All Dogs Go to Heaven?

“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in the late nineteenth century.

Apparently, Stevenson, the author of such thrilling adventure novels for all ages as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, was not a jogger. He certainly never encountered the dogs I’ve met on my daily run. Otherwise, he might have given pause to a few of my canine acquaintances.

There’s Chewy, a hyperactive little white terrier who shares none of the same benevolence of his fellow Scot Stevenson. Chewy would be sitting blissfully in his front yard, or sniffing about on the property, when he’d hear my approach. He’d race frenetically to the bottom of the driveway, only to be brought up short by an invisible electronic fence.

One day, he broke through the barrier and chased after me. Fearful of tripping over him or being nipped on an ankle, I stopped. His insistent yapping, and my attempts to mollify him, eventually brought forth his owner, who unconvincingly assured me that Chewy likes to play and would never bite anyone. When the same interruption happened again, I found it less troublesome simply to redirect my course.     

Chewy, though, must have emitted a secret, kindred signal—some kind of ineffable animal magnetism, like a silent alarm whistle—to his doggy neighbor around the corner. Shortly after I had replotted my course, I was greeted by an aggressive spaniel, who stopped playing with his chew toy when he spotted me—a real, live chewable plaything. I never caught the spaniel’s name, but his owner likewise explained that this was the dog’s way of showing that he liked me. Thanks, but I’d like him better if he were on a leash, I thought. The dog has since come running out two more times to frolic with me.

Finally, last week, as I was in the final uphill stage of my course, a mastiff, on a leash and starting out on his own bit of exercise, made an aggressively hostile pass at me. His owner, initially unprepared for the surge, barely kept his hold on the leash as the beast lunged. I had stopped short, irritated by the interruption but thankful for the quick handling by the owner, who refastened his grip and then punched the dog viciously on the top of his head.

I thought to myself at the time, “What kind of memories do dogs have? How will this one process the blow he just received? Will he now associate pain with my presence? Are we forever destined to be incompatible? Should I make another course correction?” It’s hard to run while looking over your shoulder.

Stevenson’s elegiac poem “Requiem,” inscribed on his tomb in Samoa, says as much about the author in death (he died much too young, at age 44) as it does about him in life:

          Under the wide and starry sky,
          Dig the grave and let me lie.
          Glad did I live and gladly die,
          And I laid me down with a will.
          This be the verse you grave for me:
          Here he lies where he longed to be;
          Home is the sailor, home from sea,
          And the hunter home from the hill.

With apologies to Stevenson, whose outlook I admire, in my case when the time comes, substitute “jogger” for “hunter.”