Some of my happiest memories of the Labradork who captured my love and trust on the first meeting was a habit he developed of jumping up and down in the air in delight. I mean literally bouncing straight up into the air to a height of as much as five or six feet...all feet acting like springs expressing his utter glee.

The first time I saw Gus he was sitting crookedly on his right haunch avidly watching everything in his line of sight. Through the fence surrounding his pen at the local Humane Society Shelter he looked at those of us walking about and looking at dogs and seemed to be waiting for someone to take them out of jail. He alternated looking inside at us and then outside at the other dogs around his run.

He seemed to be intently processing information, mulling over everything and everyone he could see; conjugating canine verbs, calculating doggie ways he might manage to make a break for it.

When I called out to him he glanced at me briefly but found no reason to consider me any more important than anything else within his range of vision.

It looked as if he was waiting for someone in particular, someone who had perhaps loved him and had been looking after him before he found himself alone in this place.

So sleek and shiny, Gus was a blue-black lunk of a dog that looked to be a finer blend of canine velvet smoothed with beautiful deep blue silk. The light played off his muscles as he leaned in or out the arch between his pen and his run to see better all that was taking place around him.

From the first glance I found myself unable to stop looking at him in admiration verging on awe.

When I asked about that black dog over there the attendant told me that Gus (who had been badly tagged with the name of Arby) had only been with them for two weeks. She said he was a sweet dog. She said if I waited a little, she would try to go get him so I could visit with him in a separate room. I was momentarily stunned so I didn't say anything. She saw my hesitation and asked if I had the time and repeated that if I would like her to, she would get him, all of which I had not expected all.

It seemed to me to be such a very great privelege that I became suddenly unsure. It meant that I could touch him and talk with him within a nice-sized centrally located room having sliding glass doors on both sides of it where we could be semi-alone together---but would also be within everyone's view, and in this semi private place we could begin to become acquainted.

He was so preoccupied, so remote. Not the kind to nuzzle up or try to curry favor, not this dog. He was too busy, I thought, still watching for whoever it was who had kept him for the first 15 months of his life, whoever it was who had named him Arby, whoever it was who had abandoned him to the county dog pound where he had been for what must have seemed to him for much longer than two weeks. It was where, too, he had been castrated and here he was finding himself feeling entirely different and being looked over by strangers who admired his beauty but who had found him either too big or too beyond puppyhood or too something else to take home with them.

Five minutes alone with him and I knew I wanted this dog. I wanted him to like and then to love me and to be my companion. I just could not stop looking at him. He was so beautiful, so stately, so self-contained.

So, that's how it happened, love at first sight on my part, I guess. Me in my Pinkerton uniform; white shirt, red patches and shiny badge, black epaulletts on the shoulders, black pants, thick black, tooled leather belt around my middle and regulation black leather shoes, I probably looked like any other shit-head security guard, and here was this brilliantly shining smooth coated Black Labrador Retriever that might have been a warm moving black diamond on four paws ... ready to go anywhere I led him. I signed stuff, paid up and we went home.

***

We stopped at the pet store so I could get him a leash, some food, a few biscuits and a raw, bloody bovine shin-bone they'd dipped in some addictive, a brown liquid he found interesting and a few other assorted bits of this and that. The stuff that dogs like to chew on.

We piled back into my old blue Dodge Caravan and rode the fifteen miles back east to my house.

I could hardly believe that I had chosen to spring him from the shelter. It so happened that all this occurred immediately following my overnight shift at a nearby manufacturing plant. Maybe, I reasoned, I took him along with me (about 2 p.m. on April 29, 2001) because I was so tired from lack of sleep, not to mention the lonliness of night watch quiet through countless nights that I had stopped counting.

When I got him home he followed me everywhere, sat alertly very nearby and watched my every move. He sniffed everything carefully to suss out where he was but continued to look about him in an agitated, wary and confused manner for hours. He refused to lie down and rest. As that night progressed he would not even lie his head down, not once, until about one o'clock a. m.

It looked like he had no idea where he was or what was going to happen next and he was not about to relax until he had more clues. Eventually he was so tired he couldn't fight sleep any longer, his head began to nod, still he would jerk his head up to alertness again and again.

Finally, he lay down beneath my computer table falling into a twitchy sleep from which he would pop up every half hour or hour to look around to see what was up. So it went until I lay down and slept, myself. That was the beginning of our much too short, mostly happy life together.