Still, he didn’t come forward for his meal, like Mingus or any other dog I’ve ever met. He hid while he waited for it to happen to him, while he waited to be called. Only then might he peep round the corner of the door which leads from the dining-room into the hall. I would be at the other end of the corridor, in the kitchen, with the bowl of dry food and a tin of pilchards. He could not bridge this gap – twelve feet – without assistance. I had to lay a trail of chicken pieces to enable him to make the journey. Once he’d made it, he’d crouch trembling by his bowl as he ate. Then, suddenly, he’d jump. What now? I’d look round to see that the apron had inadvertently been left hanging on the kitchen door. Only once it was removed could he bring himself to finish his bowl.
I thought about myself and the apron in terms of a nasty man, the monster in Ollie’s mind for whom I was such a great substitute. Ollie had been collected from the wild at about two months. Say he’d been wandering for one week before being rescued. Or let’s push it and say maybe two weeks, at the outside. That would allow a mere six or seven weeks prior to that for a man to have been nasty and left an overwhelming impression. It’s not that long, but clearly it’s long enough. As Ollie slunk away after his dinner, without a backwards glance, I grew to despise and resent the nasty man myself.
The days and weeks passed and nothing changed. Sometimes I’d visit a house with a normal dog in it – a dog who welcomed humans with barking and jumping up and licking. This only served to illustrate how much Ollie differed to a domesticated pet. He seemed unable to de-program himself from the notion that I was his depraved warder, who might, at any time, turn on him and beat him to a pulp. In order to try better to understand him, I began logging on to various Saluki websites. (Experienced lurcher owners always greet me with the line, ‘That’s a nice Saluki-greyhound you’ve got there’ – there’s not much cross, it’s the Saluki in him that is dominant.) Online I learned that Salukis have a very unusual characteristic. Believe it or not, if you tick them off, these animals can actually hold a grudge for an hour or two. If only.
***
It’s a favourite trope of wildlife programmes to demonstrate how animals deploy their strategies, talents, and saving graces in the service of their own personal survival.
Ollie was growing ever more stunning to look at. Here, at least, was his saving grace. After several changes of feed (and numerous consultations with the vet which involved, for an unsuccessful stint, a vegetarian diet, following some chronic fits of indoor, and in-car, diarrhoea) his coat had developed a brilliant sheen; he gleamed like an otter, and was fitter than a flea.
His movement was becoming superb. Much as he was decimating my timetable, and making my life difficult, he was capable of stopping the traffic with his running and leaping; like a hare at full tilt, he could even change direction in mid-air. I’d sometimes turn from admiring this to see that I was part of a larger audience, smiling and nodding in quiet appreciation. Here was his saving grace and his talent rolled into one, and the talent he put to good use. He developed particular relationships with dogs that he met regularly.
He knew to avoid certain cases, Sparky, for example, a mean, heavyweight, elderly and irascible Belgian Shepherd, who had nipped Ollie on his backside once as a way of telling him where he could stick his jaws-wide-open neck-sledging routine. Ollie never forgot the nip and took to hurdling Sparky whenever their paths crossed, and he did the same with any other Belgian Shepherd, too, just in case.
Sparky’s owner was equally irascible. Held together by bits of string, he was an old boy who was the first living person I’ve ever seen carrying a crook. I never saw him beat Sparky with the crook, but he’d jab him with it, and he shouted at and bollocked the dog most of the time, for all it was worth – it never made a scrap of difference.
Sparky seemed perfectly happy to take an earful and the odd prod as the trade-off for doing more or less as he liked. I began to wonder if some dogs were simply unbiddable, that they got on with their thing whatever you tried and that was that.
Milla was another.
MILLA
We came across Milla some time after our darkest days. Milla is a Dobermann rescued from the streets of London, then named after the Cameroonian footballer Roger Milla, who celebrated the goals he scored at Italia ‘90 by doing the Makossa – the rhythmic step-forward dance – around the corner flag. An odd name for a dog, you might think, until, that is, you see Milla (the dog) shaking his booty.
Milla is the opposite of Sparky in the sense that he is one of Ollie’s closest friends. More often than not, the first I knew of Milla’s presence was that, in his excitement to get to Ollie, he bowled me over by smacking into the back of my knees. I’d look behind as I got onto my feet. Where was Milla’s master? (Like parents at the school gates – ‘Oh, hello, are you Naughty Victoria’s mum?’ – I mainly know the dog’s names, not those of the owners.) Milla’s master was nowhere in sight: in this respect, at least, Milla’s master was like me.
Every time Milla and Ollie met, each jubilant occasion which began with gangsta handshakes and high fives, the two of them would be united by a single ambition: to better the quality of the rumble they’d had the last time. It began with Milla chasing Ollie, in a figure of eight, through a chicane, then a reverse, then a playfight, then picking a playfight with another dog, then picking a playfight with a second dog, and a third, and so on, with time-outs given for group brawling.
Milla’s master would finally appear, having been left behind in a copse some way back. Milla would ignore him entirely, choosing instead to dive-bomb my pockets where he knew treats were kept. He must have weighed three times Ollie, and he was a Dobermann. The Dobermann – a blend of Pinscher, Terrier and Rottweiler as The Giant Book of the Dog will tell you – is a breed developed over a century ago by a German tax collector and part-time dog-catcher, a breed designed to protect the taxman whilst he was out dog-catching. In short, a breed developed to be fierce (it makes a terrific family pet, obviously, given firm handling).
Milla comes to say hello
In my pre-Ollie days, I would have gone out of my way to avoid a character like Milla, and even now that I knew a little of dogs, I still found him fairly alarming. He has the maddest orange eyes, like shattered marbles. Was Ollie frightened of him? After they’d done with their fighting, or sometimes during it, Ollie would try to hump his friend. As mentioned, Ollie has been neutered, but having his equipment decommissioned doesn’t stop him from feeling horny, and he makes no distinction between dogs and bitches either. Experienced owners told me he was displaying a form of dominance. (This was where I got my line for the Labrador owner at the outset; this common lore is the way in which the word is passed along.)
Ollie’s humping was an activity which appalled Jack, if it happened to take place when he was around. Jack has the characteristic homophobia associated with teenage boys and routinely uses the word ‘gay’ as a term of abuse.
‘That dog’s gay dad,’ he’d say in a suitably horrified tone.
‘Bisexual,’ I’d reply.
But whatever his preference or orientation, his behaviour out here in the open was not easy to square with his indoor persona. My best guess was that he felt safe engaging in these lurid acts because he knew that if it came to the crunch he could use his talent – his agility, his speed – to remove himself from danger. This could not apply back in the cage of our home.
I watched him rear-ending Milla. Here you had the full Ollie-paradox: frightened of flies, aprons, curtains, his loving owner, yet prepared to attempt anal intercourse with a killer-dog. On occasions I’d seen him try it on with a Great Dane, a Rottweiler and a bull-mastiff, all male, all four times his size.
‘Behaving himself, is he?’ Milla’s owner would say, as he finally caught up referring to his own charge. ‘Oh yes, great,’ I’d reply. And I meant it. Because Milla was one of the other naughty kids in class, the ones who help cast my own little angel in a better light.
Through t
he course of their game, which typically sprawled into the biggest available space – the football and rugby pitches – the other dogs that came and went provided more or less of a distraction. Ollie might try his luck, taunt a bonus run out of a distant Labrador, and often he’d get it. He could cross the ground in seconds. The distant owner would invariably be calling their dog on, not keen.
They continued to bemuse me, these people. Early in the morning, the sun out, nature showing off her new blooms, yet the prime pleasure they seemed to take in all of it was to exert authority over an animal who only wants to play, to demonstrate a superiority over rogue owners like me and Milla’s master – reprobates who introduced dogs into the public domain which were out of control.
Labradors can be very fit, athletic dogs, incidentally and, though it’s probably too late to save myself insofar as Labrador owners are concerned, Ollie numbers many friends among this breed, as in turn I have come across many excellent Labrador owners who ARE NOT STIFFS.
***
But before we ever met Milla we were still in our darkest days, and at the conclusion of our walks Ollie persisted with his neurotic evasions.
When at last I got hold of him, or someone else did it for me, I was all too often in a filthy humour, a black mood, blackened further because my options to act were so restricted. I knew that to shout, like Sparky’s owner, or to whack him on the nose – or make as if to – as I’d seen others do, would only increase the fear and confusion that was already swimming in his eyes, an expression that remained unchanged even as I gave him his treats in the back of the car, his reward for being good enough to drop his guard so low as to finally allow himself to be caught.
After a particularly grim morning outing, replayed an especially grim scene from it in my head as I fed Ollie his bits. He had dashed behind the long hedge to sledge some timid puppy, ruining someone’s day (I was left in no doubt about this), a someone who probably had to get to work, a someone for whom time was limited and precious, not a cloud-cuckoo-land dweller like me. As I fed him, it dawned on me much more clearly what had been going on with the staff who taught in one of the middle schools that Jack went to. This school had a high number of statemented pupils, children who would receive a team point or a gold star on those happy days when they didn’t throw chairs round the classroom or bite a fellow student on the ankle. The catch-all expression used to exonerate the antics of these headbangers was ADS, Attention Deficit Syndrome. I had a problem with the method the school teachers employed to deal with these cases, the system of reward. The problem I had was that it was all the un-statemented children who paid the price as the classroom was cleared while negotiations with the offending individual took place and lessons were lost. It was this politically correct half-witedness that was the principal reason that we took Jack out of that school. I recalled the methods employed by the teachers while Ollie took his last piece of steak, and I had the blinding flash: I could suddenly see how the owners of the normal dogs out in the park might see things. Did Ollie have ADS, I wondered? What was this animal’s strategy for survival?
Insofar as our relationship was concerned he didn’t appear to have one: in fact he seemed to be going backwards. Once I’d found him a few extra mouthfuls of old cheddar from my B-stash of treats, and he had semi-settled on his sheepskin throw in the car, he might relax enough to accept a stroke without fully flinching. This remained the standard; this was as good as it got between us in any confined space.
Back home I experimented with some new tactics aimed at improving relations. I tried ignoring him, but he just ignored me back. I lay flat on the floor to be lower than him, in a passive, submissive position, to see if he’d try to dominate me as he would a bull-mastiff. He’d occasionally glance my way to see if I’d gone yet. I’d try him with a squeaky toy: scary. Everything I attempted spooked him. From his point of view, my not being there was definitely best.
Additionally, and to heap on the irritation, he began to express delight upon catching sight of one of my male friends, Smut, a carpenter. Smut and I used to work together. Smut smells of dog, workshop and sawdust. Aside from these excellent characteristics, his appearance at our house could also be a signal that his own pair of canine companions, Charlie and Louis, might not be far behind (though I didn’t think that was the whole reason for Ollie preferring him to me). He would go beyond wagging his tail at the sight of my friend, he would rotate it like a propeller, and even put his feet up on his shoulders and lick him, the treacherous little bastard.
CHARLIE AND LOUIS, AND OTHER FRIENDS
Like Mingus the Dalmatian, Charlie and Louis have Jazz names, because, like Mingus’s owner, their master is a music lover of a certain disposition (one who I’ve seen practise the trumpet while sitting on the toilet). Inseparable brothers, their generic type is 57 varieties, though Charlie has a pronounced spanielness while Louis is more the pointer. Short and obsessive characters, they are outgoing and friendly, except for Louis, who can be a bit unpredictable in the sense that once in a while he’ll take a dislike to another dog and launch an attack. It’s not all that funny when it happens, and Smut’s partner had a period when she more or less gave up on taking him out for all the aggro he caused. Louis will put up with anything from Ollie, though – ear-chewing, sledging, mounting, growling and more ear-chewing. This is for a particular reason, born of self-interest; the sight of us arriving at their place inevitably signals a bonus walk for him and his brother. We take them down to a nearby meadow with a river passing through it. Charlie and Louis are great swimmers and retrievers of the stick, and they like to combine the two. In an absolutely consistent pattern of behaviour, Louis swims out to collect the object while his brother paddles idly around the river bank waiting to take it from him and present it back to us. Meanwhile Ollie, who does not swim, stands with his feet in the water and his arse in the air barking a camp ‘arf’ as he attempts in turn to steal the stick from Charlie, so that he can be the winner of this great game. On the occasions that Charlie deigns to allow Ollie to wrestle the stick, Ollie runs off with it into the long grass where he loses it.
Charlie and Louis
We once took them all to the beach where Louis found a long oar washing into shore. He took a distinct liking to the oar and carried it in his jaws all the way back to the carpark a mile away. It was over six-foot long and sodden, but he never dropped it, nor did he break stride; he was a dog on a mission from God. Though he allows the impression to be formed that it is his brother who is the brains of the team (‘Look at this chump,’ Charlie seems to say, as he walks the same mile unencumbered, removing the treasure from Louis in the last ten feet, to plant it at your feet, a personal gift), it is Louis who has the idea in the first place, and it is Louis who does the graft.
The incident of the oar confirmed an impression I had already formed; namely, that if I ever undertake an expedition to the North Pole, Louis is the dog I will take with me. When it all goes wrong, Louis will only eat small parts of my carcass, the remainder he will drag back to civilization, where no doubt his brother will be waiting to take the credit for the heroic rescue work. At the funeral Charlie will do a great job of looking mournful with his big mournful eyes, but everyone will know where the real acclaim lies.
After the bonus walk, I take Ollie back to Charlie and Louis’s place in order that he can observe the behaviour of normal dogs – both within the doors of a house, and towards me. It is all relaxed, all happy and chilled. Louis lies on a blanket, Charlie jumps up to sit on my knee. Ollie stands outside the back door in a courtyard flitting backwards and forwards, a mad look in his eyes: as with when I cock my leg, he seems to see no relationship between any of this and himself.
***
There was just one sole occasion on which he perked up at my appearance. I came home after he’d had been out with Trezza and another male friend. This friend had accidentally bashed Ollie in the head on the backswing of throwing a big stick (my thoughts went to the Vizsla breeder in Readin
g when I heard this tale, introducing, as it did, a new variation on the dangers involved).
Ollie looked up at me piteously from under his throw as I came in, like a child in its sick bed. For the first time ever he was after my sympathy. As I sat down beside him on the floor he went so far as to nearly rest his chin in my lap. I tickled behind his ears and he didn’t seem to mind. It looked like a breakthrough. Perhaps the bump on the head had done him some good? The following day, though, it was business as usual, his return to type as swift as it was predictable. It was with all seriousness that I considered that a possible route forward would be for me to pay somebody to clock him one every day.
Still, at least he was not pissing himself any more at my approach. Except that one afternoon when I came in through the back door, minding my own business, he caught sight of me and he did it again in the middle of the kitchen floor, a relapse made worse because I could conceive of no for reason it. If I’d have been asked how it was going at this point, immediately before this piss, I would have said the curve was ever so slightly upwards, but this moment stood in contradiction to such an opinion. It was completely retrograde and it upset me a lot.
Walking Ollie Page 8
