I was raised a suburbanite, so what I don't know about nature fills libraries full of books. Chris Clarke's lucid, menschy prose always reminds me that even on the edges of an enormous city, we are still in the natural world. It's too easy to forget that a pet is a member of another species. Those golden retrievers, those chocolate labs, those Huskies and Keeshonds and terriers that populate the serried developments -- members of another species. That vegetation all around us -- every landscaped leaf of it has its name, whether we ignorant, arrogant humans have bothered to be introduced or not, and every blade of crabgrass is another species with which we coexist, an Other Species going about its business, not always as subject to us as we think.

I'm making it sound too intellectual, too arid. Here's the thing: the key to love is recognizing the otherness of the beloved. Right? Don't you agree, you who love? Don't you notice that too, that when you try to force the one you love to bend to your will--even just to your taste--that somehow it doesn't feel as though what you're doing is loving?

Chris's love for his dog Zeke jumps from the page like a glinting trout from a river (do trout jump from rivers? hell if I know), and yet his love is that of a biologist, a naturalist, an environmentalist, a scientist. It's obviously, humblingly, a much deeper love for that perspective.

Chris Clarke is a science and nature writer, so his gift for description of the landscapes of the West – both urban and wild – is an unsurprisingly gorgeous element of "Walking With Zeke."



What is surprising is the degree to which Clarke captures the deep love possible between creatures of different species; through sidelong glances and implicit trust, occasional bouts of ferocious play and shared dreaming, daily walks and the painful shifts of aging, the culture of dogs and the people in love with them unfolds as clearly and viscerally as the last years of Zeke's life do.



There is no shying away from the hard parts here - the failures (and their motivating force to do better next time), the impossible choices, the final brutality of loss – but neither is there saccharine in the carefully described dailiness and mutual regard that makes a lifelong bond.



In this portrait of the last years of a beloved dog's life, Clarke illustrates what it is to be human – then reminds us to forget it just enough to be able to love with some small percentage of the devotion our dogs offer us.