Be the Chicken, not the Wolf.
Teegan of Utah of California. A love story.
Sep. 2008 — Jan 16, 2023
A couple of years ago I lost my Mika, and last year we lost our beloved Butters. I got to be Butter’s step-mom for only about six months, but the loss was felt all the same. She bonded with my girl Teegan. My girlfriend and I joked that Butters came to realize she was a lesbian late in life. We worried that Teegan and Butters would not get along, but they became fast friends. We imagined them recalling their youth with each other. My beloved Teegan made it almost 14.5 spins around the sun, and brought my second transition of 2023.
If Mika was teaching me presence, Teegan was my teacher of transitions, consistency, persistence, and joy. They both broke my heart open with their unconditional love. If you met Teegan in her first 12 years, you would have had the pleasure of hearing her howl. If she really liked you, you might have gotten treated to one of her hummingbird kisses. She had an uncanny ability to jump straight up, sometimes 3–5' in the air in front of you, and land a gentle kiss on your cheek, all while never touching you except from that exceptional hummingbird nose and tongue. Occasionally she even hit your mouth. There’s nothing like a little dog tongue as a sign of ultimate affection. After a great play session at my local dog park (Point Isabel), she did this to the mother of her chosen play partner, to which I had to apologize. She never much cared for other dogs or people, except for when she did.
I think she saw herself more as a human, or perhaps it’s just that she took her jobs very seriously, including managing me. In retrospect, I’m very clear that she came into my life to lead me, and I just had the great fortune of being able to be part of her chosen pack.
She was there to inspire our runs. She was there to snuggle me during relationship transitions. She was there at my feet in her doggie cave under my desk as I worked from home over the years, and in particular as I was solo working remotely during the pandemic. It was a gift to have been able to spend the last years working from home with Mika and Teegan. Teegan went where I went, but never in a clingy way. She was just there, watching me. Sometimes with a howl. And always with this unwavering look of love and devotion coming from her eyes to mine, piercing my heart, breaking it open. I’m not sure I’ve ever had someone, human or animal, look at me the way she looked at me.
In 2013, when my little girl was a spry chicken in her prime, an ex and I went to an obscure festival called Camp Tipsy. That’s a story perhaps for another article. In short, it’s a place where people camp around a fresh water lake, and build floating things with a rather ridiculous set of goals and made up awards. Some friends and I decided to make a whale from recycled plastics and chicken wire. The whale, Kafka, was a sort of creative representation of single use plastics and ocean conservation. She was the last seaworthy whale of her kind, an endangered creature built with a fire hose spout. The creation of Kafka involved a few weekends forming the wire, and then a few months of collecting plastics. We wanted to be able to have a couple of people sit on the whale sort of like a floating horse whale kayak, and that required a bit of engineering. In truth, we had no idea what we were doing, but that was also the point.
We decided we needed a really large cylinder to create enough flotation to maintain buoyancy with weight. My ex found a friend in Northern California that had a few old plastic barrels, and we went to her farm to see if one would work.
There were chickens running everywhere at the farm, and various animals, including a dog or two. I just remember one wolf like dog eyeing the chickens with menace and hunger in her eyes as the chickens were running around clucking, pecking and foraging, doing their thing. As we rounded the corner, with me carrying the plastic barrel, there was the dog with one chicken’s head in its mouth. Drool was coming from both sides of her mouth, and in that moment I imagined the chicken saying something like, “are you fucking going to do it already? I’m not going to live my life in fear. So if you’re going to bite me, bite me, but otherwise get on with it.” It was a moment of complete surrender. The mom called to the dog to stop, the chicken exited the dog’s mouth, and in that moment I just had to laugh. What if chickens were actually the most courageous animals on the planet?
Through the course of my life, I think I’ve wanted to be the wolf. To be able to take care of my pack. To be able and always willing to take on new adventures, cover ground, and always be the wolf that had some free choice to determine her destiny. Fear was a mountain to conquer, and surrender and vulnerability weren’t in my vocabulary until well into my 40’s. In that moment, I thought how wild and wonderful it was to have the vision of a chicken, the courage of a chicken, to simply be willing to do what was going to happen in the moment versus fight. What a gift to live life with courage, and not fear. As my loss and grief in losing Teegan is fresh, I can see so clearly that she was always the wolf and the chicken, running with me, and inspiring me to be a better version of myself.
I’ve spent my entire life with dogs coming in and out of my pack, and Teegan has been the one that’s led me through most of my big adulting life transitions. She traveled with me ⅓ of my spins around the sun. She protected my house from unwanted package deliveries, and intruders alike. She let me know who she liked and didn’t like whether they were approaching the house, or if they were friends or lovers coming in or out of my life. When we were out on a run, she was always surveying our path, and had a side eye and a fierceness when she needed to be. I can think of a couple trail runs where I’m pretty sure she turned someone away that might have otherwise wanted to start something with me. She had a fierce energy in a soft floppy eared body.
Teegan was my vegetarian bred for hunting wild boar that would have always picked a kale bone to a dog bone. When I was cooking kale or preparing a salad, I noticed Teegan drooling one time, and learned that she preferred the stem of kale to many other potential food choices. Before Mika got sick, I had wanted to do create a video test. I would lay out a couple fresh cut butcher bones and a small stack of kale bones in two piles and film Mika and Teegan going to their chosen prize. Mika would have gone for the bones everytime. I’m certain Teegan would have always gone for the kale bones. As a catahoula, she was bred to hunt some of the most ferocious animals and protect her pack. In her heart, she was a vegetarian, and a pacifist. And a lover. I spent many lunches or evenings making a salad, and she was the one to drool for the end of the kale. I always saved that, and the crust of pizza (pizza bones) for her. Waitresses would look at me askew as I shuffled scraps into a napkin. They ask if I wanted a bag, and I’d insist no, I was just taking a treat for my kids.
If I handed Teegan a bone, she looked at me with a bit of confusion. Was this a trick? A bone for me to throw for her to retrieve like a ball? I imagined her telling me that no civilized animal would demean themselves by taking an animal they hadn’t taken down. Surely she wasn’t going to just be given a raw bone to gnaw on like an uncivilized wild animal. She had decorum after all.
She may have been of wolf lineage at some point, but her chosen pack was her human and household pack, and we had a great life full of many adventures together. From the start, she somehow called to me from Utah. I somehow landed on her picture in a rescue near Salt Lake City. I had a road trip with an ex who agreed we had to have her. Teegan nosed her way into the curl of my arm in her first nights with us, and as that relationship ended, she made it clear she chose me (much to my ex’s chagrin at the time).
Everyone that met her loved her. They might have gotten swayed by her good looks, but a few lucky souls got to peer into that deep soul and get enveloped by her howl and love.
This isn’t a story simply about the good stuff though. There was blood in the years I had her. I can look back on how I showed up as her protector and guardian, and I learned some hard lessons along the way. I know she wouldn’t want me to dwell on that, however.
Some people have heard me have conversations with her. I have a voice for her (as I have for all of my dogs), and I carry on conversations with her with myself, and sometimes others. My current love and I do this with all of our dogs, and Teegan has had a lot to say over the past few months. I know she’s happy that I’m happy. Perhaps there’s one part of her heart journey that knows that my heart is happy, and that part of her her work is done. Laryngeal paralysis robbed me of her howl months ago, but I’m pretty sure she’d howl at me now to rise to do what needs to be done in every facet of my life. She never stopped smiling. I’d smile at her, and she’d curl her lips in an unmistakable smile back at me.
She came to me when shows like Lost spoke of a constant. She has been my constant for almost a third of my life. As I transitioned, jobs, loves, as I went in and out of my marathon and ironman training, she was there with unconditional love and unwavering support whether we sat on the couch recovering from an injury or heartache, or whether we were simply hanging after we had exhausted ourselves on a long play run. She followed me in the yard as I completed projects, and I can’t imagine life without her presence, yet. I know today is the last day I’ll get to have her sweet head on my lap. She will be constant, and an anchor in my heart for the rest of my days. Go in peace my girl. See you on the other side, eventually. I know we’ll never be that far apart. Thank you for choosing me. It’s been an honor to be a part of your pack.
The next time you see me, ask me to share her voice. She always has a nugget of wisdom or humor to impart.
