copyright Steven Sternbach
We were considering names. “How about Nellie Fox?” Steve suggested as we sat on a log having lunch, hoping not to be shot by one of deer rifles echoing from the New Hampshire woods behind us.
“That’s brilliant!” I replied. “Who’s Nellie Fox?” We were en route to view a newborn Shiba Inu puppy, the only girl in a litter of six, (and along the way, we were forming a decidedly scary view of the wilds in which she had been born.) Steve explained that Nellie [Jacob Nelson] Fox had been a second basemen for the Chicago White Sox in the 1950’s. Fox, a 12-time All Star, had died relatively young, and for years a Nellie Fox fan club had tried to get him inducted into the Hall of Fame. In 1997, his last year of eligibility, they succeeded, but that’s getting ahead of my story.
The puppy fit into one of my hands. We paid a deposit and returned seven weeks later to collect her. Pam, the breeder, forgot we were coming and greeted us with a pointed rifle, reinforcing our skeptical view the neighborhood. “She bit her brother,” Pam announced, as I wrote out a check. Right then, we should have reconsidered. The bundle of less-than-happy fur we were about to collect—she panted from fear all the way home—was a fighter, and not a very wise one. For one thing, she never grew to be more than half the size of a normal Shiba and had absolutely no sense about what she could take on. Exploring some odd sounds at our otherwise empty campground one night in 2004, I looked down to see her standing on her hind legs, straining on her leash, and beating the air with her paws in an effort to get at what I soon realized was a bear the size of a Volkswagen.
For her first year Nellie played happily in the dog park across the street, but when it closed for renovations, any hope that she might get along with other dogs closed with it. Even as a puppy, she responded fiercely to anything she perceived as an affront to her sovereignty—a big dog running over her, for example—and soon lost the ability to distinguish play from fighting. She didn’t like being touched, not by dogs and not by humans. We had to teach her to enjoy being petted, and she never got used to being brushed. I brushed her fur and her teeth almost every week for 17 years, and she screamed and struggled and threatened to bite every one of those 884 weeks! Fortunately, she was not usually aggressive, unless provoked, and eventually developed a Garbo-esque desire to simply be left alone, at least by strangers.
She was breed-conscious and had an uncanny ability to recognize dogs that were like her: Huskies, Akitas, other Shibas, and so on. She was drawn to them, even if a fight was likely to ensue, and as a puppy she fell in love with Jason, a handsome, laid-back dude, tannish-white and part Norwegian elkhound. She met him during our dog-park year, and long after the park was closed and she lost her ability to play with other dogs, she greeted Jason with spasms of joy.
If she didn’t like the usual rough and tumble of the dog park, she loved running. Whenever possible, she encouraged dogs to chase her, and she was so fast that few could catch her. Once during our dog-park year, a young German shepherd took off after her and fell far enough behind that he found it necessary to “cheat” by jumping over a low bench in order to shorten the distance between them. Sometimes, with no one to chase her, she would take off in mad circles, running round and round until exhausted. Frisbee was another pleasure that found her running back and forth under the flying disks.
Obedience eluded her. Shibas are an atavistic breed, descended, or so the Japanese claim, from pre-history. I once read an article on Carolina dogs, believed to be descended from dogs that accompanied the earliest immigrants over the landmass that once bridged the Bering Strait, and I found descriptions of their idiosyncrasies similar to Nellie’s—the sudden, frantic, spontaneous digging of small holes, for example. Nellie’s whole life was one long compromise, trying to conform her wildness to domestic life. It wasn’t that she never learned to “come,” she militantly refused to learn to come. Following my dog book, I tried treats and a training leash. As long as the leash was on, she “came” for the treat, but as soon as it was off, she weighed the treat against freedom and opted for freedom. Steve and I spent a great deal of her life involuntarily chasing her, and she loved every minute! She wasn’t dumb, but she used her smarts in the interest of staying wild instead of becoming domesticated. Once on the Cape’s Marconi dunes, when I dropped her leash, thinking she would run to “Daddy,” she darted under the fence instead, running round and round the protected dune where we couldn’t follow. We watched helplessly until finally Steve was able to grab her leash as she cruised close to the fence for the fifteenth time. She loved us, and she never wanted to run “away” exactly; she just wanted to be free.
So
how was it we came to love this dog like our very life? For starters, she was, by all objective
standards, incredibly beautiful.
Descended on her father’s side from two of Richard Tomita’s original Shibas
from Japan, she bore a strong resemblance to “Chibi,” the cover dog on Tomita’s
Shibas book, whose thick soft fur, rounded features, and soulful eyes
made him particularly handsome.
Those features and her small size gave Nellie a perpetual puppy
look. Up to a few months before
she died, people were still stopping us to ask if she were fully grown. (Our
local bookstore featured an amazingly cute picture of her at six months in
their 1996 fall newsletter.)
Steve
summed it up best when he looked at her one day and said, “If you weren’t so
cute, you’d just be a bad dog!” She
beguiled with her actions as well as her looks. Steve’s father called her a little “vance” (mischievous
child), and she mortified his mother when, on her first visit to their high
rise Brooklyn apartment, she dove under the sofa, a space two inches high, to emerge
minutes later with a desiccated mouse!
My sister, impatient with Nellie’s
waywardness, shook with helpless laughter one night as she
watched her chase June bugs on our deck. For better or worse, Shibas have an amazing range of vocalizations, so I taught
her to sing. She frequently serenaded
us, hoping for a treat, and always accompanied us on “Happy Birthday,” her
favorite song because birthdays meant presents. She could never quite understand that not every birthday was
hers and always looked forward to opening presents, no matter whose. She paced around the Christmas tree on
Christmas Eve as impatient as any child to start opening her gifts.
She played hard, indoors and out. She could pluck balls from mid-air and would do handstands to field grounders. Passers-by stopped to watch her play “soccer” in the park, chasing a beach ball around, pushing it with her nose like a seal, while we ran in and kicked it away from her. She had a variety of indoor toys for chasing and chewing, but particularly loved tug-of-war with her rope toy, standing on her hind legs to wrestle it away from Steve in a pose we dubbed “Tyrannosaurus Fox.”
Although she was almost nine when we purchased Mill Brook House, she had many good years there, running through the fields, chasing turkeys, hunting for mice, and fishing for leaves as they floated down the Mill Brook. We built her a pen from the sturdy fence that had surrounded the defunct swimming pool we filled in, so she could spend time lolling in the sunshine and chasing bugs. Although we tossed balls for her both outside and inside the pen, she came, in her last years, to distrust the open fields—too many smells from animals she knew she could no longer defend herself against—and to prefer the security of her pen. As she aged, the pen became the last place I could get her to play ball. When Hurricane Irene destroyed it in the late summer of 2011, she never chased balls again. Becoming ever more fragile and dependent, she left us a few days after Christmas in 2012, bequeathing indelible memories of a charming, difficult, unique little personality.
Good night, little Princess...
For more photographs of Nellie Fox, click on the album in our sidebar "Nellie Fox in Pictures" or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/nellie_fox_in_pictures/index.html