I have just come in from the garden where there is a newly dug hole I can snugly fit into and sneak out to visit another beautiful German Shepherd down the street.
This is no saccharine story of puppy love, however, she told me she is now expecting and I'm the father. Her master threw a china mug at me and shouted something about taking me to the vet.
But I digress, my mistress is reading a book called The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. It is a simple story with an animal as the central character. It’s about a woman in New York - the narrator, who reluctantly inherits a dog - a Great Dane, when its owner, her friend, a womanising professor who has been married three times, commits suicide. Apollo is bewildered by the loss of his master but finds the woman bonding with him through their shared mourning and manages to persuade her landlord to let her keep him in her tiny New York apartment.
Much of the book is about the relationship between humans and animals: “They may know us better than we know them.”
This is very true. My mistress once, on one of our walks stood and ‘chatted’ with a cow in a field, who stopped her meditational chewing and turned to look at me, its eyes full of knowingness. Mindful moments like these remind me how dogs and other intelligent animals are old souls.
I am also a good and clever boy. She told me so. Rocco. X
