We try to take Guinness for at least two walks a day, one early and one toward (human) dinner time. For the most part, he is a peppy walker, moving down the street with a bounce, his tight butt with his bobbed tail (not our doing – done to him before he came to us) swaggering back and forth.

Unless he isn’t doing this, instead doing his darting/tugging/stopandgo walk, where he has to visit every leaf, wood chip, stone, and stain for a full investigation and possible tasting (constant refrain as we steward him: “Drop it”). He does like to chew on his wood tidbits, which reappear in his droppings unscathed by his digestive tract – we can’t catch him in time all the time, so he gets in his quota on the walk. We just have to be careful about acorns, which do a dog no good.

And then, of course, there is the blended walk, part pep, part explorer, lunging after squirrels and starlings and grackles and mourning doves and doing a quick periscope hop on his hind legs to find the dogs barking at him from the front windows of the houses we pass. (He secretly feels superior to them, we know, since he is out and they are in.)

We try to keep him off the lawns because we don’t know what they’ve been perforated with, from landscaping chemicals to animal scat, but occasionally we let him skirt the edges, and he transforms into a stalker, every blade and clump and cluster examined through the nose, his body low to the dirt – and then he’ll throw in the abrupt halt so that he can pee, adding his chemical moniker to all that have preceded him.

His neighborhood walks, though, are different from his “I’m out of the house and on an adventure” walks.

On the hiking trails, he is back in his wolfish element, paws against the trail dirt, a skirling wind overhead carrying drafts of the skittering life around him to each of his nostrils, those twin powerhouse sifters of scent and sensibility. The trails are harder for him, of course – uphill courses challenge the speed and stamina of his short legs, and the downhill parts he has to take slowly since an errant bound could pitch him forward, something we have found he does not like at all.

But he always enjoys the hike, whatever the conditions – he is out, he is moderately free-ranging (length of the leash), he commands his space.

The urban trails, like when we brought him to New York City, offer him something completely different, smells that are sharp, visceral, edgy spilled over a streetscape that is itself sharp, visceral, edgy (literally and figuratively). He strains at the leash, mashing the halter against his chest, his body arrowed forward,  a straight line back from his arrow-point nose to the fletch of the bobbed tail. If he could, he would break his bonds and be off, ratcheting around like a ball bouncing down the spillway of an old pinball machine, full of ricochet, juke, and dodge. Not sure if we’d ever be able to catch him. (My terrible vision.)

Of course, he’s barely a year old. We picked him up from the rescue on Aug. 31, 2024, which just passed, and we figure his birth day was June 21, 2024, backdating from the dates on his adoption papers. Even with his accelerated biology (1 year = seven human years? yes? no?), he is still, using the AI lingo, training his model on data from the world. He has hardly exhausted everything that he can know. Walking, for him, is training and processing all rolled into one.

And for us, the walking is, well, so many things. Meditative, freeing (get out of the house, get out of the head), a chance to enjoy the enjoyment another creature takes in the surrounding world (and maybe taking some cues from that – again, out of the house, out of the head). María Beatriz and I often say to each other that his life is so simple – eat, sleep, bark, play, pee, poop – and we take an immense pride in keeping it that way for Guinness, who did not ask to be brought into the world in a puppy mill. By sheltering him, we have repaired a small part of this broken world as well as soothed those parts of us bruised and disappointed by the woeful shenanigans of our fellow humans.

Another way to say this. Keeping things generative and simple for Guinness is a discipline, one that comes from us choosing to carry forward the life of another sentient creature, never going back on our promise to be present and protective at all times, one that can dissolve the ego and counteract the many silly things that fritter away our lives for no gain or insight. It takes labor, of course, but the work is, in the most literal way possible, a labor of love. It relocates our focus to making sure that we do the things that we can do to make sure that the vulnerable and the frail – that is to say, all of us at any time – are never at the mercy of forces and trolls bent on breaking their bodies.

We protect Guinness and we serve him – and, man, thank him on every walk we take for giving us the chance to rinse our lives while having such a great time with this simple, gorgeous, complete four-legged and dynamic-nosed dance of life.