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  Further Praise for Sight Hound

  “The much anticipated debut novel from the marvelous short-story writer Pam Houston. . . . Animal lovers will understand completely the bond she has with her dog. As fans of Houston’s writing have come to expect, her characters are outspoken and original.”

  —Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Seattle Times

  “Entertaining. . . . It’s a poignant and joyous novel, a tear-jerker certain to appeal to those of us who suspect, foolishly or intuitively, that our pets’ emotions are tightly bound to our own. Without excess sentimentality, Houston offers proof that fickle humans are capable of learning a lesson or two in devotion, even if the teacher has four legs and bad breath.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Houston has an exquisite understanding of animal-human relationships. Maybe she’s creating a new genre of fiction: the cross-species romance.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Will convince you that Houston is at least a wonderful novelist and maybe also a full-fledged witch capable of advanced spells. . . . A voice so genuine you’d know it in a dark alley.”

  —Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, The Oregonian

  “[Rae] sorts out the good people from the bad in her life in time to face Dante’s death with bravery and love in several tender scenes that will touch even the least animal-besotted reader. . . . [An] amplitude of heart.”

  —Jenny Shank, Rocky Mountain News

  “Houston writes well, with a wry knowledge of the human condition coupled to an admiration of the absurd. . . . The novel is compelling. . . . As if on a mission from God, Pam Houston repeatedly reminds her readers of life’s multiple teachers, the possibility of healing and a word she uses often: ‘hope.’ ”

  —Wendy L. Smith, San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Sight Hound will resonate with readers who admire Houston’s emotional risk-taking.”

  —Annete Gallagher Weisman, People, 31⁄2 stars

  “The great news about Pam Houston’s first novel is this: She turns out to be as good at fiction as she is at nonfiction. . . . All but the coldest hearts will find Sight Hound an astoundingly deep exploration into the desires of humans to connect.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Postfeminist toughness and post-hippie sentiment are the alternating currents in this wry, tender novel. . . . Houston’s gift for capturing the dynamic of unorthodox webs of relationships is on pleasing display in this gruffly warmhearted novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Part fable, part romance, part paean to the beauty of nature, Houston’s arty and endearing Rockies screwball comedy includes one of the goofiest marriage proposals ever and many sweetly teary moments.”

  —Booklist

  “Houston . . . prompts genuine laughter and tears in this tale of loyalty, liberation, and unconditional love.”

  —Allison Block, Pages

  “Sight Hound should come with a warning label: Beware of Dog. Dante . . . will steal your heart. . . . Writing from an animal’s point of view is always a risky venture, but Houston more than pulls it off.”

  —Joanne Collings, Bookpage

  ALSO BY PAM HOUSTON

  A Little More about Me

  Waltzing the Cat

  Cowboys Are My Weakness

  Women on Hunting

  WITH VERONIQUE VIAL

  Men Before Ten a.m.

  Sight Hound

  a novel

  Pam Houston

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

  This book is dedicated to the greatest dog that ever lived,

  to the man who came along in the nick of time,

  and to veterinarians, everywhere.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank Carol Houck Smith for her belief in this project, her absolute understanding of the canine-human connection, and her line-editing skills which are second to none; Liz Darhansoff for her enthusiasm and ongoing support, Kelli Ziegler for her internet skills and her friendship; and Emily Bernard and Tami Anderson for their keen eyes in the final hour. Boundless gratitude to Dr. Peter Walsh, Dr. Alan Leach, Dr. Robyn Elmslie, Dr. Phyllis Glawe, Dr. John Howard, Dr. Carroll Loyer, and to the staff and students at the University of California Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, the Veterinary Referral Center of Colorado, and the Creede Animal Clinic. Special thanks to those who heard or read early drafts, especially my U.C. Davis colleagues, my Phase Two students, and one young man in Greeley, Colorado, who said I ought to give the cat a chance to speak for himself. Sincere appreciation to Toni Morrison and Jackson Browne for lighting the path with kindness and grace, with artistic and personal integrity. Warmest thanks of all go to Martin Buchanan, who in so many ways makes this book possible.

  Contents

  1 Mona’s Dream

  2 The Meeting

  3 The Courtship

  4 The Wedding

  5 The Fires

  6 The Hockey Player

  7 The End

  8 The Future

  I know that

  hope is the hardest

  love we carry.

  —from “Hope and Love”

  JANE HIRSHFIELD

  One

  •

  Mona’s

  Dream

  Rae #1:

  We were driving along Colorado 64, somewhere between Meeker and Rangely—the Milky Way bright above us and Dante and Rose snoring softly in the back of the 4-Runner—when Mona told me about her dream. It was the early eighteen hundreds, she said, and we were going west together.

  We had eloped. I was a man, she said, in that life, and I had stolen Mona from the man she was supposed to marry in Boston. She was pregnant with my child, and when she tried to deliver the baby it died, and then so did she, and I buried her, the baby in her arms, next to a slow-moving river.

  I don’t remember that life, though ten years earlier in this life I had insisted upon floating every single mile of the Green River, through oil fields and farmlands and sections of flat desert no one had ever boated just to say I had, and I never knew why.

  In the life I do remember I died on a battlefield, in the Civil War, I think, or maybe the Revolution. There were bodies all around me, I was a man that time too, bullets and blood. Battlefields come up for me in dreams more times than I dare to count. More often this year, because of all the war movies I won’t go to see.

  Mona said, “Rae, is that really true, you think you might have been a man in your last life?”

  I said, “Oh Mona, I’m just barely a woman in this life,” and we had another good laugh like we’d been having for weeks. A Denver Post journalist once said I had the soul of a man, but I don’t think he meant the same thing as Mona did.

  I don’t know yet what any of this has to do with love between women, or the way I’ve always thought the safest place in the world is a darkened theater, right before the curtain goes up, or the way the young actor’s white collar against his chin made my guts pull so tight I almost fell off my chair.

  I was so happy after the show that night I couldn’t keep my feet from knocking together. I was almost making a successful run at living in the present moment, my mind sliding into the future only now and then. Thich Nhat Hanh said if you take care of the present the future will take care of itself, so that’s what I was trying for, trying to feel every bit of it and not to look away when the young actor said any number of things that were daring me to meet his eyes. I was too old for him and too old for new love, but I’d finally gotten around to c
ultivating something I might one day call faith and there seemed no time like the present to test it.

  I’d spent my whole life convinced that one sure way not to get what I wanted was to hope for it, out loud or even to myself, and it didn’t seem to matter whether it was something simple like rain on the parched pasture so the wild iris would have a chance this year, or something bigger and softer I could fall back on, like a man who would stay, or a friend.

  Now that Dante had had all the chemo an Irish wolfhound can have in one lifetime, there was nothing to do but share a bottle of vitamin E and miracle mushroom gel caps and live each day like it might be the last—since it might. Dr. Evans says it’s a good thing dogs don’t walk on their X-rays and I took him to mean that a statistic is only a statistic after your dog is already dead.

  That Alanis Morissette song was playing on the radio all that spring, thank you terror, thank you disillusionment, and I got it long and loud. Peter had left me with a note in October that said, I really did love you, and it took me exactly two hours to make an appointment with Theo, my therapist, 24 hours to start the paperwork for a visa to get into Tibet. Theo had told me once that the only way Peter could handle our relationship was if I dimmed myself down to about forty percent of full wattage, and in Theo’s office that day it became clear that the first thing the well-rested sixty percent of me wanted to do was head off to some far-flung corner of the world.

  It’s a desire that never wears out in me, to go as many miles as possible to a world that resembles my world not at all. Theo says loving the unfamiliar is a convenient way to avoid loving myself and he may be right, but whenever I’m in the Himalayas I tell the villagers how happy I am to be there so many times they think I am drunk or retarded or both.

  At the Sera Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa, the monks in debate out in the courtyard sounded, from a distance, like a raft of migrating snow geese rising off the surface of a lake, but when I got up close I could tell that half of the monks were asking questions—What is Big? my guide translated—and the other half were answering back.

  “What is big?” I asked my guide, and he shook his head the way he’d been doing all week, a combination of I-don’t-have-the-language and you-don’t-have-the-capacity-to-understand.

  My dog is big, I wanted to say, and in all the ways you mean it. But who was I to presume such knowledge, so I kept my mouth shut and leaned my back against the big bodhi tree in the center of the courtyard and closed my eyes to listen better to the sounds.

  I once traveled a long way with my boyfriend at the time to visit the concentration camps at Dachau, and miles before we got there I knew there was no way in hell I was going to go in, so I sat at the train station while my boyfriend and his friends toured the ruins of the camp. And it was not as if I was such a sensitive soul in those days—in fact I was cultivating coldness—but years later when I told my friend Jonathan about my reaction he said, “Well, you were probably one of the souls who died there, I mean think about it, a hell of a lot of people did.”

  On the hike to Delicate Arch, Mona said, “The baby’s name was Nell,” and then the trail went around a corner and damned if there wasn’t a mother nursing a newborn who looked about four hours old. We had left the dogs in the car with all the windows open, because a four-mile trip was too long by then for Dante, and because Rose couldn’t be counted on to hide from the park ranger when we told her to.

  I asked the sun to just please give us an hour at the top of the trail and it did, and then it went away for good right before all the sunset photographers arrived, and I thought about Jonathan again and how he once asked me why I was always giving the power to people like Adam and Peter and Henry Miller and God, when was I going to realize I was the one who could make the sun come and stay.

  My cell phone rang after we got back in the car, and it was Howard, the young actor, telling me that while he was driving he felt as if he might turn at any second into a tiny beam of light. And it was right at that moment that Mona pointed up out of the sunroof and said, “There, look, there, that’s two golden eagles, that’s us. What are the chances that there would be two golden eagles, right on the highway like that?” And I thought, well, the chances are good enough that the highway department put a sign up that says BEWARE OF EAGLES ON HIGHWAY, but I knew inside that if the eagles came to tell me anything that day, they came to talk about Howard and his little beam of light.

  And I couldn’t stop thinking about the battlefield, looking for Howard’s face among the bleeding and dead. Maybe we died there together. Maybe it was his job to take care of me. I meet so many people, but I’ve never met anyone like him. I’ve never met a man before who would spend his last five dollars on floating candles.

  In therapy the other day we focused on my battlefield, which Theo thinks is a metaphor and that’s fine, if that’s what he needs to do. And then we did EFT where you rub your sore spot and say your affirmation, and it was no problem to say, I accept myself fully even when I’m supposed to be taking care of someone else, but when it got to the part where I was supposed to say, I accept myself fully even though I want someone to take care of me, well, I just couldn’t say it.

  “Try it again,” Theo kept saying, as if we were talking about the balance beam or the high jump and not the simple task of putting several words together in a line, and eventually I did manage to say it but not without my heart beating hard in my throat.

  The guy who came to Mona’s door last month said, “Someone from another time lives in your house,” then he said, “You lived in another time too, you were a pioneer.”

  Then she was thinking he looked just like John Candy, and he said, “Yep, that John Candy, he’s my man.” He sold her a magazine subscription and then he went on his way.

  But somehow after he left she knew that I would die in a fiery crash the next month when I was going to Italy for the opening of Jonathan’s play. As if the guy had given her that information telepathically.

  And Mona’s husband, Daniel, said, “You have to call her, it’s too important not to,” and I said,

  “What, does this mean you don’t want me to go?” and she said,

  “Of course I don’t want you to go because then you’ll be dead.”

  When Jonathan and I got to Italy, Vincenzo, our driver, said he was dating a woman named Pina and her best friend, Tina, simultaneously, and when I asked him wasn’t he afraid he’d say the wrong name he said, “I’ve never slept with both of them at one time!”

  I tried to tell him in my pidgin Italian, which is really more like passable French with O’s stuck on the end of everything, that “my amiee-go in Etas-Unito parleyed of an accidento terrifico, grande fuego! Morte, Morte, por moi.”

  Vincenzo nodded and smiled when I said this, and then whenever he’d pass two cars at once on the double yellow line Jonathan and I would yell, “Fiery crash! Fiery crash!”

  In Italy I rode a big grey horse that turned his neck all the way around to eat figs from my hand, and Gino, the heart of Teatro Spagnola, said, “I have so much charisma, but Jonathan, he is not simpatico. I play the guitar when people are sad, everyone is jealous of Gino.”

  Gino showed us the image of the Madonna in a knot of a tree. He said God tells him who are the good people. Then he got out his photo albums full of stills of himself in all his starring roles since Teatro Spagnola opened in the 1970s.

  And all the time I kept thinking about the young actor, how when he took off his ball cap to reveal his hairline I thought, Oh, thank God, because otherwise he was just too, too handsome, and how I thought for the first five minutes that he was gay, and for the next five minutes that he was with the leading lady, and for the next five minutes that Victoria had her hooks in him somehow. But when he walked me to my car that night and said,

  “Well, at least I’ve met the dogs now,”

  And I said, “Yes, well, that’
s the important thing,”

  I knew that I would see him again.

  The next morning I drove up to Boulder to see Madame Roslinka and the first thing she said to me was, “The spirit has helped you out, not one time, but many times. There are two people in your hand,” she said, “only one in your heart. One is a little lighter, one is a little darker, but don’t worry, you will make the right decision.”

  She said I had had big pain in my life three times, seven years before, three years before, and last October, and it took me a moment to realize that she had hit them all perfectly—Tucker, Adam, and Peter—and I was pretty impressed. She said I would live to be eighty-six or eighty-seven, that I would earn and spend money easily, and that in general I would always do the right thing.

  I know there’s not a woman who’s ever been in love who didn’t think some kind of fate was at work in the background. What I’m saying is, I understood that my connection to this young actor was deep and true and old, and we had only just unearthed it. What I’m saying is, there was no chance that I would have driven off into the sunset with Mona into whatever life we might have had alongside the Green River. What I’m saying is, this was a time in my life when the big questions collided with the small ones, when the smell of sage coming up through the snowmelt could seem like a bona fide promise, when what is big was all around me, demanding patience and courage in alternating doses, singing this is the beginning of beginning to understand.

  Two

  •

  The

  Meeting

  Dante #1:

  The first point of confusion I’d like to clear up is that there are three legs left, three good legs that are perfectly capable of lifting the entire lithe grey body over a single-strand barbed-wire fence from a standstill, especially if the human you love is standing next to it, crying about your osteosarcoma, about your lost fourth leg, about your impending decline and premature death, about how she will never live without you.