The Dog Who Signed the Signature Card
My border collie put a muddy paw print on the one line that said sign here, and the paperwork has been legally bonded to him since.
There are two kinds of working dogs in Colorado, those that know their job and those that think they have been promoted. My border collie Juniper belongs firmly to the second kind. She is a black-and-white dog with one blue eye and an air of managerial confidence, and she has never gone more than twenty feet from me during any task, including, I discovered, filling out legal paperwork at the kitchen table on a rainy afternoon.
I was finishing the last page of a land lease, an agreement with a neighbor for a hundred acres of summer pasture, and it required my signature on a line at the bottom. I had the pen in my hand. Juniper, who had been sitting under the table, got up to see what I was doing, and I suppose she felt left out, because she put both front paws up on the table, right in the middle of the document, covered in mud from the morning's chores.
A paw print, I might point out, is a lovely thing. It had four toe pads and a big heart-shaped palm, as neatly pressed as a rubber stamp, and it landed squarely on the signature line, a full inch above where I would have signed. I sat there with the pen in the air. Juniper looked at the paper, then at me, and wagged once, as if she had just closed a deal and was waiting for a handshake. I did not have another copy.
I drove it over to the neighbor, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Albrecht, who looked at the paw print for a long time, then at my signature, which I had added underneath. She said she would honor both. She said she had never had a more dependable witness. We had it notarized in town, and the notary, a serious man, asked whose paw it was. I said, mine, in a manner of speaking. He stamped it. I understand from the CFPB that the paper itself is perfectly fine, so long as you add the sign-off, and the lease has run without a single dispute. Juniper has the stamp of authority now, and she acts like it, and I have been told on farm.FM that a country song might just be waiting in this one.