It was the smell of hot dogs that drew the male beagle into our yard. Without pausing to see if this was friendly territory, he headed straight for the barbecue. I said, “Get the hell out of here.”

He wagged his tail as though he thought I loved him and went directly to my wife, Lexxie, who broke off a piece of hot dog and fed him from her palm.

“Don’t feed him,” I said. “He’ll start hanging around.”

“I can’t resist those sad eyes. What’s wrong with a little treat?” She fed him more. “The poor thing acts starved.”

“Animals always act starved. I used to bring home sunfish I caught in the lake and feed them to my sisters’ cats over there in the barn. A dozen cats leaping all over me for a few fish. They weren’t hungry, they were competitive. One female ate a fish while pinning the head of another cat against the barn floor. Don’t think my mother didn’t feed those cats plenty of cat food. She did. Competition just brings out the worst in animals.”

“He doesn’t have a collar.”

“Probably one of Henry’s hounds.”

“I don’t think so. Henry’s dogs are skittish, and they carry their tails low. This one came in here with his tail stiff and high, like he owned the place.”

The dog left the same way, as soon as the hot dogs were gone, even though Lexxie rubbed his ears and coaxed him to stay. He put his nose to the ground and followed the road to the lake and cottages with barbecues.

The next day Lexxie and I discussed the dog with Henry across the stone wall that separated our houses. “Sleeps with my dogs mostly,” Henry said. “Begs food down to the girls’ camp dining hall. If he belonged to one of them summer people, he’d have a collar. I figure he came up here with some hunter and got himself lost.”

“Why don’t you keep him?” I asked.

“Got too many to feed now.” Henry grinned, showing his one lone tooth. “Why don’t you take him back to the city?”

Lexxie nodded as if she were considering it. “There’s something endearing about him — maybe the mystery about where he came from. Or maybe his total trust in strangers.”

“Good-lookin’ dog,” Henry said.

“An apartment’s no place for a dog,” I said. “Besides, Lexxie wants a golden retriever.” And I didn’t want a distraction to finishing the novel I was working on.

When the dog returned, she fed him again, even though I objected. After that she fed him when she thought I was oblivious.

Each weekend Lexxie and I drove from Boston to this empty childhood house of mine, a run-down structure within a short stroll to a lake where many summer people cooked on barbecues outside their cottages. By mid-July the dog had learned our migratory patterns and was sitting on our porch when we arrived Friday evenings. He peered through our screen doors, followed Lexxie into the house, and worked his disconsolate eyes on me when I pushed him outside. He disappeared on Sunday afternoon just before we packed up my old Volkswagen Beetle.

As summer waned, Lexxie said the dog was probably feeling anxious about where his next meals would come from. The girls’ camp had closed and most of the summer cottages would soon be closed up for the season. She said we should bring him with us and give him to her friend who worked at an Animal Rescue League in Cambridge.

But the dog was not on our porch when we arrived on Friday, and when he failed to show up the following day, Lexxie drove my VW along the lake road to search for him. Fifteen minutes later she rolled back into the yard. “I saw him,” she reported. “He was running down the road with a steak in his mouth.”

On Sunday the dog returned but was reluctant to enter the VW when it was time to leave. So Lexxie lifted him onto the back seat. I’d been driving for about ten minutes when she reached back and touched the dog. “He’s shaking.” So I stopped the car while she transferred him to her lap. At the end of our trip, she walked the dog around the grounds of our residence, an old Victorian house, before leading him upstairs to our third-floor apartment.

I thought the dog would be a distraction while I made my first attempt at writing a novel, a partly autobiographical affair about plebe year hazing at Annapolis and getting expelled. But the dog stayed for a day, then another day, and then a week. While Lexxie went off to a secretarial job each day and I worked on the novel, the dog slept under my writing table, nudging my feet now and then. I was confused about why I liked the warmth of his chin on my feet. I thought he might be helping moderate the anxiety I was feeling about the traumatic circumstances of my departure from Annapolis.

After a week of having the dog at our dinner table while we ate, I didn’t object when Lexxie named him “Pup Dog” (after her favorite character in the Pogo comic strip) and suggested we keep him.  Pup Dog invited himself to join our meals by hopping onto the old home’s built-in love seat, against which our table was positioned. From that perch, he rested his chin on the table and shifted his eyes left or right, depending on which of us was taking a bite. Inevitably his begging paid off. I thought I should suggest she give Pup some of the wine from the large goblet that she refilled throughout the evenings. But using sarcasm was not good in a marriage.

Pup Dog walked with me unleashed in the neighborhood, and, believing dogs should have some freedom, I often allowed him to venture outside on his own.  But a woman pinned a note to his collar, claiming he’d peed on her flowers. And some official noted his dog tag while Pup investigated an elementary school playground, resulting in a leash law fine. So I walked more while Pup strained against the leash.

But I allowed him to run free again during our walk by the surf on a Cape Cod beach. But a sudden impulse made him bolt away and run toward the dunes to sniff the backsides of three naked sunbathers, causing them to bolt upright and welcome him with hugs and ear scratches. I stared out at the ocean as though I hadn’t seen anything. Since I was in a swimsuit and they were not, it seemed inappropriate for me to wave from a distance to acknowledge ownership of this canine intruder.

Lexxie and I moved from the city to my childhood house and found subsistence jobs. I hoped by escaping city pressures (like her boss lobbying for them to have an affair) that Lexxie’s wine consumptions might abate. Pup Dog regained his freedom to visit Henry’s dogs and lakeside cottage barbecues. And Lexxie purchased from Henry a hound puppy that kept tumbling into our yard and captivating her attention. She named him “Droopy” because of his long ears.

After a couple turbulent years in which thirteen publishers rejected my manuscript, Crown Publishers brought out Annapolis Misfit as a young adult novel. About that time we realized that publication of my novel and the companionship of two dogs was not a solution to our marital problems. Lexxie had continued to exhibit characteristics of an alcoholic, once having passed out from taking valium with her large goblets of evening wine, and once flying into a rage about control and calling me “mama” (although I didn’t look like her mother or have the same overbearing attitude). Counseling had not worked. Promises to cut back on alcohol evaporated. Because my father had been full of empty promises too and an abusive alcoholic, I believed I couldn’t go through that life again. Lexxie’s complaint about me was that I was too antisocial, which was probably true.

After an amicable divorce, Lexxie said she planned to drive her Ford Pinto to the west coast and asked to take Droopy for protection. I thought it only fair that she retain custody of one of our dogs. She said Pup Dog had always been my dog and that we belonged together.

So at age thirty-four, I was left with Pup Dog and a three-speed bicycle, the consequence of having given my old VW to a neighbor’s kid. As writer’s block set in, I talked mostly to Pup while rubbing his ears and contemplating my isolation from society. Even though our last year together had been tough, marriage had become a habit that I’d been used to. The empty house made me anxious. Pup gazed at me as though he understood. Before leaving for the west coast, Lexxie sent a counselor who happened to live our town and was willing to talk with me about my depression. He thought I needed to get out of the house.

So I rode the bike four hilly miles to the local inn and got a job there, doing work like cleaning the swimming pool and eventually tending the front desk, the bar, and even subbing as the chambermaid. During my time at the inn, I met a woman who was working on her master’s degree in dance therapy and whose housemate (one of the inn’s bartenders) had told her about an ex-Navy guy who was a writer and didn’t seem military at all. Her name was Shelley, and she drove a faded VW Beatle similar to the one Pup had ridden in so often with me. When she visited my house and prepared to leave, Pup jumped into her car and refused to get out. It was as though he was telling me she was the one. And he was right. As we became more committed to one another, she made him a huge pillow with a blue denim cover that went on all our travels and became his sleeping spot. But it would take a few years and a move to the Boston area before Shelley and I would marry.

We were living in the top apartment of an old house in Salem, Massachusetts, when Pup’s arthritis and failing health began causing him a lot of pain. He whined a lot. He could still go on walks with me to the nearby harbor, but I had to carry him up and down any stairs. Plus, his incontinence was becoming more frequent. Shelley had just finished her master’s degree at Boston University and gotten a job as an occupational therapist at New England Rehab Hospital. I was hunting for work as a technical writer. When I returned one day from a job interview, I found him in my closet, nestled in a pile of my dirty clothes. The elderly man in the apartment below said Pup howled while I was gone. I didn’t know whether he had been lonely for me, or in more pain, or both.

Pup Dog had been with me for about ten years, and I had no idea how old he was when he first wandered into my yard in New Hampshire. What I did know was that he was now an old dog with a gray snout and probably incurable arthritic pain. I talked with Shelley about how it might be merciful to end his life. She said she’d support any decision I made.

But I didn’t want it to be my decision. Just the thought of ending his life made me ill. I was afraid of death.  I was afraid of being anywhere near death.  During a traumatic childhood, my inebriated father had called sometimes from his weekly sales route to say he was coming home to “kill the kids.” Entrenched in my mind, perhaps, was the feeling that death was the worst thing that could happen to a living being. I knew it was irrational, but if I could be sure there were a fun-filled doggy heaven, I wouldn’t be in such turmoil over having to make a decision about a dog that I’d loved for so long.

Finally, I took him for one last walk by the harbor, snapped a couple photographs to add to my Pup Dog collection, and took him to a nearby veterinarian. After his death, I cried intermittently whenever I looked at my photographs of him. I placed one photo on my writing desk so that it would seem, as in the beginning, that I could still feel his chin on my feet.

Kurt Schmidt’s memoirs and essays have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, The Avenue, Discretionary Love, Eclectica Magazine, the “Adelaide Literary Award Anthology,” and others. He is the author of the novel “Annapolis Misfit” (Crown). Last year Kurt flew in a small plane piloted by his son, although he was anxious that his son was newly licensed and inexperienced. Kurt is currently finishing a 30-year chronicle about parenting a risk-taker. www.kurtgschmidt.com.