Thunder Shirt

When a storm is approaching, when its clouds are just forming up over the Nebraska plains and giving imperceptible barometric hints of what is to come hours later in Wisconsin, our dog, Swirl, begins his frantic pacing.

We are all together in our bedroom – me, my husband, Howard, Swirl, and our other dog, whose name is Punchy. We sleep together, us in bed, the dogs on the floor. The dogs have large, thick beds that make stepping through our bedroom difficult. Sometimes, we cover their beds with fleece blankets because it seems as if they might be cold given the weather. Our room has the precious feel of a tent, especially when the window’s brown drape is pulled back, like a tent flap might be so we are able to see the moon.

Swirl and Punchy are retired sled dogs. They lived outside at a mushing kennel in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan all of their lives before they came to live with us. For a while, Swirl trained as an Iditarod dog, but he washed out, mostly because he eats very slowly and sometimes not at all and racing dogs need to be quick to eat, quick to fall asleep, and eager upon waking to run very long distances. Swirl liked the running part, but he was lackadaisical about the rest, and so he ran in lesser races, and became one of the faces of the kennel because of his exceptional looks. Both he and Punchy worked as tour dogs, taking visitors on long treks through the pinewoods. They liked this life and still run with the casual cadence of a trained sled dog. Now, they are retired, Swirl is ten and Punchy is thirteen.

The first sign of the storm coming from Nebraska is Swirl rising up on his back legs and putting his front paws on the side of the bed next to my husband’s face. It used to be my face on that side of the bed, closest to our bedroom door, but Swirl’s shocking midnight visits led to a switching of sides after decades. I tried switching sides when the children were little, when they would come in our room in the middle of the night and stand silently next to my side of the bed like one of the Queen’s Guards, their presence eventually jolting me out of my sleep. I tried to negotiate a switch then, figuring that Howard was less likely to be unnerved by these surprises but he resisted. “They’re just going to be more unhappy if I’m the one who wakes up,” he argued. And, because this was true – he wasn’t really an overly child-oriented person – I stayed put, bracing myself each night for the shock that might come from being stared at while I slept.

 Swirl’s alarming wakeups carried the risk of being inadvertently scratched by his massive paws. After this happened a time or two, Howard did the gallant thing and offered to switch. So, now, the first that I become aware of the impending storm is Howard saying, “No, Swirl. Swirl, get down.” He says this dozens of times, each time gently pushing Swirl’s chest to make him back up and put all four paws on the floor which Swirl does, but only for seconds, before regrouping and making a new assault. This goes on for many minutes while I lie facing the window and imagining the moon I might see if the clouds would part.

After the pawing comes the pacing, to the door to stand silently with his head down like a calf in a veal processing plan, then to his bed to paw and dig in the thick plushness until balls of stuffing appear and then to the bathroom where he eyes the shower door before rising to plant his front paws on the glass. Then, it is back to the side of the bed and more pawing.

All the while, his panting is heavy and loud. He seems at times to be out of his head, not responsible anymore for his actions, maybe not the sweet, placid dog we trust with babies and frail old people. I worry that our beloved dog might have a heart attack and die while I am ignoring him and hoping my husband will calm him down. It now is unfair for me to stay pretend sleeping, so I sit up and turn the bedside lamp on.

I call Swirl into the bathroom. I sit on the toilet lid and pet him. Hard, full body strokes, and I lean over and put my arms around him. I ask him what it was like during storms in the dog yard. How did he live outside in his half barrel dog house with his bale of straw? But there is no answer and no apology for being a tough dog seemingly gone soft with indoor living.

Meanwhile, Punchy gets up from his bed, does a long, deep stretch, and walks slowly over to Swirl’s ripped and disheveled bed. He settles himself for the night seeing that the alpha dog has become incapacitated by the storm which has quickly skipped over Iowa and western Wisconsin and is now outside our window, booming over our house with rolling thunder and explosive flashes of light. Punchy cares nothing about these things. He is unworried.

We ask the vet about medicine for Swirl. She says he would have to take at the first hint of a storm, and it would make him very sleepy. She suggests we buy him a thunder shirt, a device that promises to calm dogs frightened by storms and so we buy one. When the next storm approaches, I unwrap the thunder shirt. It is a stretchy thick fabric like canvas with what seems like dozens of velcro strips, so the shirt quickly becomes a wad of material impossible to unravel to a logical person’s satisfaction.

I lean over him to fasten the two velcro panels on his chest. The shirt looks like a blanket a devoted owner would put on a prized thoroughbred in the winter, so I follow that idea, pulling the shirt toward his rump and then deciphering the velcro panels that go under his belly and connect on his side. I pull the panels as hard as I can until the shirt is tight and smooth over his entire body. He continues to pace, circling the bedroom, standing still at the door, and looking longingly at the shower door, but his panting is small like an ordinary dog that has run through a large field, and he has stopped raring back to put his paws on the bed.

Howard and I pretend to go to sleep, the idea being to send the signal that it’s time for the pack to rest. Swirl nudges Punchy away and then circles a corner of his bed that is unmarred by his earlier frantic pawing. Then, he settles himself and curls into a tight ball with his nose at the base of his tail like he would have done in a bad snowstorm on a mushing trail. He closes his eyes.

We, all four of us, breathe shallow breaths. I look over my husband’s shoulder to check on Swirl, see if he is truly calm and sleeping. He opens his eyes ever so slightly to meet my gaze and then closes them, coiling his body tighter. He is swaddled, like an infant, and as protected. I turn back toward the window and can see now that the storm has moved out over Lake Michigan. The moon is still hidden but a faint light is cast from the streetlamp down the street. Everyone is at peace.