As soon as I moved to Escanaba I went to the shelter to find
a dog. The woman suggested that I consider a large, colliesque
beast that had been given up by a family. We walked around the
parking lot and looked at my truck and when the woman asked,
"Should I put him back in the kennel now?" I said, "No." He
had some paperwork but I couldn't read his name, so I tried
out a series of possibilities until he said, roughly, good
enough; stick with Joshua.

Escanaba is a small city and we walked all over it, so it is
not surprising that eventually we walked past a couple of boys
who were part of Joshua's old family. The boys came regularly
to visit Joshua. I learned that their parents had been sent to
jail for stealing from the Republican Party, their older
brother had also been in trouble. The dissolution of that
family went a long way toward explaining why Joshua started
out thinking he should be alpha male and why he was never
comfortable with small children.

Big people were another matter. Shortly after moving to Green
Bay we went into the back yard and suddenly I realized that
Joshua was no longer in the back yard with me. In my panic
I worried that he might be attacking a child or running back
to Escanaba. When I got to the front yard, I found him with
his back legs on the front step and his forepaws on the
shoulders of our new mailman -- who became one of Joshua's
best friends, stopping to see him every day (whether I had
any mail or not).

Joshua also got along with cats. He didn't speak cat but he
did understand the language. In Escanaba there was one cat
who would run over to us if we were walking by his house in
the evening in order to rub his back on Joshua's belly. When
we came to Green Bay, Joshua adopted his own pet Wheatley
Cat.