Eddie turned up on campus today with his hand bandaged.
I asked him what was wrong, and he peeled back the gauze and showed me a couple of paired puncture wounds, one of them deep, a hole in his hand, like a tiny, red, manhole without its cover. It looked even worse than it was, being filled with a clear, unnatural-looking gooey substance that I belatedly realized must be antibiotic ointment. His hand shook slightly, and I noticed he tried not to move his fingers. He wrapped up his hand again.
"Joy's work," he explained, with some humor.
"Joy doesn't have teeth like that," I said. He rolled his eyes.
"The teeth belong to Elmo," he said. "Joy bandaged my hand. She said I'm almost as sweet and loyal as a dog, so she guessed she could work on me. And we don't want the bite reported. He's had all his shots and I've had mine, but still...."
"I thought you said Elmo is getting better?"
"He is. Believe it or not, I think this is improvement."
I should explain that Elmo is the dog Eddie has been trying to train for the last two months or so. His assignment, the thing he has to do to earn his mastery, is to train a dog as a therapy animal whom even Eddie thinks cannot be trained. The first hard part was finding a dog he honestly considered untrainable, when lots of dogs who would merely be difficult to train beckoned at the shelters. And then there was the philosophical problem of being assigned to train an untrainable dog.
"If I succeed, and end up with a trained therapy dog," Eddie had said to me, "does that mean I have to start over with a new dog? Or, if I fail with the dog, does that mean I've failed my assignment and I have to start over with a new dog? Or just not earn my ring?"
None of us have ever heard of a candidate who wanted to earn the green ring and couldn't do it, but there's always the fear one of us could be the first. The masters like to assign impossible tasks, after all, like training an untrainable dog.
"Are they trying to teach me to handle failure, or trying to teach me not to give up on long-shot dogs?"
But all such philosophizing and worrying went out the window in mid-April when Eddie found, and more or less fell in love with Elmo, an unsocialized and deeply traumatized animal whom three rescue organizations had each independently examined, despaired of, and left at the kill shelter. Eddie took him, moved him in to one of the barns on campus, and hasn't looked back.
It took until almost June to get Elmo moved in and settled then treated for various physical ailments so he could concentrate on his training. And then Eddie started working and, his optimistic assertions to the contrary, made no progress at all.
"He's scared," Eddie admitted. "He's scared of me, he's scared of strange noises, he's scared of the other dogs....He won't make eye contact with me, won't take treats, won't let us take his food bowl when he's done with it...." I'd seen the inside of Elmo's barn just once since he moved in, and there were 14 empty dog bowls inside, plus the one he was eating from. That was the morning of his eighth day. Since then, I'd learned, they had build a dividing wall of straw bales down the middle of the barn, with a kind of door in it for Elmo, so they could clean one half while he was in the other.
So, now this bite.
"How do you figure getting bitten is progress?" I asked.
"He was so scared after he did it," Eddie answered. "He thought I was going to kill him--and there are people who would have. But I didn't. And I won't. And afterwards, while I was huddling in the corner trying to get my head clear of the pain so I could do something, he came up to me. He seemed sympathetic. He's never approached me before. I think he likes me."
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