A good police dog has not only a large vocabulary but also extraordinary social skills. He understands many forms of human culture and has his being within them. He can be taken to the scene of a liquor-store robbery and asked to search, with the handler trusting that he won’t molest the customers or other police officers or the clerk behind the counter. He knows what belongs and what doesn’t, sharing our community and our xenophobia as well. He can take down a criminal who is attacking his handler on Monday and on Tuesday play with the patients at the children’s hospital. These dogs, then, are glorious, but for anyone familiar with working dogs they are not surprising, any more than your pet dog is surprising in his or her ability to distinguish between your friends and strangers.

But someone might say that a dog’s courtesy with guests is surprising, or that it ought at least to be remarked on that such profound connections between two species can happen at all. (It should be surprising, perhaps, that we can talk, and, of course, some philosophers have been surprised.)

Consider, for example, what happens when you train a wolf, or what happens at least when I train a wolf. The wolf, or coyote, may sit, heel, stay, come when called and so forth. But a wolf doesn’t respect our language, and his behavior can be accounted for pretty well with a stimulus-response model, from our point of view if not from the wolf’s. The wolf may also become fond of me in some fashion or another, but I can’t use him as a guard dog. Not only will he not distinguish particularly between family, criminals and guests, he will not have the courage of a good dog, the courage that springs from the dog’s commitments to the forms and significance of our domestic virtues. The wolf’s xenophobia remains his own. With other wolves he may, of course, be respectful, noble, courageous and courteous. The wolf has wolfish social skills, but he has no human social skills, which is why we say that a wolf is a wild animal. And since human beings have for all practical purposes no wolfish social skills, the wolf regards the human being as a wild animal, and the wolf is correct. He doesn’t trust us, with perfectly good reason.

From Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, by Vicki Hearne. (And I’m reminded somewhat of Wes Anderson’s take on The Fantastic Mr. Fox.)

From Seward we went on a Kenai Fjords tour from Resurrection Bay to Fox Island for a salmon lunch, then into the open ocean of the Gulf of Alaska.  Despite the medication, I was pretty green once we hit the ocean swells, but I did manage to keep all the salmon in me.  We saw humpbacks and porpoise, and all manner of sea bird.  Around Anchorage we’ve seen dall sheep (not mountain goats, which I misleadingly tweeted), bald eagles, and moose several times each.  One moose gave us quite a scare, standing in the bushes right at the side of the road where we didn’t see him until I could have put my arm out the passenger side window and touched him (I did not).  At the end of a week the only thing I still hadn’t seen was bears, until sitting at the kitchen table tappety-tapping away at the laptop I see two smallish black bears ten feet away out the window.  I grabbed for my phone to get a picture but by then they were barely visible in the bushes, and then gone.

Some photos are already on flickr, and others will be soon.  We’re leaving tomorrow, for Seattle briefly and then back to Santa Fe for a few days before California.  I hope to be settled in New Mexico before August.

Ando H. sent me an email, pertaining to the linguistic observation from the Wire:

In honor of my move to New Orleans, I’ve been re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces, and came across a passage that reminded me of your Wire post.  One of the Levy Pants workers in Ignatius’ Crusade for Moorish Dignity says to Ignatius:

“You a bad man.  I believe a police be looking for you.”

So the a police construction was floating around in 1960′s New Orleans, too.  If they were to make another Wire season, it should center around a character like Ignatius J. Reilly.

I left off in the middle of the second season, and it adds to my overall excitement about returning to Santa Fe that I will be able to pick it up again.