The sort of dog who finds being a pet more difficult than other dogs
We managed to break our cycle little by little, day by day, and all the other mantras associated with modifying destructive behaviour. But, like a pair of lovers giving it one more try, we had no tactics. We had a little hope now, that was all. If I could say anything, I’d say that we began to build a fragile confidence by determining that we preferred not to fail; we are both boys, after all – we don’t like to be beaten at things whether we’re good at them or not. The one tangible decision I made, if you can call it that, was to give up entirely on the notion of apportioning time in a pre-dog, normal-life manner. I guess I dedicated myself to ‘Project Ollie’.
I recall long evenings in the summer when we’d be out late enough to see the sky drift to purple as the light slipped away. I’d talk to the shift workers and the poachers and the itinerants who hang around out of hours, I’d share a sip of their beer while Ollie ran himself ragged with their dogs. I remember on the longest day of the year we arrived back after dark. So as a consequence of the volume of time we were sharing together, we got used to each other better and, while we were at it, Ollie found his exhaustion point, which made him easier to handle. I found I had less trouble getting him to return to me when he was lying down, panting, wasted, and wanting to be carried home.
The nights drew in and the clocks went back, and for the first time this had a practical effect on me. You can let some dogs roam in the dark, but Ollie isn’t one of them. The gap between our first and second walk in the short winter days was so brief that sometimes we’d be out and about for most of the daylight hours. And, as bit by bit our confidence together grew, and experience began to show that (albeit eventually) he could be relied upon to return even when he wasn’t exhausted, I began to be able to use the time to think. This, I could vaguely regard as work. I had not been able to think while we were out together before because so much of the time had been typified by crisis, and crisis does not allow for thinking, crisis is panic, and panic prevents thought. This I know well, because I began to suffer panic attacks some years ago; I’ve had them on and off for the biggest part of a decade.
At first I ignored them, like you do with intermittent toothache, hoping they’d go away. And when they didn’t go away, and became more frequent, and started happening in weird places where there was no danger or stress or anything you could use to explain them – say, paying in a cheque at a bank counter – I tried some conventional medicine.
I went to the doc, my blood and urine was sampled, I was referred here and there, but all to no avail. I was offered beta blockers, but I knew they only gave you a heart attack so I never took them. I tried some homeopathic remedies which were as potent as wine gums. My main approach after these treatment failures was to revert to plan A and pretend that nothing was happening, that everything was okay. And much of the time everything was okay, the attacks were episodes, moments. But they were long moments when they came along, moments during which my heart would be racing, I couldn’t breath properly, and I was sweating even without chasing a dog in 100of. In fact it could start in a cold room. It’s difficult to pretend this isn’t happening when, in fact, it is. In the aftermath I would feel spent, unable to think, good only for a lie down in a dark room.
In Ollie’s second summer he went through a sequence of injuries that necessitated many visits to the vet, and I began to have these attacks at the surgery. It was during a period in which they had been getting worse anyway. I could more or less guarantee one if anybody started encroaching into my personal space and messing about with me, say, at the dentist or the opticians. Something about proximity to other people, while at the same time being out of control, of lacking authority, brought it on. And so, without going into detail of the therapy involved – because it’s not pertinent to this story, and because I’m superstitious that talking about it will reverse the good it has done – I forced myself to get some alternative help, which – and here I touch the wood – has worked pretty well: I’m about ninety per cent better than I was.
The unlikely rescuer
That humans use dogs as a psychological crutch is not in doubt; I see people talking with them every single day. Owners often describe how their animal can sense their distress if they are upset, how they will move to comfort them, or put on a happy face if they are feeling low. It’s never been this way for me and Ollie (though I do conduct conversations with him). If anything, dysfunctional as it’s been, it’s me who is his emotional support. And of course, I look after his physical well-being. The vets business was the final straw for me: I could put up with a certain amount of disruption to my own life as a result of these attacks, but I could not accept a situation whereby I could not take my dog to a surgery – for him to be cured for fuck’s sake – without me suffering a crisis and people having to worry on my account instead of about the real problem, the gash in his front pad. The way I see it, it was Ollie who finally forced me to the therapy from which I had so long shied away (my attitude to the visit of Attila says it all). In this sense, it was Ollie who rescued me.
***
One morning as we were beginning our walk I met an old boy who had lost his dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier. The animal had been missing for an hour or so, which, by all accounts, was uncharacteristic. In my experience, Norfolk males are amongst the most reluctant in England when it comes to showing emotion; all the same I could see that the man was in misery.
‘What’s he look like?’ I asked.
‘Big,’ he replied. (This is a typical exchange of information with a Norfolk man.) I said I’d keep an eye out for the animal, but without any hope that I’d find him, which I didn’t. By the time we got back to the car, and I was opening the tailgate to let Ollie in, I had forgotten about the lost dog. It took a second glance to notice that the creature sauntering in my direction up the middle of the road was a Staffie, a big one, with a red spotted hankie knotted round his neck (it would have been worth a mention, in the description, the red hankie, I thought). The only other information I had was that he was of good temperament, so I made my way towards him and I attached him to Ollie’s lead. As I turned and walked back to the car, wondering what to do next, I saw Ollie staring out of the window and looking cross. He had his head tilted to one side as if to say, ‘Oi! What’s all this?’
The lost dog had a phone number on its tag. I called it – a mobile – and arranged to meet round the other side of the park. I put the animal in the passenger seat, to prevent a disturbance going on in the back. Ollie glowered at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve never been allowed to sit there,’ the look said. ‘What’s the game?’
After owner and pet had been reunited, and I had the tenner reward forced on me, I opened the tailgate so the old boy could have a better look at Ollie. To show his proprietorship, Ollie made as if to lick my hand, a first.
The old boy drove off in his car, a MkI Ford Granada with doors in different colours. I notice cars – I noticed that model because it reminded me of the car some hoodlum friends knocked about in when I was young, and even more so of the opening titles to the Seventies cop show The Sweeney, of which I was a devotee. There was a time I used to covet a Ford Granada (the 3-litre was ‘an absolute torque monster’, as one of the hoodlum friends put it) but the moment passed. You don’t get many of them about these days – the last time I’d seen one it was up on blocks at a boarding kennels and had a bull-mastiff living in it.
In the very worst of Ollie’s early days we booked a last-minute holiday to Greece. We needed a break – not just from him, but he was part of it. In the same last-minute spirit, we’d had to take such kennelling as was available at short notice. The woman sounded fine on the phone, but when we got there we didn’t like her, or her attitude. She was careless, offhand, maybe not entirely sober, and the Ford and its resident did not seem a good sign either. But we were catching a plane out of Stansted in two hours’ time – it was either leave him there or
forfeit a holiday. As we drove to the airport Trezza fretted and cursed herself for not personally checking the place in advance. I said to forget it, there’d been no time for checking, that we’d sort out a nicer place for the future (we did), that however five-star a kennel might be, for him it’d still be a kennel, wouldn’t it, away from his selection of beds and duvets and throws. ‘He’ll be fine,’ I said. Though I thought it unlikely he’d come to any harm, I didn’t entirely believe my own words, I was saying them primarily to calm her down, and at moments through the holiday I entertained piteous thoughts about him and his circumstances.
The flight back from Greece was due to land early in the afternoon, which would have given us time to collect Ollie, but it was delayed. It was a Friday, and the last pick-up time allowed at the kennels was 6 o’clock. By the time we were finally driving out of the carpark I was pushing it to make this deadline. Missing the cut would have condemned Ollie to a further weekend’s board because the nasty owner didn’t open on a Saturday. It was a typical holiday return, rain coming down in buckets, articulated lorries pulling into the overtaking lane for no reason, an accident on the A11. None of this helped me. If the Sweeney had caught sight of us at any point along this drive I’d have been well-nicked: I U-turned on main carriageways, overtook badly on B-roads, cut corners at junctions, lane-hopped, and sped like a torque monster. I was a menace. All of which enabled us to pull in through the kennel gates at 18.01. The woman glanced at her watch and gave me a look, which I returned with interest as I handed her the folding.
With monsoon conditions continuing, it wasn’t possible to tell whether Ollie was pleased to see Trezza or not; he took a soaking simply by making his way from his pen to the car. He leapt in, shook himself, and shivered. At that time he was certainly unmoved to see me, and displayed no sign that I might even be considered an improvement on a rain-lashed kennels run by a drunk and featuring a bull-mastiff living in a Ford Granada. Yet I had risked life and limb to get there, just to save him from a couple more nights in a place where I imagined he would prefer not to be.
You lose your marbles when you’ve got a dog, that’s what happens.
***
Ollie is just over two now and I would not be without him. I worry about how I’ll replace him when he dies, and already I know it won’t be possible. Where I used to notice a pretty girl walking down the street, these days my attention is as likely to be caught, in the first instance, at least, by the good-looking Pointer that she’s walking. Worse than a person who keeps a dog, I have become a dog lover. Sometimes I surf websites imagining a playmate for Ollie. Not breeder sites, from where we could get ourselves a sensible puppy that we could train from the outset, but rescue sites, because now we have come through this, I could repeat the exercise.
In my own world I have become the dog guru I sometimes pretend to be. And as I have come to know one lurcher, lurchers have become my dog. I am ‘in the breed’, as they say (even if it is an unclassified breed). I know of the distinctions between the different crosses, I know about ‘long dogs’ and all manner of lurcher ephemera which a couple of years ago would have interested me as much as knowing what sort of tree a birch is. If someone offered me a lurcher fridge magnet now I would take it, and after accepting it, I would probably even use it.
You lose your marbles when you’ve got a dog; that’s what happens
The thought has crossed my mind that I could rescue a very young dog and take it over to Shay in Galway for some tuition. But then the counter thought has crossed my mind that to be in the company of an accomplished rabbiter might make Ollie feel inadequate. So, for the moment at least, I think better of it.
There will be another dog one day. It’s bound to happen.
But there will never be another Ollie.
He slit the pads on his front paws three times in six months, accidents acquired simply by running and catching his feet on glass or flint, each wound requiring stitches and bandages, each episode laying him off for three weeks. At the sight of Ollie our regular vet, Gerhard, shakes his head and reaches for his suture kit. During his periods of convalescence I have sat on the sofa with him, and our trust together has grown to the extent that, in the absence of his friends Milla, Charlie, Louis and all the rest, he has made do with play-fighting me: I put my hand in his mouth and pull on his lower jaw, we have a tug-of-war.
It is three weeks after the third slit pad has healed that he gets knocked over, the accident I mentioned to the young whippet owner at the beginning. I am not with him at the time, he is out with Trezza. In a completely unpredictable manner – going off the path at a point he’d passed a hundred times before without going off the path – Ollie shot sideways, cleared a ditch, and ran into a car (it seems he had sighted a rabbit). The driver had no chance. Trezza was in pieces afterwards, as was I. Fortunately he has been blessed with more lives than a cat, and he needs them. The impact of the collision threw him back into the ditch, his radius and ulna fractured and punctured through the pelt of his front right leg.
The drive to the vet took place through late-night Christmas shopping traffic, lasted a long time, and was particularly harrowing. He was patched up and put on an emergency drip, which he managed to disconnect at some point in the night. Still, he survived that. As he caught sight of me as we arrived to pick him up in the morning, and even with the leg encased in a thick temporary dressing like a human plastercast, he tried to run towards me. It was heartbreaking, and at the same time the embodiment of the type of thinking that got him into trouble in the first place. We drove to an orthopaedic surgical specialist in North Norfolk where he stayed for the best part a week (though they discharged him early – he didn’t like it there, and they were anxious to get rid of him, ‘before he did any more damage to himself’). He had a six-inch metal plate and ten screws set into the bone, but, apart from this serious injury, the rest was just cuts and bruises: to run headlong into a BMW and live to tell the tale isn’t bad going.
Back home his three month rehabilitation programme started with trips round the block, on the lead, building up from just five minutes a day in week one to 60 minutes a day in week twelve. The early period of this curtailed activity was particularly trying because, as Gordon, the orthopaedic specialist, said to us, ‘He’ll feel fine, as though he could behave as normal.’ In this way, a five-minute walk could take half an hour because Ollie developed a routine featuring any number of sit-down protests all the way round the block, i.e. every ten steps.
As the trips lengthened, and in contrast to our beginnings, it was he who came to pester me to take him out at night-time. He is a very strong dog – to complete the reversal of the early days, it was he who dragged me round the scary streets down to Carrow Road and back.
As the time neared when he received his clean bill of health, as his bone density returned, each day we went jogging together in parkland, still using the leash, just to get him moving a bit faster, and to warm his muscles. All this enforced proximity finalised our bond.
He actually came up to my office and wagged his tail. He will sit under my desk while I type now, and sometimes he will lick my bare feet, which can only mean they taste nice, like horse manure.
As the moment came closer for his life to return to normal, as I counted down to the official off-lead date, I found myself itching to slip the ring and let him go. Because there were two things I missed during the period of his confinement more than I would have imagined possible. One was watching him run. The other was walking with him, out in nature, seeing him free, and being free myself.
POSTSCRIPT TO THE FIRST EDITION
It would be remiss of me not to mention something that happened between the handing in of the original manuscript for Walking Ollie, the publication of the hardcover, and the reappearance of this book in paperback.
As Ollie ‘normalised’ (this will always remain a relative term, in his case), the something that happened was this: I became obsessed with the idea that what he really needed was a
canine companion. I spent an ever increasing amount of time online looking at Lurcherlink and other lurcher rescue sites. Here I would read reports and study pictures of dogs that were, like Ollie at the outset, deserving cases, and worse. Occasionally I’d see one that I thought might make a good brother or sister for him, but I would step back from doing anything about it for the obvious reason: did I really want to go through all this again? The answer was, No.
So instead I took an obvious, lunatic, step sideways. At a certain point it occurred to me that to the best of my knowledge, we had never, on any of our walks, come across a pure Saluki, the breed to which I have always attributed the biggest part of Ollie’s troubles. What would one be like, I wondered, in real life? I searched Saluki breeders. They were relatively few in number, but on one particular website I saw a gallery of dogs that were rather fine-looking and elegant. So I emailed the site asking if there were any plans for puppies. ‘There may be,’ came the reply.
Trezza and I drove down to see the breeder, who lives a couple of hours away from Norwich. She had six Salukis which were restricted to her kitchen as we arrived. As she opened the door to allow the pack into the lounge, all but one (the one who is reserved and shy, the Ollie) rushed at us immediately to say their Hellos with a normal measure of barking, licking and sniffing. After the excitement had died down, which took only a minute or two, they each settled onto their personal rugs and cushions and sat quietly observing us. The breeder was assessing us, too, to see if we might be fit persons to become potential new owners for her lineage, and I expected as much, from those early Vizsla days. What was surprising was that the dogs were examining us in the same way. Much as Yul Brynner does to Deborah Kerr in The King and I, we were given a thorough once-over. We were being weighed and measured. By dogs. I was much taken with this attitude, and with their general regal deportment. Most were ‘feathered’, that is with long frayed ears and a fringe running along the underside of the tail, but the future father was without these adornments; he was ‘a smooth silver grizzle’. Grizzle is a term that describes the way his coat blended from one tone of silver to another. If he were a horse he would be that most beautiful of animals, a grey.
Walking Ollie Page 10