Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog


Posted on Jan 31, 2008
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

By Ted Kerasote

Harcourt, 398 pages, $25

Available on Amazon.com

Maybe the best thing of all is when a dog finds us, not when we go looking for a dog. Then it means you are truly meant for each other.

This is what happened to Ted Kerasote, an outdoor writer, when he was camping in Utah. A dog appeared to him--not a vision, but a real one, collarless, young, and red-gold in color. Kerasote looked at the hound mix and he replied, "You need a dog, and I'm it."

Truer words were never spoken, even if they were never spoken, and indeed this is one of the aims of this absorbing love story between a man and his dog: the author wants us to know that dogs have (as it were) their full humanity, too. They have their own interests, emotions, thoughts, and ultimately their own lives to live. So he puts words into Merle's mouth. There's little doubt that he hears correctly, too, at least most of the time; anyone who's ever lived with a dog knows this, that they have as full a range of desires as we do. If we listen, we will hear them speak.

The door alluded to in the title is the door to loving fully, which sometimes only a dog can fling open this wide. It also refers to the happy task of attempting to understand the species that has stood next to us for millennia.

This may be why a friend of mine, who finished reading "Merle's Door" just before I did, opined that it was a lovely book, but also a peculiarly male one. She meant that instead of losing himself entirely in the narrative of relationship, the author refocuses his lens, frequently pulling back to take in such subjects as canine history, biology, behavior, popularizing the work of experts from Nicholas Dodman to the Coppingers to Karen Pryor.

Kerasote and Merle had 13 years together, living in Kelly, Wyoming, a place where dogs can still have their full mobility, unlike most places in America, because of the lack of vehicular traffic. This is what has made prisoners of the human world out of most dogs, Kerasote thinks (along with his predecessor in exploring the essence of dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is also often quoted here), and he thinks it a shame. It is clear that dogs agree.

The reason Kerasote cares so much about all matters canine, though, is because he loves this one particular canine so much. It is that simple, and that deep. Together he and Merle climb mountains, hunt elk, fall in love with others but remain true to each other, and ski, after which they might also dance to bluegrass. It is a full and rich affair, and its end is heartbreaking, as all such ends must be.  

Anyone not in tears during the last chapter, which is also the last chapter of Merle's great life, has a heart of stone. Judging from the water marks on the pages of my copy, mine is fully melted now.
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