Did you know where the expression”Dog Days of Summer” comes from? Do you love both books and dogs? Are you hungry for even more Odyssey-related essays? Keep reading…
It’s the last day of July. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s hot, perhaps uncomfortably so. Nobody is doing their best work; the iced coffee is all that’s keeping you going, and somewhere a dog has found the one cool tile in the house and claimed it for as long as possible.
We call this stretch of time the “dog days”. Most people assume the name comes from a dog– the feeling you get when trying to walk your pup on a hot day, and realizing it’s not a good idea for either of you. But it doesn’t. It comes from a star.
The Night Sky Hound
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and it sits in Canis Major, the Great Dog constellation. To the Greeks, it was Orion’s hunting dog in the night sky.
In late summer, Sirius rises every morning just before the sun does. The ancients noticed this and drew a classic but completely wrong conclusion: that the star’s fiery heat was being added to the sun’s, and that was why the weather turned brutally hot. The Romans called the stretch dies caniculares, the days of the dog star. The expression stuck, even if most people have no idea what it means and probably haven’t for centuries.
The ancients hated this time of year. Dog Days were bad days, with little relief from the blazing sun until it finally went down. This was well before air conditioning or readily available cold drinks —many centuries before the invention of iced coffee. Homer brings Sirius into the Iliad to describe the glitter of Achilles’ armor as he closes in on Hector: the brightest thing in the sky, and an omen of fever and suffering.
Hesiod warned farmers that this was when men grew weak, and women grew restless. Valid, even with today’s modern conveniences. Roman writers connected the season to madness in dogs and sickness in people. Some Romans supposedly sacrificed a dog at the start of it (August 3), on the sound logic that if a dog star’s early appearance is causing the problem, an earth dog’s early death might fix it.
Of course, despite the expression’s durability, times have actually changed. The Earth wobbles on its axis, so the stars drift relative to our calendar. Sirius no longer rises when it did for the Greeks. The dog days have already slipped by more than a month, and if we make it that far, our descendants will be complaining about the dog (star) days in the dead of winter. The name will continue to outlive the reason. Names, like stories, often do.
Buddies for life
The dog got its own star because the dog was already central to humanity, earlier and more deeply than anything else we domesticated.
Dogs as human companions came well before agriculture. Before cities, pottery, writing, money, or the wheel. Estimates run from 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, which means that while humans were still following herds along the edge of an ice sheet, something in the wolf family was following us, getting closer and closer, and eventually being part of the tribe.
The most affecting evidence is a grave found near Bonn, in Germany, roughly 14,000 years old: a man, a woman, a dog, and a puppy, buried together. Testing suggests the puppy had survived distemper, a disease that would have left it too sick to be of any use for weeks. The dog was cared for and protected, just like they are now.
We ended up changing each other. The common view is that dogs evolved to be useful for getting food, then were bred to be pets, but it’s more complicated. Dogs seek out our eyes; wolves raised with humans don’t. They even grew a muscle for it, a small one above the eye that lifts the inner brow into that pleading expression, present in dogs and essentially absent in wolves. It exists because for thousands of years, the puppies who could make that cute face got fed. In turn, human development was helped by dogs, as human sleep may have become far more restful and useful for brain development once dogs were in the mix as protectors and guards in the perilous dark night.
Why writers love the pooch
All of that history is why dogs are so useful on the page.
A dog can’t lie. It can’t flatter you or give you a self-serving version of events. They also can’t speak, but actions speak louder than words– dogs are “show don’t tell” in fur. A hound has no stake in the plot and no way to narrate it, which makes it a reliable instrument in fiction for measuring a human being.
Dogs also do emotional labor for the author. For a lot of readers, the first tragic death in literature they experienced was a dog’s; for me, it was #4 on this list. Writers know this, and screenwriters know it maybe too much.
So: the five best, counting down. Feel free to disagree…
5. Toto (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, 1900)
The smallest dog here does the biggest structural work in his book, and nobody gives him credit for it.
Toto pulls back the curtain quite literally. He wanders off mid-audience, noses aside a screen, and exposes the most powerful figure in the land as a middle-aged man with a microphone. The whole moral argument of the book turns on that moment, performed by an animal with no idea what he’s just done.
He actually does it twice! When the balloon is about to lift off and carry Dorothy home, Toto bolts after a cat. She goes after him, the balloon leaves without them, and everything that follows (the entire final act, the discovery that she had the power all along) happens because a small dog saw something interesting. Baum used Toto to move the plot, but he’s also cute.
4. Old Dan and Little Ann (Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls, 1961)
The pick that will get this list forwarded to people who haven’t thought about it since they were eleven. But it was the first one that came to mind when I thought about writing this post.
Old Dan is all canine instinct and no sense, and he won’t leave a tree once he’s put a coon in it. Little Ann has the brains and the legendary hound nose. Neither one hunts without the other, and they love their boy.
Billy works two years to buy them, selling bait and berries to fishermen until he has fifty dollars, then walks twenty miles to town and back to carry the pups home in a sack.
They have some adventures; their bond is established, but then the mountain lion arrives on the scene. Old Dan dies of his wounds, and Little Ann stops eating and dies on his grave a few days later. A red fern comes up between the two graves, and that’s what finally lets the family leave the valley. Devastating. They were great dogs, and very memorable to any young reader.
3. Bull’s-eye (Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, 1838)
The anti-Argos! The dog as horror. We needed one in this list because literature contains many villainous dogs.
Bill Sikes is a cold-blooded murderer, and Bull’s-eye is beaten, half-starved, and completely devoted to him and his evil ways. Sikes tries to drown the dog to keep from being recognized by it. The dog escapes and comes back anyway. At the end, as Sikes falls to his death from a rooftop, Bull’s-eye leaps after him and dies on the stones below, ever-devoted. So he is like Argos, but he’s devoted to the villain, not the hero.
Dickens took the one virtue everyone agrees dogs represent, loyalty, and pointed it at a monster. Bull’s-eye is perhaps the most morally conflicted dog in English literature, and I think Dickens wanted us to ponder what role the dog plays in following his breeding and instinct.
2. Buck (The Call of the Wild, Jack London, 1903)
Every other dog here is basically a supporting player. Buck carries a whole novel on his back.
Stolen from a soft California estate and sold into the Klondike, Buck shouldn’t be there, but he is, and he makes the most of it. London’s thesis is that the wolf is still in there somewhere, a few thousand years down, waiting for the right amount of pure hunger. It’s a book about civilization as a thin veneer, and it’s told through a dog’s body as it suffers in the cold and ice.
London can be sentimental, and the science is dated, as we now understand that Dogs aren’t really wolves. But the ending, Buck loose in the woods, howling with a pack, running past the place where the last man who loved him died, earns every bit of his power. No other dog in fiction gets a myth for a final chapter. Buck is the kind of dog we want our dogs to be.
Ulysses and Argus (1871) By Briton Rivière
1. Argos (The Odyssey, Homer, ~8th century BCE)
Nearly three thousand years old, on the page for about twenty lines, and still top of the literary canine heap.
Odysseus comes home after two decades disguised as a beggar. The disguise is legit and fools his wife, his son, his household, and the men eating his food. He stands at his own gate, and nobody knows him.
Lying in the filth by that gate is Argos, the hunting dog he raised as a puppy before he sailed for Troy. Old now, neglected, covered in fleas and ticks, dumped on a pile of waste because nobody bothers with him anymore. He lifts his head. He drops his ears. He can’t get up, so he moves his tail, which is all he has left. Odysseus turns his face away so no one can see his tears, says nothing, and walks past. The dog dies right there. He had waited twenty years for a moment that lasted a few seconds, but we instantly understand and feel something powerful.
It’s the first recognition scene in the poem, and it comes before any of the human ones, because only the dog never stopped waiting by the gate. Homer needed to show what Odysseus lost while he was off being a hero. He did it in those few lines, with a dog too weak to stand, but too loyal to die.
My Bubble Pups
Fight me in the comments, but here’s who I cut and why.
Old Yeller is devastating, but the book is about the boy, and we don’t know the dog all that well.
Nana from Peter Pan is a nursemaid with a plot function but little personality.
White Fang is Buck’s arc in reverse and could have been here, but Buck is more compelling.
Cujo isn’t really a dog; he’s a demon, although that is a great exploration of dog relations.
The Hound of the Baskervilles doesn’t quite make it either; it’s a cool concept (glowing evil dog), but there’s not enough there.
Back to the Dog Days: named for a star that was named for a dog, and blamed for the heat since long before any of these works were written. We have forgotten the reason for the phrase, but we haven’t forgotten our beloved pooches.
Our dogs are still here. Still on the cool tile, still waiting by the gate.