I started to write a book about Mu with the idea that, what if I was reincarnated as Mu, as a dog, some thousand years in the future and also if Mu came back as a human and just happened to be that I was his dog and he was my human. Of course I don’t believe in reincarnation, but it was just a way of expressing that I wish I could tell Mu how much I love him and how beautiful and brilliant I think he is.
Since starting the book, my thinking has evolved. For quite some time, I have had the idea that a human is an ecosystem. In language, and in law and culture, we are conditioned to think of I, Me, Mine. While this is great for rules and responsibilities, it doesn’t reflect the realities of how nature and evolution work. I didn’t will myself into existence. The “self-made” billionaire usually got rich exploiting a lapse in current laws, making truckloads of money before legislation caught up to make it illegal. Also, this self-made billionaire didn’t invent his own language, he didn’t print his own money, and he didn’t magically produce his own army of mindless consumers to buy his products. Looking at a human from the perspective of the biosphere, Homo sapiens are a plague on the planet, a virus, a cancer. The world would collapse without bees, but the planet would be healthier without humans. I have a forest full of trees providing oxygen for me. I exist on a molten rock with a thin crust and a thin vapor of gases just right for me to exist. I live in a space that is infinitesimally small in the universe, and I would be dead anywhere else except in this fragile film of the biosphere. My existence is entirely dependent on distant stars exploding, billions of years ago, and being incorporated into the earth as it coalesced from the cloud that became our solar system. I would be dead if Earth was just a little closer to the sun or a little farther. I would never have come into existence if the object that became the moon hit the earth just a little harder or if it missed completely. If the mass that became the moon was twice as large or half as big, life never evolves in the tidepools driven by the rotation of the earth and the moon’s influence. My existence relies entirely on a strange chain of evolution from microbes to fish to rodents. I would not exist if the the Chicxulub meteor didn’t strike the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and clearing a niche for humans to evolve into. My body has more cells in it with non-human DNA than it has cells with my DNA. I am part of a large, intricate web of nature, history, genetics, evolution, culture, random chance, and inter species relationships we haven’t even begun to understand.
The same applies to dogs, but dogs have a much larger role in our current form of existence. Dogs invented humans. I can type on a QWERTY keyboard and post cute pictures of dogs on the internet because our association with dogs gave humans the capacity to earn a living with less of our time and devote our spare time to learning, language, science, culture, exploration, and, unfortunately, domination. Everything a human can do today was made possible by association with a wolf. If we never became friends with wolves, humans would still be primates swinging from trees and digging termites out of rotten logs. How this relates to my book about Mu is that I no longer need to rely on the thought experiment of Mu becoming a human and me becoming his dog in a future life. A man is not a man, and a dog is not a dog; we are a human-dog hybrid, an ecosystem. Human history is dog history. Dogs can and should remain innocent, free of the restrictions and artifices of language. A dog experiences the world on his own terms, a world of scent and actions, and we can experience the world through the dog’s eyes by observation and recognition. The dogs retain wildness for us, and we give the dogs history, beauty, language and art. The dog doesn’t need to read the book because the human reads it for him. I never really thought that I would be reincarnated as Mu’s dog, but I wished it would be true. Now, I don’t wish for that. I want dogs to be dogs, and humans to be humans, as part of the dog-human ecosystem.

Tino and I searched for Widget near Dearborn and I-5. Widget is about 11 pounds. He is a rescue, a bit nervous usually. He escaped from an apartment near Broadway and Jefferson when someone came in the entry unexpectedly. Widget was seen near the Goodwill store at Rainier and Dearborn. Tino started on the scent trail there, and followed it to the freeway. If Widget crossed I-5 during rush hour traffic, the cars would have been going very slow. We tried to get access to the property across the freeway, but it was all City of Seattle public services, parking, police, DOT, etc. Ironically, this publicly owned property is not open to the public, so they wouldn’t let us in to search. Later on, after dark, there was a sighting of Widget at Jefferson and 14th, much closer to home. Tino started on the scent trail again, but it appeared Widget was going through and under fences where we couldn’t continue. We set a trap in the area.
While we were searching the first time, one of Widget’s owners came upon a homeless man in a tent under the freeway. He had overdosed, presumably on opiates. She called 911, probably saving his life. We saw several camps in that area near Dearborn and I-5, probably over 100 people living a marginal existence. Tino and I were excluded from searching on acres of land devoted to City of Seattle public services, and right next to that, more than 100 people lived in squalor, in thin tents, among needles and trash, not receiving any services. I don’t know what the answer is, but the system is not working. If any of those individuals was a dog, I could help. Because they were humans, I was powerless.

Mu searched for Stewart today in Bellevue. Stewart fell from the third floor balcony of an apartment while his family was out of the country. The pet sitter looked for him a little, but certainly not adequately. By the time Mu and I started the search, Stewart had been missing 6 days. There had been reports of him around the swimming pool, and, oddly, Stewart was known to be particularly attracted to chlorine. That’s the first time I’ve heard of that. Other cats had been seen around the complex. As we started the search, I could hear a Husky howling in one of the apartments. He had a beautiful voice, but I wondered if the other tenants appreciated his singing. As we searched around one of the pools, the husky sat on his deck with his head poked through the railing, silently watching us. I figured the Husky probably knew where Stewart was, if we could only ask him.


Mu and I searched around the complex for a couple of hours. Mu seemed attracted to the grounds of the church across the street. We searched over there, but he didn’t find any cats or any evidence. We tried to search the giant laurel hedge in the cemetery behind the apartments, but we got kicked out fairly quickly because dogs aren’t allowed in that particular cemetery. As we were walking from the cemetery back to the apartments, Stewart’s owner notice the landscaping crew at the neighboring apartment complex, which reminded her that the landscapers would be coming to Stewart’s complex today. Now we were under pressure to hurry up and find Stewart before he was chased away by lawn mowers and leaf blowers.


As we searched around one of the pools, Mu sniffed at the base of the wall of one of the buildings, and he whined, indicating a cat. There was an access hatch to the crawl space, and it was pulled away from the building far enough that a gap was left, big enough for a cat. This gap was under a bump out in the apartment building wall, and also obscured by shrubs and ground covers, so no one could see that cats were getting into the crawl space. Mu’s nose revealed a hiding place no one knew about.


When I looked closer, I saw grey fur around the edge of the entrance to the crawl space, the color of Stewart’s fur. A gray cat had rubbed against the rough wood and left a little fur behind. When we lifted the hatch, we could see many spiders that appeared to be black widows. I have been bitten by spiders plenty of times, and I know they won’t kill me, but it’s still not my favorite thing. I mean, I actually like spiders, in general. I prefer not to have them on me, if I have a choice. Mu whined at the opening, so that meant I was going into the dark, smelly crawl space full of spiders. I took Mu back to the car, and then came back and slid through the narrow opening.


Down in the crawl space, it smelled of cat urine, which was actually a promising sign. I saw the skeletons of birds and small mammals, too old to be the work of Stewart. Other cats must have been going down there for quite a while. I felt spider webs on the back of my neck, and brushed them away. The crawl space had a series of walls dividing it into smaller spaces, so I couldn’t see all around under the entire apartment building. I thought I saw a shadow go by. It could have been the tail of a cat, or just the shadow of my flashlight as it passed behind a cable. I have been watching Stranger Things, so it also occurred to me that the fleeting shadow might be a Demogorgon. The owner’s fiancé came down into the crawl space and helped look. My flashlight started to die. I remembered several times on previous searches when Mu was able to pinpoint a cat in a crawl space by sniffing from the outside. Working from the outside was seeming like a really good idea. I climbed out and went and got Mu.


As we searched around the building, Mu picked up the scent of a cat at the northwest corner. I reported it to the owners. We worked our way around, and Mu picked up a strong scent at the south side of the building, in the middle of the wall. Mu whined louder, and he sniffed at the vent as if he was trying to inhale the cat through the mesh and pull him out. I reported the location to them, and the fiance in the crawl space looked to the south. There he saw Stewart, just hanging out, like it was the thing for a cat to do, loiter in a smelly crawl space with spiders and skeletons. Stewart’s person was delighted that he was found, of course. They were moving to California, and they were supposed to fly out tomorrow, so it had been especially urgent to find him today. She ran to get a carrier to put Stewart in.


Talking to the fiance in the crawl space, it seemed that Stewart wasn’t wanting to come to him. She was not too keen about getting into the crawl space where we had seen the black widows. I told her I would go down there, and I certainly understood if she couldn’t make herself go down in the dark with the spiders and bones, but if she could go down there, Stewart would be much more likely to come to her. She ran back to the apartment to get a sweatshirt with a hood, and then she slid through the gap, down into the crawl space. I watched from the opening, ready to block Stewart in if he tried to escape. She waited by one of the dividing walls in the middle, and she talked softly to Stewart. After about five minutes, he came up to her and rubbed against her. He let her pick him up. She wrapped him tightly in her arms and carried him to the opening. I held the cat carrier up to the opening, and she stuffed him in. Stewart was safe.


Stewart’s people were very happy with Mu’s nose. From the outside of the building, just looking at it, it appeared that all of the crawl space screens were intact, and there was no way under. Mu’s nose found the gap where cats had been getting in. They had placed several traps around the complex, but they hadn’t caught anything. They were up against a deadline for their moving date, and they had been trying to plan dates when they could fly back to Seattle to continue searching for Stewart. The search dog isn’t always the best way to find a lost cat, and it certainly isn’t the only way. In some cases, as with Stewart, a dog like Mu is definitely the right tool for the job. Mu slept soundly, snoring all the way home.