My first dog was a boxer named Pucho. He came to our house on a cool November afternoon, a few weeks before Christmas. He was really tiny and cute, a face flat as a miniature pancake with a black stubby nose sticking out in front. He came in a cardboard box wrapped in a blanket, and he already had a name, engraved on a shiny tag on his collar. It was a gift from my father’s cousin, who had a bitch called Balalaika that had recently given birth to a small litter of puppies. Pucho was pure bred, an expensive gift by any standards, and a sign of my dad’s cousin appreciation for us. I was eight years old at the time, and had never had a dog before. Pucho immediately became the center of my whole life, and I started to make great plans for his future. He was going to go with me everywhere I went, specially to the next street where the “gang” hung around waiting for little kids on bicycles to venture into their territory where they would immediately confiscate any worldly possessions you happened to be carrying with you, like your money, your pants or both. With Pucho on my side, I fantasized strolling right past them with confidence, safe and secure on my loyal fierce companion’s deterrence. I wanted to try this dare right away, but was discouraged by Pucho’s inability to walk with the necessary poise the moment required (or to walk at all, for that matter). His head didn’t reach to the top of my cowboy boots, so I figured I had to wait for a few days until he would put on some weight and cut enough teeth to pose a real threat to anyone with mean intentions.
We sat around the living room with my dad’s cousin, playing with the new furry creature. When bedtime came along, we said good night to the grown-ups, and took Pucho into the TV room to sleep, after he had taken care of a few ounces of bottled milk and gone potty on my lap. Everyone went to bed and I said goodnight to my new best friend. As soon as the last light on the house was turned off, a long series of yips and wails started to fill the almost sleep household. The sounds would immediately stop when the lights were back on, but resumed simultaneously at the touch of the off switch. After a few lights-off, yip-yips, lights-on, silence routines, dad tried leaving the TV room light on, thinking that this should take care of the short circuit. It didn’t work. As dad climbed stealthily into his bed, Pucho wobbled out of his box, parked himself in the living room, peed, and started yelping pitifully again. This went on for what seemed like hours, until I suggested for Pucho to sleep with me in my bedroom, where I could talk softly to him until he fell asleep. A little desperate by now, dad agreed, and so Pucho became my room mate for good.
A week before Christmas, my dad’s cousin came back to visit, this time bringing her dog Balalaika. Pucho was totally besides himself, which slightly confused Balalaika who didn’t remember having had identical little twins. My dad’s cousin went into the house with my dad, while leaving Balalaika and his son to my care on the front yard. I intended to take her and little Pucho for a walk around the block, to test my theory on the effectiveness of boxer dogs on the gang. I wrapped Balalaika’s leash around my wrist and instructed her to follow me. She didn’t. She sat in front of the closed main door to my house, where she had seen her owner disappear a few minutes earlier, her nose pressed against the wood as if glued there by a mysterious kind of magnetism. No matter what I tried, she wouldn’t budge. I petted her, pulled hard on her leash, pleaded with her, all to no avail. She remained there, whimpering softly, nose to the door.
Alcira, our old Colombian house-keeper must have walked by the door and heard the strange noises, so she opened it to check what it was. The effect of the opening door was instantaneous and explosive on Balalaika, who dashed forward at rocket speed between Alcira’s legs, leaving little skid marks on the porch’s floor and a small cloud of dust in the air. My dad and his cousin were having coffee in the kitchen, which was all the way on the other side of the large house. Balalaika had never been to our house before and she was not familiar with it’s layout, so she took an ever accelerating reconnaissance trip around the dining room, a couple of bedrooms and the living room before she heard the voice of my dad’s cousin in the kitchen. Then, she made a hair-pin 180° turn and followed the voice trail to the kitchen.
I could follow this complex itinerary closely and accurately, since my hand was, from the very beginning of the trip, tightly wrapped around the other end of her leash. This small fact helped explained some of the amazing wreckage left at Balalaika’s passing. I report here that while a dog’s body is fairly streamlined and shaped to squeeze through some very tight spaces (like between the legs of people, chairs and other furniture), the body of a thrashing eight-year old is not so streamlined—actually it is quite a bit bulkier—to squeeze through the same passages.
Alcira, after the locomotive part of the freight train went under her, didn’t wait for the rest of the convoy to knock her over, so she jumped a couple of feet up in the air in a manner I didn’t think possible in a person her age. If I had had the time, I would have compared her jump with some African dances I had seen once on TV, the spread-legged leap, the war-like cry, the wide-open eyes, and other details, but I was too busy concentrating on thrashing about trying to dislodge my hand from the leash. I couldn’t do it in the first few seconds of the journey, and soon other more pressing matters took my full attention, specifically the fast approaching forest of table and chair legs that Balalaika was planning to go across. Like an heat-seeking missile, able to make sharp turns and sudden changes in direction, Balalaika weaved a wavy line through the little forest, paying little notice to the carnage being staged behind her. Not only did I plow through the chair legs like a runaway tractor, but the momentum of Balalaika’s switches and turns was related to my body through the leash in wide-sweeping arches, which increased the mowing effect on the furniture. By the time we got through the dining room, the first populated station on our journey, there was not a chair left standing, and the table, while still on four legs, had a wobble that was to last for the rest of its useful life. Dad, who was pretty handy with tools, was never able to stop it completely from wobbling. I came out off the first station of the track more or less in one piece, but the best parts were ahead of us.
The next station was the master bedroom, towards which Balalaika headed at full speed. She crossed the half-opened door at Match 1 with me close behind. At the doorway I left my first sample of skin, a combination patch of elbow, ribs and knee hide, wrinkled on the sharp edge of the door. She went under the bed and came out the other side, giving me a chance to inspect closely the wildlife under the mattress (lots of cow webs and maybe a surprised spider or two). It is amazing how your senses get magnified when adrenaline is fully flowing through your veins. My sister’s bedroom was next on the schedule, and there, Balalaika got a little confused, stopping for a microsecond to get her bearings before trying out a new direction. I took the opportunity to get on my one good knee, and attempted once more to dislodge myself from the leash using my teeth. She made up her mind and shot out of the bedroom, and me and my teeth went shooting right after. She then went to the living room, straight towards the couch, jumped on top of it, and somersaulted cleanly over my head. The momentum carried me head on towards the bottom of the couch, under which I wedged with an guttural Oomph! As she shot back again to her cruising speed, the leash wrapped around my shoulders and pulled me painfully from under the couch, leaving a raw burn mark on my neck (which I, child weaned on TV spaghetti westerns, later showed to my friends as evidence that once I was hung from a tree branch by a bunch of outlaws, but survived to hunt them down like dogs).
Finally, Balalaika heard the unmistakable voice of my dad’s cousin coming from the kitchen, turned sharply (more skin detachment against some furniture and rubber skid marks on the walls from my cowboy boots), and came to a triumphant stop in front of her owner, spilling her coffee and pronouncing a sharp “Hello there!” bark. It took my dad a few minutes to realize I was the mangled body that had been dragged behind Balalaika and deposited by his feet. With the dog under control now, he and his cousin worked on setting me free and rearranging my scrambled body parts into the shape of the kid I was supposed to look like. After regaining my speech and muscular coordination, I helped dad pick up the tipped-over chairs and collect the little bits of my anatomy from the assorted furniture and walls. Pucho wandered into the house at last, carrying in his mouth his little own leash. He had liked so much the demonstration that he was ready to try it himself.
Life resumed its normal pace, and Pucho grew like a well-watered weed into a strapping young dog. My hopes of having him as my personal protector were fulfilled fully. Whenever my friends came to play at my house, Pucho would put on his full body guard attitude and carried on his duties flawlessly. This made for particularly impressive demonstrations of his abilities. Any time one of my friends would attempt to jostle with me or even put a hand on my shoulder, he would find himself facing the business end of a mean-looking dog, all growls and teeth. One day I figured it was time to put Pucho’s resume to the test, so we prepared for a stroll around the next street gang’s territory. We started walking up the street towards the corner when a large German shepherd belonging to one of our neighbors appeared walking casually towards us in the middle of the street. Pucho interpreted his presence in the street as a direct insult and took off running towards him with a steady low growl. The German shepherd, who was really minding his own business, didn’t take kindly this interpretation of his alleged breach to my personal security, so he responded in kind, grabbed Pucho by the scruff of the neck and gave him a solid thrashing.
Pucho did as best as he could in this first true fight, and not being totally stupid and willing to recognize a mistake when he made one, tried to reason with the German shepherd, attempting to withdraw from the fight by tucking his little stubby tail under his legs in true “I give up” fashion. I guessed that because of his very short tail, the shepherd wasn’t able to see it in time and get the message. Besides, he was getting warmed up to the fight by now and knew he had the best part of it. Meanwhile, I was trying with all my strength to separate the two of them, although there was little I could really do by yelling to the top of my lungs from ten feet away, the only safe distance from the whirl of flying teeth and fur. Eventually, with a final chomp to Pucho’s rear end, the German shepherd ended the fight and walked away. Pucho laid motionless sprawled in the middle of the street. There was blood and spit all over him, and I was sure he was dead. I knelt besides him and cradled his head on my lap, crying. By then we had acquired a small audience of cars and pedestrians who looked in silence at the pitiful scene. A boy and his dead dog.
But Pucho was not really dead. He slowly opened one of his eyes and gave me a questioning look that clearly said “Is he gone yet?” He then took a quick look around to make sure the shepherd was truly gone, and stood up wagging his tail, ready to go home and tell everyone how he had bravely defended me. It was then when I realized how smart Pucho really was. He had tricked that dumb dog in believing he was dead, thus defusing his attention from me, the important person he was to protect. Cheers arose from the audience as Pucho and I walked back proudly to the house to take care of his battle wounds. He was to give me many more examples of his incredible intelligence for years to come.
Carlos
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