Who is popular today?

Well, the dogs are howling
All over the neighbourhood
— Willie Dixon,
I Ain’t Superstitious
Somewhere up the hill from my house lives Radar the dog.
I don’t know precisely where he resides, or
what his real name is. I call him Radar after Radar O’Reilly, the company clerk on MASH who could hear incoming helicopters before anyone else. Radar the dog does the same with sirens.
Three o’clock in the morning, the whole world as quiet as Oak Bay during Coronation Street, and out of nowhere Radar will begin to howl, a low eerie moan like Les Leyne makes when he misses a two-foot putt.
Then, faintly in the distance, you’ll hear a siren. Ambulance? Police car? Doesn’t matter, Radar will already be baying like a banshee by the time the far-off sound registers with you. And once Radar begins the canine chorus, the rest of the neighbourhood dogs will join in, howling and yowling, copycatting (copydogging?) their leader just like politicians during
Question Period.
Radar is not to be confused with Barking Dog, whom longtime readers will remember as my middle-of-the-night
tormentor from years past. Barking Dog would shatter the silence with a repeated “Woof! Woof! Woof!” that while unvarying in its content — really, his (or her) messaging was as consistent as Dr. Bonnie Henry’s — was delivered with an irregular cadence, the barking and silence alternating in periods of
unpredictable duration.
It was the silences that left you on the edge of the bed, sweating like a U-boat captain waiting for the next depth charge to explode. Coiled there, nerves as frayed and taut as the ready-to-snap waistband of your pandemic-challenged gym shorts, it was hard not to wonder how Barking Dog’s owners, whoever they were, could ignore the nightly torture. Were they hard-of-hearing? Hard-of-thinking? Perhaps they were dead, lying on the kitchen floor as cold as last night’s supper. This last
possibility gave me a small measure of joy.
I bore no ill will to Barking Dog himself, though. Nor am I angry with Radar, who is just doing what dogs do. The experts, or at least Google, say dogs howl at sirens due to some ancestral wolf-pack instinct — it’s a form of communication, or perhaps ecolocation.
Me, I’m not so sure. I wonder if Radar hears the siren and goes “Maybe the cops are pulling over a speeder.” But no, the siren wails on and on, which makes the dog wonder if something more serious is happening. Could it be a medical
emergency? Radar hopes the guy is OK. A fire? No, Radar can’t smell smoke.
Maybe a madman is running amok in the neighbourhood. Radar pauses, tries to remember if anyone locked the front door. Oh, if only he had opposable thumbs.
Or maybe it’s not the sirens themselves that trigger Radar’s howling. Maybe the sirens just wake him up, and the howling comes when all the worries
lurking in his subconscious, the ones suppressed during days filled with important hole-digging and the aggressive investigation of his own private parts, drift to the fore. His mind fills with thoughts of COVID.
Of back-to-school during COVID. Street crime. Climate change. Cats.
Jeez, Radar wonders, what will happen when the CERB payments run out, and the government stops subsidizing wages? Will there be enough people with jobs to carry the load for those who don’t? What will happen to the restaurants when it starts raining on the patios? Maybe he should bury a few bags of Purina, just in case, but then he worries that would make him a hoarder — a bad dog! — a thought that makes him feel shame, just like that time he tried to hump the letter carrier.
So, feeling uneasy and not knowing what else to do, Radar howls. And the other dogs howl back. Maybe they’re getting each other worked up, fuelling the fear. Or maybe, they’re just trying to reassure one another, or at least let Radar know he’s not alone.
I’d like to think it’s the latter. “No point in barking at
shadows,” they’re telling him. “We’ll all get through this together. This is for now, not forever. Be kind, be calm, be… squirrel!”
And then they all settle down, at least until the next time the sirens wail in the distance.
Good dog, Radar.
jknox@timescolonist.com