This is Zorka’s story. As he was a dog it can’t be told except by me. But Zorka’s life happened like this as close to true as I can tell. It still makes me wonder about our creature natures, what we pretend to know so much about.
Zorka was the most unusual animal I ever had contact with. I’m a dog man, meaning what others would call a breeder and trainer, and mostly of greyhounds. As such I’ve laid hands on a few thousand dogs through my life. Yet none to compare to him.
Zorka was a Borzoi, meaning what others would likely call a Russian wolfhound. To me he was blueblood ‘Borzoi,’ with all the connotations that rings in — nobility, great size, and too the grace and wonder of the greatest ballet dancers of all time.
Zorka never barked–excepting the one time I’ll tell you about. He never whimpered or growled in our hearing. Neither did he made sounds when he moved. His big form maneuvering through whatever surrounded it as smooth as the silk of his curls through your fingertips — as smooth coming and going as the dawn’s early light.
My wife named him. She said that in Russian ‘zorka’ meant the dawn. Not sure about that but I never wanted to check it — the sound fitted him, the meaning to us was exactly a match, still is in memory.
We bought Zorka for what seemed a small fortune to us when he was about six months old. He was already mid-thigh high first time I saw him.
We found him at the ‘Fat Man’s.’ My wife’s snide name for an old lawyer in Madison, Florida. He was fat, but I never thought he might be as bad as most lawyers, even though he was rich and acted like he owned all of Madison County — maybe he did.
The classified news said the Fat Man had a Borzoi for sale, rare as a snowstorm in Florida. So I phoned him up. We were in luck, he claimed, as he was retiring and moving to Scottsdale (for his ‘Fat’ my wife sneered).
Out back of his small mansion in Madison, under the live oaks and Spanish moss, indeed he had a very nice dog compound, first class to any dog man. And in the compound were some half dozen grown Borzoi, lolling about in their splendor. Quite a sight.
Fat Man claimed he was moving them all to Phoenix, except for the young one there. He’d be willing to sell that one.
To be truthful, Zorka as a puppy was not very appealing –too stately I suppose.
First he made his pitch. He explained how this lone big short haired pup didn’t fit his longer haired Borzoi line. For good reason, the pup was a true rarity being of the famed line of Borzoi bred exclusively for aristocrats.
This, the lawyer exclaimed with a courtroom finger pointing, this somewhat gangly pup, in other words, was directly descended from the Czar’s own Borzoi. He told us how most of those dogs were shot at the time of the revolution. How only a few were smuggled out of Russia.
Before giving us the price, the Fat Man eyed my wife carefully — figuring her as the smart one of us –and said he’d bought the dog as an investment from a firm in Atlanta . . . didn’t know anything more about its history, except the tattoo in the ear was exactly right. He peeled back one of the pup’s ears to show us, a small tattooing in blue ink of letters and numbers.
However, said the Fat Man, immediately afterwards he’d gotten bad news; doctor’s orders to retire, get the hell out of the humid rot of north Florida swamps.
So the dog was a good deal, we were told. A great deal he was too. My wife negotiated the Fat Man down, just enough so we could afford to buy Zorka.
I’ll explain that she may have done the wanting — she’d had photos of Borzoi about her for weeks before we saw the sale notice. She may have done the buying, and the grooming, and I know she loved that dog. But Zorka did not belong to anyone, not to her or me — although he and I had a connection hard to explain. It’s that connection that keeps his story turning in my head.
Zorka passed out of puppyhood on the Florida greyhound farm we were managing at the time. Some 400 greyhounds on that land.
He was about a year old I’d guess when we made the step up to renting our own place, a small dog farm we’d found out West in Colorado. The farm was about half way between the Springs and Pueblo, on the high plains but only a few miles off from where the Rockies reared up high. Most scenic place I ever lived in, worst weather too.
We moved 15 of our own greyhounds there plus Zorka by kennel trailer, hauling them behind a rental truck all that 1500 miles or so. Quite a crossing although nothing like what we’d come to face later. Like lots of Americans you could say we were born-again nomads.
One greyhound I recall died on the way and we buried her in a roadside park. Zorka did fine, though, and he thrived on that Colorado plain.
He came to bloom there in all his glory, and it occurs to me that maybe it was so because that land was most like what his ancestors had known before him. Whatever the cause, he was suddenly the Zorka we would know for the next few years.
Grown, Zorka was about the same height as our kitchen table. From rear to his nose there was more than three feet of him in length.
In case you’ve never seen one, Zorka was a perfect Borzoi as to body lines — full chested, but very lean, with dainty loins under a long gracefully sloping back. His tail was a rich plume.
His coat of soft curls is damn hard to describe, closest I can get is calling it a fine, steel – blue white. It could subtly change in the light and as he moved.
He had this classic sleek head, with a long delicately pointed black snout. His small ears were back close to his head.
His eyes were most extraordinary, large olive-shaped eyes, dark with gold tints in them. Framed in fine darker lines it looked like someone had put mascara on his eyes at birth to make them even more dramatic.
But aside from his body’s beauty, his legs were what I admired, dog man that I am. So strangely long and delicate to support such a tall, long animal; so much hidden power in them to give him the amazing speed he could attain. ‘Borzoi’ – it comes I hear from an old word in Russian for speed.
My description of Zorka is a still life, just a dead photo to me. What you need to know is what animated this creature. That and not his beauty is the story of Zorka, and too what makes him unique to me among the beings, dogs and men, that have surrounded me. Of course, that’s also the hardest thing of all to tell about a living thing.
There was nothing typical about Zorka. Think about the different things most dogs do–wag their tails, frolic when they see you, lick you, lick their balls, hide if you’re mad, squint sideways if they’ve been bad or feel embarrassed. Zorka did none of this.
He didn’t even shit in front of us. Not only did he never bark, he never once got caught trying to hump one of the loose bitches that we might have about.
His composure and expression were always the same. Could you call a dog arrogant? Zorka was not, for sure, even if he may have looked it to some. He was just different, and assured of that; very calm about his power.
This dog lived most of his life alone. He was loose all his grown life, keeping to his solitary way on our various dog farms in different parts of the country.
Usually he came to the house to be with us in the evenings, yet even then staying clear of the kids, visitors, the cats and other dogs we’d have about. He never gave them his attention, good or bad, it was like they didn’t exist to him. If annoyed by anyone, or thing, he simply took his leave.
When a time of peace fell about the place on those evenings when he stayed about, then he’d come up to me and my wife, each in turn, just standing by us, leaning slightly against one of our legs when we’d be seated. Presently he’d lay his snout in our laps and look us straight in the eye.
That was his moment of affection, and too when he expected to be groomed. My wife did the brush work on him, gently clearing the weed snares or clots of mud out of his curls.
With me it was just my hand on his head, or idly stroking his back.
This contact was never for very long, but it remains intense in my mind. The flow of feeling between me and that dog was just about as heavy as what I’ve had with human kind.
Daytimes he mostly spent out of sight. Sometimes you’d see him off yonder moving alone around the perimeter of the farm.
Zorka never simply walked, he always made a stately slow-jogging gait when near us. Leaving, he’d go trotting away into his aloneness with perhaps one pause to look back at us. Only off in the distance could you catch sight of him loping along.
But running free over an open field is how I most often think of him. Pure free spirit and beauty in motion. He was fast too, even if not as fast as the greyhounds. He had more endurance, though, so we used him in coursing as a back up dog when the greyhounds were off chasing hares. The greyhounds left him alone too, even if they might fight to the death with one another.
Those couple of years in Colorado, sometimes he’d be gone for days, and we’d fret that he was dead somewhere out there in all those empty miles around us. When he came back to the house after these mysterious outings he’d be a mess.
Gentle as my wife was with any living thing, she did have a temper and laboring an hour or so to work the burrs out of Zorka’s coat after three days off on his own was not to her liking. It made her yank that brush in punishment. My wife would curse as he stoically stood for the grooming that must have hurt him.
A few times Zorka came back ruffed up, a chewed ear, a slash on his side. I’d doctor him in the kennel, and as soon as done off he’d be trotting his own way again.
Once I tried following him. I knew he knew I was after him. Zorka kept to his usual trot, giving me his characteristic glance back, as if to say ‘come along.’
He’d found a small culvert under the Interstate about a mile from the house. Slouching through and he went off free to the other side, open range there with not a fence in a hundred miles. I waited a moment to watch. Sure enough before long a silver ghost spirit went streaking across that up tilting plate of virgin earth.
After that we called it Zorka’s playground.
Zorka was more than three years old when we took him to the farm we leased near Abilene, Kansas. The small farm operation in Colorado had been OK but we were ambitious and Abilene at that time was the capitol of American greyhound business. There were about 30 greyhound farms surrounding the town and buyers came in from everywhere.
That move was easier as we sold most of our dogs to get the lease. We just moved our main studs and bitches, plus Zorka. It was a 600 mile trip. He’d been moving about the country for sure.
Zorka abided his time in Kansas. He had lots of land to roam, but too many fences in the way. Although it was empty enough, and green, with big rich farms looking more like old-time America then even Americans remember it to be. But perhaps when hunting there he’d not so many exciting enemies to find and fight. In Russia the Borzoi were often used for not only bringing down stags but bears too.
In those times he came more often in the evenings to be with us. Sometimes there he seemed not just alone, but lonesome. We talked about it, but buying another Borzoi was not in the budget and for that matter we’d likely never find a Borzoi bitch with his pedigree, if what the Fat Man said was true. Who knew what we’d get from crossing him with another kind of Borzoi or what value there’d be in any pups that might result.
So Zorka for all to guess remained in lordly, if somewhat sad, celibacy.
We’d been in Kansas another three years — I keep giving the time going by because for dogs, with shorter lives than men, each year means more and so I try a careful accounting for Zorka– when two important things happened in my life at the same time.
First, my wife and I had been saving all we could, our dogs were running well at the race tracks, and then we caught the interest of an East Coast investor. All in all we could go shopping for a real dandy dog farm.
The second of things was that about the same time we started planning how to find ourselves a real dog farm of our own I saw Zorka slowing down.
He wasn’t off afar so often loping the fences. He was trotting around the yard more. After a while I noticed him sort of trembling when he came back up to the house.
Then he stopped running.
I knew the signs well enough. I’ve seen hundreds of dogs dying.
But then suddenly we also found our farm, about 125 acres of well fenced land outside Prattville, Alabama. Best of all the seller was a dog man too and was selling out at 72 years.
Buying this Alabama farm, swept us off into what would be the biggest move of our lives. There we were in the middle of the continent with 170 valuable greyhounds in stock, plus all the gear and equipment to run a dog farm, and too the house furniture and such — we had some 900 miles and more to get it all down to Alabama.
I took Zorka to the veterinary hospital at Kansas State University, one of the best there is. They kept him for a couple of days. Never saw vets look with such attention at a dog as those did at Zorka, even sick he made professionals stare.
Leukemia was the assured verdict. They even had me look through a microscope to see it in his blood sample. No medications of any use, no surgery. Life expectancy a few weeks, stretching to a month with luck and most tender loving care.
They wanted to put Zorka ‘down’ there and then at the hospital, but I wouldn’t let them. I drove him back in the kennel truck thinking all the way how to tell my wife, and too about how I was ever going to be able to give Zorka the goodbye shot of phenobarbital.
I recall driving into the farm lane at dusk that day, the sundown one of those extravaganzas you can have in Kansas. Seeing the house a flaming flamingo in the glow, with lights on, everything nice and welcoming.
My wife cried herself to sleep.
Buying the farm took the capital we had so this would be a crudest of possible self-moves. I had two kennel trailers, two trucks. To do it I planned on a dual phase move down–go first with my older boy hauling the stud dogs and older brood stock as they’re sturdy, then leave them with my boy on the Alabama farm and hire a local man to come back up with me for a second trip.
That would be with me driving one truck pulling a full trailer of dogs; my wife driving the other truck and hauling another full kennel rig. The Alabama fellow would drive yet a third vehicle to come along, a small rented van holding the rest of our belongings.
Zorka was pushed into the back of my thinking. Probably I delved so intently into the planning of that move partly to delay coping with him.
It was then that Zorka took to following me wherever I went. For days he stolidly tracked me as I went about my work, watching me as I began to pack things up.
No matter what detail of the move might be confronting me as I strode about the farm, I’d catch the soft rustle and uneven toe pad plopping as he struggled along after me.
When standing still doing something or other in the barn or kennel, Zorka would come up close and stare at me with those fabulous big solemn eyes. He had something to say, even if I wasn’t in the mood to listen.
By the day he grew weaker, yet even as we were packing up the kennel gear he was struggling to wobble along with me. The language was clear. Don’t leave me.
My wife was about to crack over it. Finally one night she did, starting very emotional and finally saying she couldn’t take the sight of Zorka dragging himself after me another day. She begged me to put him down that night.
I went outside in the full moonlight to get the syringe from its box in the kennel, what I never wanted to think about in my dog man work. Month of August in Kansas. Heat still in the air and the engine throb of locusts all about in the trees.
Zorka fell trying to keep after me as I walked. He went softly like a puff of dust in that dark empty farmyard, halfway to the kennel door. He didn’t get up.
I went back to him. He was a gleaming silvery shrine in that moonlit scene. Zorka lay flanks heaving on the worn pathway, still struggling to lift his head and shoulders to crawl to me.
Stooping down close I saw his eyes were cloudy, nose dry as that scorched prairie soil. I lay both hands over his eyes hoping to close them for good, feeling the warmth in him; high fever I figured. Zorka was panting, tongue lolling. When I took my hands off his eyes they were set steady on me, eye to eye, dog to man. Zorka to me.
I talked to him about it, “Now you sure of what you want? You sure you want to come? It’s a long mean trip this time. You won’t make it. You’ll die bad. . . Now you are sure?” Zorka didn’t need language to reply.
He’d lost enough weight by then that it wasn’t so bad picking him up in my arms, he was probably down to less than 100 pounds. Nevertheless it had to be a quick trip to manage the weight. I decided to hide him under the nearest kennel trailer.
I left him there in the pitch dark shadow of the trailer, under the rear axle. Gave him a pan of water, plus a long last pat. I knew he’d be gone in the morning.
That morning was moving out time. Sort of ‘wagons ho’ as the three rigs were finally ready–the greyhound bitches and puppies in one trailer screaming their heads off, the older pups in the other trailer answering back.
The best we could do for ourselves was to tie our bed mattresses on top of the kennel trailers–when done made me think of “The Grapes of Wrath”.
An evil thought did occur to me then in the middle of the chaos, to just give the sign and roll on out. Couldn’t do that. One betrayal leads to another. In the end I forced myself to go back and look at Zorka.
He was a sorry sight, lying on his side in the shade of the kennel trailer, old-truck exhaust idling in the air. Bright light on him now–no more moonlight sonata. Alive, yes, but he could barely breathe and had that smell of sickness and pain all living things give off as their living comes to its end.
“Where’d you bury Zorka?” my wife yelled from the back porch just as we were ready to pull out. “I want to put my potted fern on his grave. It won’t be making it to Alabama, either.”
I recall this because just then I was slamming shut the door on the last empty hold I’d had left in the trailer I was driving. Slamming it closed on Zorka who I’d hauled into it with some loose straw for bedding.
By then his eyes looked too iced over to have much sight in them. Nonetheless he was still heaving air. That was enough. It seemed to me we’d made a bargain the night before. Seemed I had to fulfill my part of the agreement no matter what.
My wife didn’t say a word when I told her where Zorka was. She just put the potted fern down in the now empty kitchen and slammed the door locked behind her. That last empty hold had been reserved for the house pets, a couple of cats, my wife’s Maltese, a stray mutt we kept — now these road instead with us in the cabs of the trucks.
It wasn’t a merry sing-along ride from Kansas to Alabama. Hauling valuable dogs you can’t stop at a motel, can’t do anything but keep going. Due to the load we couldn’t go more than about 50 miles an hour. Had to stop twice to unload the mattresses from the trailers so we could get under train crossings. Too slow for the interstates so had to crawl through the cities. With brood bitches near their time we kept stopping to cool them down with ice — ask was that a hot-August year? Yes sir.
In my mind now it’s a blur journey of interminable ugly truck routes through uninteresting towns, then long long empty stretches with slow changing scenery. Scenery that’s surely worth seeing if I could have had taken a glance to admire it.
The numerous stops were agonies because we needed to leash and walk all the dogs in groups of three or four, greyhounds in running shape can’t lie idle too long or they can cramp up. We had to keep changing the straw beds and water. I just hoped we’d never find a dead pup in the straw, each one being of potential grace to our financial future.
How many cups of stale coffee, how many sickly sweet doughnuts in all those look-alike stop-n-go convenience gas stations? Surely I can attest, driving across this country through the night it is its own nightmare.
Even with the noise and fury of those constant stoppings I could have checked on Zorka a dozen times during that long brutal voyage. I didn’t.
I can claim it was due to stress, and true I was about as close to physical collapse as I’ve ever been. My business, my earthly goods, my family — all I had was riding those hundreds of miles on old tires.
Just outside Memphis in a truck stop where we paused at around midnight, I did at last decide that as I knew he was dead it’d be best to dispose of the body there rather than haul a heavy, even a once-beloved carcass, any further.
When the kennel trailer door opened I saw in that concentration-camp light of the truck stop what I didn’t want to — Zorka lingering on. Barely now, wheezing in the straw.
“Ok,” I thought, “Bargain is a bargain. It’ll be over for you soon enough, my friend.” By the time we got to the new place he’d be a sad memory, an unpleasant cloud over our fresh start–but I tell you truly I felt helpless to do anything other than giving him his final ride down through the dead hours of Dixie.
“I know he’s still alive, don’t you think this is enough cruelty? Give him a shot now, please, for me.” That was what my wife said to me as I turned from closing the trailer hatch on Zorka for the last time. She was standing up close like women do when they’re feeling close to you. She wasn’t nagging or getting emotional.
“It’s an agreement I made with him,” I thought she’d laugh at that, a woman’s mean laugh. No, she just said “OK, then let’s just get there. I’m about ready to be put down myself.”
So I didn’t go back to Zorka’s hatch door again, although we had to stop twice crossing Mississippi and once more in far western Alabama.
To be truthful, Zorka being assuredly dead meat in the trailer behind me–this beyond any doubt in my long dog man’s experience– I blanked him out of mind for good. Dog business is real business and you have to keep it straight in your head, not your heart.
In the heat and rumble of that horrible late-night scrambling to get a hell trip over with Zorka was not even a sorrow, anymore. Just another problem. All I could do was keep my weary eyes on the glare of white strips slipping by on hot asphalt.
It was early morning, still dark although a thin glow began creeping toward us in the tree branches and over the tops of the kudzu as we went along. At last we passed a telltale curve and I felt a pang of joy. Can’t call it anything else. Then came that one signboard I’d been hoping to see for hours past, a full 42-hours of constant travel since leaving Abilene.
Soon our small convoy of trucks, people, dogs and cats, our rattle-bang of worthless belongings, a load of suffering and need rumbled across a cow grating and onto our land. For the first time ever, altogether, our very own new land.
We’d made it. My older boy was out there without his shirt, all sleepy and tousled, holding a flashlight beam on us for welcome, gate wide open and beginning to wake up enough to grin proudly..
I was just about to celebrate with a honk of the truck horn, leaning over to give a whoop out the open window into our dawn’s early light. That was when we heard it.
In one moment of silence from anything else. It was a lone dog ‘woof.’
One woof. Clear enough.
“Oh my God, that’s Zorka!” yelled my wife from the next truck.
I was out of the cab and back to his door as fast as my stiff legs would do. Door open, flashlight beam on the hold, there he was.
Somehow he was managing to partly sag upright, nose up sniffing the air. Zorka, filthy and with straw dangling from his snout, gave me his look, eyes brighter than before.
Hard saying, hard believing, but there was something like a spark in him. Like maybe he knew he had just beat me to honking a horn of victory.
And that was indeed the first and last time he ever barked.
Zorka began to get better it seemed by the day after we arrived. We hovered over him as best our time would allow, getting setup and all. To be honest I didn’t trust the change, figuring it for a treacherous fluke of nature.
But only a few weeks on the new farm and I looked out one morning early to see him walking slowly towards the kennel building.
Soon after, Zorka regained much of his usual self, thinner but almost as handsome as before. In that recovering he seemed to acquire a more home side nature. He obviously enjoyed being on the farm, staying on it and not roaming. I just keep doubting how long it could last.
One day I caught sight of him running again. Running? Not to be possible. My heart just about broke at the sight. That’s the closest I can come to tears in this story.
About three months or so after we moved onto our farm in Alabama, the old dog man who’d owned the place finally came by to welcome us to the area. Turned out to be something of a local aristocrat, in the southern sense at least. An educated old fellow, well mannered, soft spoken. Drove an old Continental.
“He sure never lived on this place,” hissed my wife in the way she had when feeling uncertain about someone.
We were drinking cold Dr. Pepper on the back porch that late afternoon, admiring the sight of the lordly pecan trees that shaded the scene– this old man who’d sold us the place, me, my wife and the kids –when Zorka came trotting around the corner of the house.
The old man dropped his glass; it broke, splattering half of the Dr. Pepper onto his linen trousers. Parkinson’s?
“That Borzoi, sir, he’s yours?” choked out the man, staring at Zorka hard and sure.
‘Yes sir, he’s mine.” I said, admittedly with some pride, although I knew it wasn’t mine to show. “Bought him years ago in Florida. He’s lived all over this country. He’s gone from Florida to Colorado to Kansas and now down here.”
Zorka came up onto the porch, sidling away from anyone else, heading for me. He glowed in that soft southern light as startling as the broken glass on the porch floor, so finely featured and formed, as if himself cut out of steel-blue white glass.
He came to lean against my leg, poking his nose sideways across my thigh.
“Well sir, you should know something then . . .” Went on the old fellow.
Dr. Pepper dripping, wife gaping, me and Zorka stayed locked eye to eye on that porch.
“I had Borzoi on this place, just over yonder where that roughed up rectangle of grass is. That’s where the original kennel house stood before we had the fire.
“I had here a wolf breed of Borzoi directly descended from the Imperial Perchina kennel in Russia. The Grand Duke Nicholas himself was the owner of those dog’s ancestors.
“They were some of the rarest dogs in the world I’ll have you know . . . This Borzoi of yours looks a lot like them.“
Old man pausing suddenly, stopping to rest in an old man’s way. and then to lighting up a HavaTampa. He cleared his throat and went on in a softer tone.
“The bitch, Zita, she had a litter and when there were say about 4 months old, not more, someone torched the kennel, some hateful bastard. Murdering helpless dogs. Me, I lost a good quarter million bucks in greyhounds that night, but I also lost my prized Borzoi dame and sire, the litter too. They were more to me than money. Sort of like the murdering of the Romanoffs all over again.
“I thought all the dogs died in that fire. But now I have to wonder, maybe, just maybe someone got at least one out? If so I hope they they did well by him.”
He took a moment’s rest, tapping his cigar ash considerately to the other side of the porch rail. Whiff of cigar smoke, flowery sweetness of spilled Dr. Pepper, I remember now these exotic scents in that charge atmosphere.
“Kindly allow me to see his tattoo…”
In peering down at Zorka’s ear, the old gentleman, I think, realized something even more unusual than his story was waiting to be told — perhaps guessing too from the mouth-open looks my wife and I were exchanging.
Southern folk love to hear stories. For sure, he was about to be the first to hear this one.
“Look here for yourself, sir, it’s all true.” The soft drawl was even softer.
“The tattoo is proof. . . Here’s the exact place on Mother Earth where this dog was born! You understand me, sir? This Borzoi has come home.”
Zorka lived well on our Alabama farm for another five years. He died there quietly in his sleep.