed me the way out of it. 

It was around midnight, and I was taking one of my semi-annual too-stressed-to-sit-still walks around campus. These walks were rare, but they were a vital pressure-relief valve that I developed freshman year. Depending on what time of the semester it was when proverbial things hit proverbial fans, I might run into a few haggard-looking people headed out of the library, or a cluster of drunk friends navigating back towards home. Sometimes, if I was lucky, it would be like that night – that kind of enveloping darkness that comes from the knowledge that no one else is out, that I’ve got every curve of the sidewalk to myself. I had let go of conscious direction. A string of lamplights pulled me across campus, toward my memories of every building and path – from Galloway to the Houses to the space where the Quad now sits. I thought of what was there before it was new, before it was even a hole in the ground, to when I circled a different building and left pecan-studded footprints, now buried beneath glass and concrete. 

Taking a walk for nostalgia’s sake let me pretend for a few moments that I wasn’t using my body to escape my work. I meandered, deciding on a whim between left and right, forward or backward, standing still to breathe in the deep night. The air smelled of rain, and I waited for drops to start beading on my shirt before I could move again. I almost turned back toward my apartment but decided to soak a while. As is often the case when the assignments pile up, there was nothing good waiting for me at home. Another lap would do. Swirling in these thoughts, I almost didn’t catch the sound over the rain pelting leaves and windows and puddles from the day before. But it came again, louder, more demanding this time: a mewing voice shoving its way through all the rest. I knew I was in the territory of the campus cats, but I so rarely ran into Ella that late that I was surprised to see her emerge from behind her bushes and walk right up to me – like Fenton, she was keeping her eye on everything and had noticed that I was out of place. She trotted with such purpose that I almost expected a finally, you’re here as she leapt up onto the ledge of a lamppost. There’s no denying a request like that, so I followed her over and give her the attention she’s so willing to soak up any time of day. The rain hadn’t let up; we were both drenched. I smoothed out her wet fur one last time and started in the opposite direction. 

I made it around to the other side of the building when that mewing broke out once more. I turned around, and there was Ella, in a near full gallop towards me. I did a doubletake and stopped where I was – my relationship to the campus cats until then had been a casual pet or treat while on my way to something else. Never has my presence been downright insisted by the queen herself – the magnificent, watchful creature. She had noticed me like a hole in the fence, and she was not going to let up until she could remedy the breach. In a moment, she was perched on another lamppost, flicking her tail back and forth while scolding me for walking away. She pressed her soft face deep into my now-outstretched palm. She must have known I was confused, because she looked up at me and tilted her head: what, you thought you were alone out here? Please. She rubbed against my hand again, but kept turning up to look at me, a pair of yellow-green eyes keeping careful watch – “hypervigilant, but not neurotic… ready to be of service” – holding me in place. 

I surveyed the scene for a moment. Not a spot on either of us was dry. The lamplight hovering above us was the only thing cutting through the rainclouds’ ink. Before I had time to worry about just how hard it was raining, I was sitting on the ground. Ella finally seemed satisfied with me as she climbed into my lap – took you long enough. No matter how unlikely it is that every other person on a college campus is asleep at any given moment, it felt just like that: like everyone else was dreaming, and I was walking in the shadows between them, and Ella had shown up right on time to keep me from getting lost in the rain on a starless night. The small creature could not be more opposite to a giant Irish wolfhound on a farm thousands of miles away, and yet both are connected by a look, a kind of understanding, an existence that demands recognition as much for your sake as for theirs. To say Ella understood; to say she saw into the stress that was pushing me to a breaking point more clearly than any of my friends is to only scratch the surface of her furry being. To say Fenton, to say Ella is only the beginning. The magic lies in that look. 

Spring 2021