The dog.

He’s sort of the forgotten member of the family these days. Quite literally sometimes when, for example, I stumble over a neglected empty water bowl or remember half an hour before bedtime that he hasn’t been walked. I feel bad for him sometimes, he’s been through a lot – with transcontinental moves and the like – and is watching his position in the pack slide as he gets older and this endless stream of hairless pups come aboard.

I got the dog – dubbed Timmins after the northern Ontario town that my parents called home -  in the late Spring of 2001. He was a husky puppy of questionable parentage acquired to serve as a calming influence to my unmanageable Siberian bitch. The bitch died a couple of months later, a victim of some poorly disposed antifreeze and her own unruliness. The idea of Timmins as stable pony would never have worked anyway as he turned out to have obedience issues of his own. For the first couple of years of his life, I spent countless hours chasing him and threatening violence upon him and any devil spawn that he may have been unlucky enough to create.

The dog was an escape artist. We moved into a wonderful old rambling house near downtown Columbia, Missouri. The landlord was generous enough to put up a brand new chain link fence around the surprisingly large back yard. Within a half hour of his release into his new domain, the dog was over the fence in a single leap and off in a cloud of white hair after some vermin (cat, squirrel or other). I coralled some of my work mates into taking an afternoon off to help me erect an electric wire around the top of the fence. The initial shock wore off in a couple of days with the realization that he could still clear the fence with a running jump and he was off again, me cursing in tow. Every single time we hosted a party in that Missouri house, not an infrequent event, one of the regular party games was one that I like to call ‘chase the damn dog around the neighborhood because some drunken moron left the front door open’.  I have scars – literal scars – from this particular game.

The damn dog was wild, more lupine than canine. Genetically, huskies and their ilk are more closely related to their wolf ancestors than other breeds and you could certainly see that in Timmins behavior. He wanted to hunt not play fetch, wanted to run with a pack not sit at my feet in front of the fireplace.

But our canine friends are ingenious at endearing themselves to us and when the time came for Dr. O’C and I to take the long trip over the Atlantic to Blighty, there was little talk of leaving the dog behind. So, six months and thousands of dollars later (not to mention a last minute trip back by your underwhelming correspondent to physically put the dog on the plane) Timmins was happily leaping the mouldering fences of Oxford. During his time in Britain, the dog developed quite the taste for British fauna that made me yearn for the days of chasing him around the neighborhood. The fact that he wasn’t shot by some angry English sheepherder is a miracle.

Actually, let me tell you that story. Dr. O’C and I, in the heady pre-Boy Z days, were off on a long ramble with the dog out in some pasture land on the west side of Oxford. We had him off lead as there wasn’t much out there and without distractions, he was pretty good off the lead.

I don’t remember which of us saw the herd of sheep first, but there was no time to respond before Timmins either got a whiff or a sight of pungent fluffy prey. In a way it was like watching a nature documentary – he was off at top speed, staying low along the fence line. He hurdled the fence without breaking stride and begand to bear down on his prey.  Sheep, being sheep, didn’t recognize danger until it was too late. The dog began circling the sheep, corralling them into a herd. He picked out the weakest – a young ewe – and struck, grabbing the sheep by the neck and pulled her down to the ground.

It took us a while to sort out the situation (actually I think Dr. O’C sorted out the situation as I recall). As there was no farmer or house to be seen, we took the easy way out and high-tailed it home. I rang my boss at the time, a landed Englishwoman with a couple of dogs that had been involved in livestock altercations in the past. She asked the obvious question, was the sheep dead? In our haste to leave the scene of the crime, we hadn’t spent much time evaluating the health of the sheep. We got on our bikes, may have changed clothes as well, and rode back to check on the sheep. It was gone. I chose then and choose now to believe that the sheep was merely stunned – a flesh wound, if you will.

Sheep killer (stunner) or no, we didn’t leave him in Columbia so we certainly weren’t going to leave him in Oxford. So 10,000 miles, 28 days in dog jail and thousands of pounds later Timmins set foot on his third continent in his short life a free dog. A Free Dog. Maybe it’s all the travel and the confinement associated with it, maybe he’s getting a bit longer in the tooth (he’s 8 this month) or maybe he’s just tired of the chase, but he’s a different dog these days. He’s trustworthy off the lead. He doesn’t jump fences. You’ve seen what he lets the kid do to him.

timminssamsonEvery now and again he’ll go on a brief walkabout through a door left carelessly ajar. Occasionally some primal instinct, despite being neutered since he was a pup, will take over resulting in some embarrassment on beach walks.

For the most part, however, he stays in the yard. Contentedly sitting on the porch, keeping an eye out over his domain.

And now he resignedly lets a little boy sit on his back, pull his ears, smack him with a cricket bat and run a truck along his supine form. With another one on the way, his golden years are likely to be spent fending off a constant stream of attacks from two hairless pups rather than just the one.

It’s a little sad really. All I wanted when he was a younger dog was to extinguish that feral fire. I wanted a golden retriever, a dog that obeyed my commands and rested quietly at my feet when not needed.  Now that I’ve got that kind of dog, I kind of miss the wolf.

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I’ve got another great Swedish artist for you today from Omaha’s Series Two Records. Big Picture is singer-songwriter Mikael Salomonsson, currently based in Beijing. His self-titled debut came out last year and features guest appearances from Peter Gunnarsson (Suburban Kids With Biblical Names) and Lina Cullemark (Springfactory). If you like this track, the album is available from Chris at Series Two.

 
icon for podpress  Big Picture "About A Dog" [3:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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