Teary-eyed, we left Charlie and Peppa behind us in Spain. Before we left, I sat them down and made a speech about how they will always stay in my heart, and how I would always honor their great unchained spirits, and how, when I dream of the things that fill every corner of my essence with joy, love, compassion, devotion, and tireless commitment – notice I’m leaving out “intelligence”? – that my mind would be painted with pictures of each of them, blah blah etc. Charlie was bored, and might have drooled. Peppa tried to slink away mid-speech; maybe she got into the peanut butter again. And felt guilty. Don’t ask.
We boarded a plane for Dubai. Just to say we were there. Then we boarded again for the long flight to Australia. Four weeks in Toowoomba! Who else can make that claim? Well, you know what they say: You leave two silly canines behind you in Spain, two more are waiting in Toowoomba. They all say that.
This was not to be a cakewalk. First, weighing in around forty kilos, looking like Charlie only with a little more pudge, a little less hunting pedigree, and an innocent “you can trust me” used-car salesman demeanor, there was Chopper. He was about nine and still active and alert, but not in a very good environment, emotionally speaking, because of his fellow canine-in-arms. Dog Number two, who happens to be very brown -just sayin’- was 1 and weighed, get this : sixty kilos. Max was a Rhodesian Ridgeback who was bred to, get this : hunt lions. At this point my wife decided “Get this : you’ll be walking Max”.
Poor Chopper! Anytime he wanted a pat or a cuddle or a treat there was Max, butting his big ol’ bull’s head in where it didn’t belong. Being a puppy, and having the power of an elephant and the violent athleticism of a charging rhino, and having beautiful dark-brown lachrymose eyes you can’t be mad at, Max garnered most of the attention, most of the tidbits, most of everything.
A great and typical Max story: one time I was in the bathroom shaving when Max came in wondering what I was doing in there. Unfortunately the first part of the bathroom is a little narrow for anyone not named Max. Or elephants. Max wandered in and noticed almost immediately that he would not be able to turn around, so he did what anyone would have done in a similar situation: he backed out.
Oh, Max, we miss you.
My favorite activity with Max would be eating on the porch, upon a table which is exactly the right size for every creature on Earth except Max. We would be eating, and Max would stroll over, looking for scraps, and Bonk! he’d ram his head on the table. Never fill the glasses too full when eating outside! Or else it’s Bonk! Splash! We always ate lunch outside- come dinnertime there were too many mosquitoes – and at every meal there Max would Bonk! his head at least twice. Since it was hot, he would sometimes seek the shade under the table, and oh! what fun that was when he discovered something interesting farther away there, and he would make the attempt to crawl under the crossbeams (?) of the table, or once, a chair! This would all end very badly, as if Max was trying on furniture as a kind of cape; I wonder if he even noticed the mayhem he was causing.
Sometimes we made the mistake of taking him for his walk too close to the midday heat, and he would come back to the house plum tuckered out, and when he plopped down his head would hit the floorboards so hard you could hear it anywhere, even down the street.
Max loved to play, and it was always a screaming laugh riot to play one of his two favorite games with him: 1), eating your hand. Most of the time none of us wanted to play “Hand-chomper Max”, so he would play anyway, and you’d have to wait until your hand was coated in enough of his stomach juices for him to get bored and quit. Game Nr. 2) was “Jump the human”, which has been played by dogs all over this planet for thousands of years but probably never with so much pain. Especially when Max jumps your back, and you feel layers of epidermises being exposed to our atmosphere like the innards of an onion while peeling. Fun!
Max also loved food, so when you weren’t looking you could bet he was pilfering goodies from the cat’s Automatic Cat Food Dispenser, from ACME, maybe, and more than once we found it empty. When he was bored he got his circus games mixed up and loped over to the cat to insert its’ head into his esophagus. He thought that was a swell game; the cat, not so much. But I don’t want to tell you about a cat-gargling dog. I wanted to talk about taking the dogs for a walk.
Taking Chopper for a walk was a chore in itself; he wasn’t afraid of anyone and had never been taught to heel or behave or not eat the chickens, etc., so if there was another dog or cat or bird somewhere he felt like he had to play the tough guy. My thirteen-year-old daughter was challenged more than once as Chopper got a head of steam real fast and went for something else in his line of sight; I was proud of her for handling him admirably. But Max was another story. You had to keep him on a very short leash, because if he were to get rolling then someone was going to get hurt. Usually me.
This lack of discipline was the reason you could never let either of them run around anywhere without a leash. I’m convinced there has been no drop-off in my ability to do pull-ups because of the effort and energy I was forced to expend trying to hold that Mack Truck of a dog back. I’m writing this about three weeks after we came out of a park and an aggressive dog behind a chicken-wire fence starting barking unexpectedly right up close, baring and gnashing his drool-coated teeth. Chopper and Max went right for him, and even though I was mostly ready for it Max yanked at his leash so hard I can still move my right middle finger only with pain.
Him being brown and clumsy, I liked to call him Marmadufus. Marmadufus and I went on a short (5K) run once that turned out to be my revenge tour with him. You wanna yank me around the neighborhood like King Kong dragging Fay Wray? Fine, let’s go Dawg!!! I kept it nice and slow; even though it was early it was already warm, and Max was not used to a steady pace over longer stretches. It was glorious! He stayed with me the whole time, hardly tugged at all, and the best part was that he LOVED IT! That’s the kind of exercise he signed up for.
Then we got back home.
I opened the gate. He dragged his heavy paws onto the property while I closed the gate. And that is where he collapsed, exhausted. I could barely get the leash off because he couldn’t raise his thick skull.
A touching moment with Max: We were relaxing in the living room, sipping on smoothies and watching our standard afternoon documentary when Max came in, ignored the room my wife had made for him at her end of the couch and plopped himself somewhat next to, but mostly on, because there was really no room, me. There he cuddled for the entire documentary, providing me with several numbed limbs and a deficit of oxygen that had me seeing stars.
A housewife’s nightmare: Much of the land is a rich, reddish kind of clay maybe that’s very dusty when it’s dry and very messy when it’s wet. Imagine what the living room looked like the day that began with a hard rainfall and continued with Max wandering through that wet clay before making his way inside to find a comfy place on the couch!
I like cats.
Our time with Max and Chopper was spent trying to get through these walks and dousing them with a Lavender Essential oil: for Max as a calming agent and for Chopper because of his B.O. Near the end of our time together, my daughter and I washed him on the patio, which he enjoyed so much he shook himself furiously when we were done, then went straight to the grass and clay to roll the stink back onto himself.
Yes, it was extremely challenging taking those two goons for their walks, especially cleaning up after one of Max’s “bombing missions”, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Youth is also a force of nature that must be, first and foremost, enjoyed, then dealt with and protected when a lack of discipline could prove dangerous. They both kept us on our guard and it was great to know they were getting the exercise they not only wanted but needed.
The time had come, however, to say goodbye and to move on to what would be, in many ways, our greatest challenge : taking care of two poodles. Yes, we’re cat people but we’re open to dogs, too, mostly. The more they bark, or bite, or don’t listen, or fuc_everything up the less so, but I believe I can speak for all of the members of our family when I say that poodles are the absolute dregs, not only of the canine world but also the entire animal kingdom.
But more of that in Part 3…