Angus : A Memoir

by Siebert, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780609604946
• ISBN10: 0609604945
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

"Can you stand, can you even imagine it anymore? Did you ever know it at all: full-fathom fearlessness and the feel of charging away from your own lit windows into the night, charging off on a scent, purely, and the urge that it stirs? Go. Go. And further, and on, with nothing holding you back, no worry, not a second, not even a first thought -- thought that leads to fear and fear to worries and these to clouded thoughts, like the fence-snagged sheep hair of atmosphere that drags tonight in a blue wind about the planet." A young dog named Angus lies wounded at the edge of a dark wood. In the distance he sees the lights of his owners' cabin. As he starts the long, valiant climb back to them, all the stirring sights, sounds, and scents of his brief but wildly episodic life begin to replay before him. Born on a farm in Devon called Pollard's Combe, where Charles Siebert and his wife arrive one stormy night to claim him, Angus soon finds himself being whisked off to a multi-sensory array of new destinations: from a small miner's cottage on the Cornish seacoast; to the lighted "room-stacks" of London; to the cargo hold of the "metal bird" that delivers him to Brooklyn; and, finally, to the wild woods of southern Canada, where Angus' irrepressible curiosity and zeal for new experience finally meet their match. WithAngus, Charles Siebert, author of the critically acclaimed memoirWickerby: An Urban Pastoral, has performed a singular act of literary ventriloquism -- the autobiography of a dog, a book that offers us a wry, poignant, ultimately redemptive view of life and death as perceived through the heightened senses of one very brave, winsome, unforgettable Jack Russell terrier. At once poetic, thoroughly canine, and unsentimental, Angus is a brilliant feat of the imagination that illuminates our often ambiguous relationship with our fellow creatures, while delivering us to a fuller understanding of the forces that make us all one.

Author Biography

Charles Siebert was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he currently resides. He is the author of the memoir <b>Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral</b>. His poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>, <i>Harper's</i>, <i>Outside</i>, and <i>Esquire</i>.

Excerpts

If I could lift myself and run again. If I could run here to the far wood's edge, where it has just happened, at night; run away from the very place I'll have to crawl back to now--and why? What is it, exactly, drawing me to those cabin lights?--lift myself and run here to the far wood's edge, directly beneath the bottom right corner star of the Big Dipper's ladle, where it all happened, I would.
        
"An--gus?" "An--gus?"

Cries. Theirs. Some deep. Some higher and thin. I heard them, not very long ago, but hazily, when it was already too late, when I had just awakened, I think, to find myself ruined like this, and numb, and the world so oddly pitched that I hadn't even begun to consider the long climb back out from among these trees through the side field under the Big Dipper toward the cabin lights where they, my owners, sit tonight.

It was already too late, and I so small and low, lying here among the trees behind the field of uncut grass, that they couldn't see me. Not the way they each came outside and looked, so tentative, into darkness, calling toward the woods, calling out across the night in my general direction but still standing so firmly behind whatever boundary it is that you have, and that never existed for me: darkness and the woods and their mind-mate, fear.

Can you stand, can you even imagine it anymore? Did you ever know it at all: full-fathom fearlessness and the feel of charging away from your own lit windows into the night, charging off on a scent, purely, and the urge that it stirs. Go. Go. And further, and on, with nothing holding you back, no worry, not a second, not even a first, thought--thought that leads to fear and fear to worries and these to clouded thoughts, like the fence-snagged sheep hair of atmosphere that drags tonight in a blue wind about the planet.

Peepers. I hear the peepers down at the back pond and crickets. I hear the maddening, mounting measures of mosquito drone mercifully erased now by the swooping bats. So many stars out, swimming, flowing, endlessly, through the Dipper's bottomless cup. Atoms, everywhere. I see, but I can't stop them. I'm coming apart. I'm little more now than the sum of those peepers, sounding.

How did I come to this? I've never been one to look back. I've never known regret. That's your province, isn't it, the mind-mate of expectation? Something I'm not saddled with beyond the immediate kind: you go out the door. I hunker down and wait, mangling some prized possession of yours to ease my loneliness.

You sit around all day and stare off blankly through windows. I wait for you to finally get past your brains' alien entanglements and take me out for a walk.

You hover interminably above kitchen counters, blabbing, on and on, while I wait for you to finally put down the food bowl.

But as for long-term imaginings, the ability to get worked up over a possible future that doesn't at all resemble any one day: an endless series of filled food bowls, and of the best walks I've ever known, and ongoing nights in which you never leave me--hope, in other words, I wasn't even aware such a thing existed until now. Until, lying here at the edge of my own absence, I'm suddenly able to imagine in their faces the look of the hopes I've dashed.

I can't say how it happened. All I remember is a scent, rising, above all others, growing stronger as I ran toward it and then hard and sharp: a scissor-flash of fangs and my body going with the stars and the distant cabin lights into a swirl that, all at once, stopped with me, hard, against the earth, and the scent falling away, fading, far back into the forest.

"An--gus?"

Cries. Theirs.

Are they what stirred, what arrested me a while ago when I was slipping away? Are they what's keeping me here now, still snagged and adrift within the sphere of worry, when I was already well on my way, frictionless, around the next bend? And hasn't that always been the complaint about me, that I'm forever straining at the lead, trying to see what lies in store, just up ahead?

It's late. I'm cold. Peepers. Those pond peepers sounding, still, in the dark woods behind me, like mud-embedded stars, each peep a deep burst of light, one connecting to the next, and somehow, in their chorus, comprising my consciousness.

I'm beginning to see everything now, but backward, in recollection, as though my last flash forward into this forest is illuminating a final flashback: the things that I wasn't thinking when I charged out tonight; the steady train of events, from my life's very beginning, that lead, inevitably, here, to these dark woods, and the scissor fangs, and those far-off cabin lights where they sit now, in the warmth, leaning, I'm certain, for some indication of me.

Angus. They call me Angus. I go by and, when it suits me, come to, Angus. That's the name I was given one day nine months ago, the day that they suddenly appeared at Pollard's Combe and set off the chain of events that would eventually thrust me here, where I now lie at the dark edge of a new-world forest.

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Excerpted from Angus: A Memoir by Charles Siebert
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