Using His Cranium

"In the morning, I woke on the floor alone and discovered him sleeping up on my bed," he wrote. "A fair trade in his mind, I suppose."

Working at the Berkeley museum, Krantz broke his big toe in a particularly memorable manner: He dropped the Dead Sea Scrolls on it. During his recuperation, a friendly woman named Eve Einstein took him and Clyde in. Soon she became his third wife.

In the mid-'60s, Grover and Eve and Clyde moved to the University of Minnesota, where Krantz finally got his PhD. In 1968 he began teaching at Washington State University.

He'd pulled his life together, and he gave the credit to Clyde, "the closest thing to a son I ever had." His love for Clyde had made the difference, he wrote, "between being a functioning human being and a drunken bum."

At Wazoo -- as everybody calls Washington State -- Grover and Clyde bounded around the campus, just as they'd done at Berkeley and Minnesota.

But wolfhounds tend to lead short lives, and Clyde got old. He shrank and shriveled. He suffered through recurrent bouts of pneumonia. In January 1973, he died.

"His death left me with the most empty, lonely feeling of my life, before or since," Krantz wrote.

With the help of a grad student, Krantz buried Clyde in the frozen ground of his lawn. He'd already buried many animals there, ranging from prosaic roadkill to an African lion. Anthropologists study skeletons, and the cheapest way to get them is to bury dead animals and then dig them up after they've decayed, which takes a year or so. But this was different. This time he was burying a friend.

"It really was as if he'd lost a child," recalls University of Idaho anthropology professor Don Tyler, who was then one of Krantz's students.

Krantz plummeted into a deep depression. Within six months his marriage collapsed.

One afternoon a couple of years later, Krantz decided to dig Clyde up so he could add the dog's skeleton to his collection. But when he spotted Clyde's skull in the dirt, he stopped.

He retreated into the house and fortified his courage with a whole lot of wine. Then he went back outside and kept digging and drinking until he'd finished the job.