He twists suddenly and I’m a step behind. Swiftly, he leaps to the right, off the trail and toward the buck. Muscles surge as he does what he was bred to do: Close in, go for the throat, and bring it down. Somehow, my voice breaks through. He pauses in mid-stride, trying to decide.

Sadiq loves to run trails right after I finish my Lucky Charms. He stares intently at me from across the sun-lit room, brown eyes calm, but ears perked forward in expectation, waiting for the last magic marshmallow to disappear. As I reach for my pungent New Balance jacket, the deal is sealed and he knows it. We dive off the porch together, plunging into the Palisades, footsteps from our home.

He’s one hundred and fifteen pounds of muscle and bone. A Rhodesian Ridgeback moving in fluid shades of Chai tea and silver, Sadiq was bred to hunt lions in east Africa. The dog books say he is “aloof,” but not to his family. We interviewed, provided three references, showed photos of our back yard - paid more than I had for my first blue Chevy truck – for the honor of taking him home.

We run loose and free. The trails wind for miles through midlife maples and pondering pines, occasionally crossing rigid rock-pile spines, built in the long-fallow fields of desperate Scottish farmers. Rockland County comes by its name honestly. Sadiq and I respond to each other without thinking. He knows how to read the trail, remembers where we turn, and will happily run close enough for me to touch his short-haired back. I listen, without thinking, to his jingling tags and soft pant, noting his location while I look down, dancing through the roots.

Springsteen sings ”Straight Time”  though my Ipod, “ My uncle's at the evening table, makes his living running hot cars, slips me a hundred dollar bill, says ’Charlie you best remember who your friends are.’”

Before we moved, I had studied the trails on Google Earth. I would click on the view icon and shove it down, trying to discern dim depressions in the forest. I knew Sadiq and I would run together even then, when he was all feet and ears. My family and I spent hours teaching him to sit, come, then how to walk on a leash. Ridgebacks, by their very nature, don’t do well with restraints. Their strength, nose, and eyes conspire against the best intentioned dog trainer. Sadiq needs kindly enforced instruction to resist the hunt burned into his DNA.

“Kitchen floor in the evening, tossing my little babies high. Mary's smiling, but she's watching me out of the corner of her eye. Seems you can't get any more than half free; I step out onto the front porch and suck the cold air deep inside of me.”

We began by running on the roads, twenty yards at a time. At one point, Sadiq would have to sit every ten feet, learning to follow my lead and to resist his temptations. They came in all forms, but squirrels were the worst. Taunting him from the side of old oaks, until he dove in after them, certain of a kill. He pulled me, upside-down and yelling, twenty feet down a steep embankment once. Something moved, and he just couldn’t help himself.  

"Got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line, I ain't making straight time.” The poster, scotch-taped to the Church’s  faded green wall, reminded everyone that the best they could hope for was one day at a time, like Israelites serving their sentence in the wasted wilderness. 

Sadiq decides. He stops, spins on his hind legs and looks directly at me. “Come” I call firmly, and he does. With one more look at the fleeing buck, he turns toward me, trots over, and sits. I lavish praise and he drinks it in. But as the deer crashes through the undergrowth, he wonders.

And so do I.