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Show Lucy-2 forced to move to from Salt Lake City to Central Illinois for a full time academic job, leaving behind my beloved Utah landscape, longtime friends, my stepson, even my cats. But in all this came a wonderful gift: Lucy. She was tethered at the end of a row of dogs rescued by the owners of a horse bam in Missouri near the Illinois border. Our trainer had insisted on stopping there after we'd competed in a small hunter -jumper show, me on my $600 appal oosa, Eric, whose exuberant love of jumping sometimes stole the show. I was tired, wanting to get home. But Lucy, a scrawny ginger-colored thing with an odd bushy tail, had astonishing golden eyes. Intelligence radiated from those eyes as if she knew everything about us. The bam owners said she might be a coydog, for she was exceptionally smart, didn't act quite like most dogs, and coyote hybrids were common in the region. She was sweet natured, they said, and they'd tried to keep her as a house pet but had found her impossible to housebreak. Call me crazy, but I took Lucy back to Illinois with me. Oh yes. She liked to claim her territory in emphatic and smelly ways, and she squinted up at me, as if baffled by my displeasure at what were, after all, her declarations of belonging. The first time I left her alone I returned to the sight of all my mini-blinds torn to shreds. But her saving graces were many: she'd greet me with screams of joy, a lightning leap to flick the comer of my mouth with the barest brush of her tongue, go on to tell me all about her day with an array of human-like intonations, and she'd curl on my bed, knowing bedtime before I did, smile up at me, and work her magic with those sun-filled eyes, |