This past week was the Week of the Dogs for Mother and me. There was even a musical group – Three Dog Night – named for our situation. I can’t say it wasn’t enjoyable, but it was interesting. It reminded me of nothing else so much as that Scottish game in which each contestant wears nothing but a pair of baggy pants tied at the cuffs, and then drops a live, unhappy ferret down inside. The Gael who can stand it the longest wins.

I know that people who don’t love dogs can be bored nearly to tears by the sentimental tales of those who do. I know because I was not a dog lover for the first fifty-six years of my life, and often scoffed at the bathetic granite inscriptions and excesses of animal cemeteries. When our younger daughter rescued a little mostly-Sheltie puppy from an abusive home in a fraternity house some sixteen years ago and asked whether we would keep it, at least for a while, I put my booted foot down. “There will be a dog or a husband in this house,” I declared, “but not both.”

I came home from work after dark one cold November evening with my overalls frozen into brown stovepipes on my legs and my mood black as the night outside. There on the kitchen floor sat the puppy, wondering what had just come through the door and not yet aware that one of us was leaving. I stopped in front of her; she looked up, clearly frightened, trembling slightly. Then, as I gazed at her face, I could see a hologram hovering above it, like the signs you see on diners that proclaim, “Caution. Microwave in operation.” But this one read, “Cerebral cortex in operation.” The light of science burned clearly in those brown eyes! I reached down to pet her; she peed on the floor. I could tell by her face as I lifted her that she knew she’d blown her one chance to stay.

Mother carried her for about a month in a baby sling on her chest, speaking reassuringly all the time. I took her with me when I went down for the newspaper or drove to the post office. She and Mother and I have been, in one combination or another, inseparable ever since. Mother was always to be with, and I to do with, until she grew too old to do much anymore. Year-round, we walked hundreds of miles together. Her prodigies deserve a book, so I’ll save them. But all these years later, she’s still with us. At the moment she’s lying as if asleep about four feet behind my chair. But if the chair moves more than a couple of inches, her head comes up. Bedtime? What?

A little over a year ago we had the sense we were losing her. Her arthritis had become crippling, and her thyroid wasn’t acting the way it should. Laid up by surgery, I couldn’t do anything but pet her, and we could feel her sort of slipping away. Then Maggie arrived.

Maggie’s a chunky chocolate Lab who lived in the house next door to a small guest house where we spent last winter. She’d lost a couple of siblings, and was desperate for company. Then suddenly we moved in just a few yards away, with company ready-made. She came to visit, stayed ever longer in the evenings until they became sleepovers, and finally, when her owners went to Florida for the winter, became a member of our family.

You cannot imagine a better-mannered lady than she. Though outweighing our old gal by a factor of three, she consistently defers. Now and then, after devouring her supper with her blunt muzzle in five seconds, she may hover expectantly nearby while her adoptive sister nibbles at hers with her long, narrow jaws. But one stern word sends her off shamefaced to the next room.

Barney dropped suddenly into this settled situation when his mistress, our younger daughter, left for a week-long cruise in the Caribbean. Barney is an irrepressible Jack Russell terrier, which I realize is a redundancy. Walking him on a leash is like driving a car with water in the gas – start, stop, jump. Our full-glass doors gave him wide views of the yard, which he assumed it was his job to keep clear of predators, real and imagined, by barking frenziedly and hurling himself at the glass. A few years ago, during his first weeks in Vermont, he killed a skunk and a porcupine (Post-mortem, the porcupine almost killed him.) and chased a cow moose out of the yard. He’s mellowed a bit in recent years, and I must admit he’s kind of a cuddly little character.

Mother got tired of his push me-pull you action on the leash when she went down for the paper in the morning, so she leashed him and Maggie together and turned them loose. It was a stroke of genius. Maggie outweighs him by a factor of four, so when he reached the end of the leash, he stopped; and where she went, so did he. They looked like the mismatched remnants of a comic dogsled team. If Maggie found him at all irritating, she was far too well-bred to show it.

Which is why it amazed me so the other day when she was mouthing a plastic carrot that makes loud whistling noises, and Barney decided he wanted it. She ignored his desire, pretended not to see him sneaking up behind her, and then silently raised her lips. Barney backed down in surprise, wisely deferring to a polite, but determined lady – and one four times his size, besides.