Literary Hill by Karen Lyon

the LITERARY HILL

A Compendium of Readers, Writers, Books, & Events

The Soul of a Dog

As a foreign service offer, Christopher J. Datta served in some of the most volatile hotspots in the world: Israel, Lebanon, Liberia, South Sudan. “My career took me into situations no one would ever want to experience,” he writes. “What saved me in those hardest of times was my friends, of which I am fortunate to have many. But even more than them, what saved me was Scout.”

“Run Scout Run” is a loving tribute to the dog he adopted as a puppy in Sudan and brought to his home on Capitol Hill. For 13 years, they enjoyed the strongest of bonds. “When I was happy, we played,” he writes. “When I was depressed, he put his head on my lap. When I was sick, he lay in bed with me. He was my constant friend, my companion and my protector.” Friendships don’t get much better than that.

Interspersed with the story of Scout are nuggets of animal research Datta has unearthed and his astute and unvarnished observations on a variety of related topics. He ruminates on “the alpha male fallacy,” takes issue with Rene Descartes’ contention that animals have no souls, and bemoans the arrogance of the human race. “We think we are so damn unique,” he writes. “Uniquely short-sighted, perhaps. Uniquely blind to the beauty and intelligence of the world around us, absolutely.”

Written with warmth, humor, and a big dose of humility, “Run Scout Run” offers abundant proof—if any were needed—of why Datta was such a successful diplomat. His passion for equality and his caring philosophy of exercising “patience, consistency and love” to the whole “family tribe” of people and animals is a model we would all do well to emulate.

Christopher Datta is the author of two American Civil War novels, “Touched with Fire” and “Fire and Dust”; a supernatural thriller, “The Demon Stone”; a detective novel, “A Perfect Disguise,” cowritten with his wife, Debra Datta; and a memoir, “Guardians of the Grail,” which recounts experiences from his long career as a civil conflict specialist with the U.S. State Department. Find him on Twitter @dattacj

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