My Lucky Dog

by Mellon Tytell

William Morrow, 96 pages, $19.95

Available on Amazon.com

There are few more eloquent testimonials to how profoundly an adopted mutt can change a person than this exquisite book of photographs. The lucky dog of the title is an 86-pound mixed-breed named Hunter, who might have ended up an animal shelter statistic if the author hadn't seen his picture in the window of a Vermont store.  

That picture changed Mellon Tytell's life. Before Hunter, she had photographed many intriguing people and places all over the globe. After adopting him, all that changed; she couldn't bear to leave him behind. So to that original picture of Hunter she added thousands of her own, chronicling what appears to be his every move. We see Hunter racing through the snow... riding in the car... carrying a big stick... playing with his best friend, a Beagle... reclining on a Persian carpet... jumping high in the air... gamely wearing a blonde wig ... gazing pensively into the distance, his aristocratic snout held high. Reflected in his golden eye we see Tytell and a sunlit window. "To me," she writes, "Hunter was more fascinating than a Pollock or a Picasso."  

In his eleventh year, Hunter was unable to walk the two flights of stairs to Tytell's apartment, so she gave up her busy Manhattan life and moved with her dog to Vermont, where acupuncture treatments enabled him to join his mistress on hikes through the countryside he loved.  

As beautiful as Tytell's images are, her writing is equally strong. "I knew that Hunter would leave me for any man who walked into the room," is her remark on a photograph of Hunter keeping her husband company in the bathroom. On the following page is a shot of Hunter yawning wide, which she wryly captions, "But I was madly in love with him."  

"His fur smelled of pine trees and wild roses," Tytell muses - and many of the most powerful statements in her book are juxtapositions of extreme closeups on that brindle fur with landscape shots.  

This book would be wonderful enough if it were just about a dog. But more than that, it's about the unstoppable passage of time, and what that does to us all. Tytell's tribute to her best friend is a good reminder that facing hard truths can be its own art form, and a beautiful one at that.

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