cover image Angus

Angus

Charles Siebert. Crown Publishers, $18.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60494-6

Fearless, feisty and smart, Jack Russell terriers currently enjoy a popularity rivaled by few other breeds, thanks in part to TV shows like Frasier. In this slim, impressionistic ""memoir,"" Angus, an 11-month-old Jack Russell born on a farm in Devon, relates his life story as he lies dying of wounds from a coyote attack. Bought at the age of eight weeks by an American couple, both writers, Angus is taken to a Cornish village at the western tip of England, where he spends the next six months endearing himself to, and growing to love, his new owners, whom he thinks of as ""Huge Head"" and ""Sweet Voice."" In charming, unsentimental prose that's often as cerebral as it is vividly sensory, Angus speaks to humans and to himself: ""What is Angus? What am I without that two-beat tug on my heart?"" On the first step of his owners' journey back to North America, Angus is taken to London, where he's overwhelmed by the city's myriad scents, and finally, after a mystifying trip in a plane's cargo hold (""the belly of the metal bird""), he's brought to his new country home near Quebec. That's where he meets the other family pet, Lucy, an elderly, arthritic Dalmatian, who hates the puppy at first sight, but who eventually reaches a poignant rapprochement. Free to roam the nearby land, Angus meditates on his dreams, his anxiety to please his owners and what he perceives as his work. Told in episodic flashbacks as the mortally wounded terrier tries to drag himself back to his owners (who intrusively take over the narration at the end), this is no warm and fuzzy puppy tale, but, like John Berger's King, a wry, meditative and poetic account of an intelligent animal's inner life, philosophies and all, and of the spiritual connection that exists between pets and their humans. Siebert is the author of the memoir Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral.Agent, Chuck Verrill. First serial to Talk magazine; 5-city author tour. (May)