UBAC AND ME

An elegant, heartfelt meditation on life with a beloved dog.

“Getting a dog means catching hold of a creature who’s only passing through, committing to a full life that’s bound to be happy, inevitably sad, and in no way sparing.” Former gym teacher and mountaineer Sapin-Defour, whose memoir was a surprise hit in France in 2023, begins with the inescapable fact of death. Having lost one dog, heartbroken, Sapin-Defour spots an ad in a provincial paper announcing the availability of a litter of Bernese Mountain Dogs, overcomes all sorts of internal objections, and then makes a 200-kilometer trip to a remote village to have a look. “Dog people swear it’s the dog that chooses you and not the other way around,” he recounts. “The whole idea is nonsense.” Yet, sure enough, a beautiful puppy steps out of the swirl and selects him. The French being a systematic people, their version of the Kennel Club had decreed that puppies born in 2003 should have a name that begins with the letter U, and so Sapin-Defour chooses Ubac, “a term for a north-facing slope,” speaking perfectly to the puppy’s alpine origins and Sapin-Defour’s passions. Training the puppy is easy enough, though in a sense, as the author notes, Ubac is really training him how to understand a different reality: “I’ll never tire of studying his vision of the world to remind myself that my own is just one of many options.” Though the breed doesn’t live long—thus the meditation on death—Ubac enjoys 14 years of Sapin-Defour’s companionship, and vice versa. His death isn’t tragic as such, but the author’s account of it is quite moving, as is his thought that with every dog he pets henceforth he’ll really be petting two: “Perhaps one of them will pass on a message.”

A book every dog lover will cherish, celebrating the unbreakable bond of canine and human.