The dog was in the ditch before the truck stopped rolling. The man shouted. The dog, to its credit, never broke stride. It dove headfirst into the water up to its shoulders and never looked back.

No dog stops to figure if something is worth going after. It wants and it goes. It gets soaked or stung or sliced up on a bit of barbed wire and does not care. Or, perhaps, by the next day it has forgotten it ever did.

That dog decided about the man who bought him the day they went home together. . It knew his hands. It knew the crunch his boots in the gravel when he stepped out of the truck at the end of a long day. That was all the dog required and it never asked twice. The dog followed the man to the door in the morning and it waited at the door at night, and though he’d wait, I don’t think the wait was boring or tedious in the way it is for us. It was just honest want. A wanting in a way no man has ever managed to sustain. It wagged its tail when it was hungry. It stood at the door and scratched at the glass let you know it wanted out. Never an ounce of hesitation or a moment of shame. It ate things out of the grass that would put a man in bed for a week and would do that stupid dog grin, like it had won something.

Men are far more careful than that. A man tends to stuff his desires down where nobody can see them. A man, he will want something for a lifetime and never say a word about it. We’re strange creatures. We can sit at a funeral, proper and respectful and show nothing. Later, alone we will find a place alone, and cry into our hands where no one will ever see. Save the dog. The dog never learned that. What it loved, it loved out loud where everybody could watch. Strangest thing, too. Neither the dog nor anyone else ever once thought less of itself for it.

Most men will try to convince you the dog is the simple one in the relationship. Riding in the truck bed, face in the wind, its tail twirling like a windmill, while the man does the complicated task. Driving while working out an argument he means to have with somebody in some future that will never come. It is clear which one has the better of it.

The purpose of a road it to get somewhere. The ditch is where things end up. Beer cans. Cottonwood fluff. Rain that’s now swallowed by thirsty crops. A rabbit on a good day. Men tend to stay to the road. A dog prefers the ditch, and I’ve come to believe that’s the smarter choice.

Any man who takes a dog home has signed some unseen agreement to part with it at some time. Every man who loves dogs has also buried them. Many of them dug the grave. He knew, even with every spadeful of heartache, that in a year or two he would do it again. The price of what this love cost him didn’t slow him down. It never did.

A man keeps a dog inside himself too. It is the same animal. It has been told to keep still and most of the time it does. Until a certain song comes on, and then it is up and running for the door. It grieves for people long gone. It wants things nobody could explain, and no book has ever cured it of the habit. It takes a chance on the next turn every time, whether that is smart or not.

In the end the man will always follow the dog into the ditch. He will sacrifice his boots and good clothes but the dog won’t care. The dog will always gaze up at him with something I believe is understanding. There was nothing down there worth all that. They both knew it. The man stayed anyway, down in the water with the dog, and did not think it was time lost.