I owe whatever success I’ve had becoming more human to dogs.

I got my first dog after college while working in the foothills of the Sierras. Of course, back then, everyone in California had a dog. But that’s beside the point. As a kid our family had quite a few dogs for pets, but they were pets; not a dog, as in my dog.

My girlfriend and I decided to get a dog; she thought it would be good for our relationship—whatever that meant. So we drove out to a little town called Rough and Ready, where we’d seen an advertisement for a litter of pups. I wanted the black, rolly puppy; she liked the little yellow one—the runt of the litter. So we compromised and got both.

I named my dog Bear, because he was round and black, a lab-shepherd mix. I thought he was pretty smart because, well, he was my dog. My girlfriend named her dog Jesse, after the kind of soulful person she hoped I would become. And when that did not come to pass, she passed out of my life and left her dog behind for me ‘n Bear to take care of.

We moved to Maine in the winter of ’73—me ‘n Bear and Jesse. We lived in a cabin on the Number Seven Road in the southernmost unnamed township in Washington County. The sunrise county. The three of us were happy enough to be there, except for the green firewood I kept feeding into the woodstove that hissed like an adder and smoldered contemptuously for the first hour after lighting while we all shivered nearby.

Not long after we moved into our little cabin, Bear and Jesse went off on a toot. With miles and miles of empty forest around, I did not think much about their jaunt until Jesse crawled back home the next day, worn out and alone. I waited and waited for Bear to return and grew increasingly frantic. What if he were out in the woods alone? What if he had been caught in a trapper’s snare? I kept imagining horrible scenarios and followed their tracks out back of the cabin further and further into the woods, urging Jesse to help find Bear.

When their tracks finally petered out in the light snow cover, I drove all around Township Number Seven to the Black Woods Road looking for where their tracks might have crossed the road; I put up signs in stores all around the county. I advertised on Bangor’s country-western station.

And then one day three weeks later, I got a message that a dog fitting Bear’s description had wandered into the yard of a couple in Aurora, about 60 miles north as the crow flies. I could not have been more excited. Jesse and I drove to Aurora, happy as larks, about to be a family again, except when Bear tried to hop into the pick up, Jesse held his ground and wouldn’t let Bear in without a fight then and there.

I was thunderstruck; not at all the reunion I had imagined. But after much bigger Bear had reasserted his dominance, the universe was restored to its rightful balance. Me ‘n Bear and then Jesse. Like that.

We weren’t back at the cabin more than a few days when I let the dogs out to pee one morning. They were long gone again. All day, all night and into the next day until Jesse limped back into the dooryard, all worn out, but with what seemed was a satisfied expression on his dogface. Do you get it yet, he asked. I am your dog, not that big dumb black ­___hole.

And that was how Jesse became my dog. He chose me to be his loyal companion. Which is how it was for the next 14 years. We went everywhere together. We got to know each other better than I knew any other living creature at that point.

He went to forestry school with me and got into the class picture. He went into the woods with me when I worked north of Greenville and then into the St. Croix River valley when I cruised timber there. And to the islands when I first began working offshore. And he chose my wife; actually my wife’s dog, with whom he became inseparable.

Now I have sons who are trying to navigate their way in the world. It is complex, especially when it comes to navigating the thicket of relationships. My advice to them is to get a dog.

My oldest son agreed to take in a series of rescue dogs with his girlfriend and they were married soon after. Dogs know you better than you know yourself. And pay attention to the runts; they are usually way smarter—and way more loyal—than the big beautiful dogs that are easy to fall for but hard to hold on to.

Philip Conkling is the founder of the Island Institute and now operates Conkling & Associates, a consulting firm.