biting the wrong dog

In Perth, we had a dog called Raffie. I liked her a lot. We’d got her second hand, and she was half rottweiler, half German shepherd. She was very loyal, too. Our other dog was called Shamwari, which meant friend. This dog was a really smart dog, and really tough, too. Once, he had come in through the window, knocking out the flyscreen on entrance, head covered full of blood, like some red plastic shield or mask. It’s how he looked without the hair upon his forehead. My mother said he must have had a collision with a car, a near miss, but he had come home, shaking it off, as if nothing had really happened. In truth, he was probably just dazed and following his instincts. Sham was a really smart dog, but Raffy not so much. It was a danger to feed them close together, because as they snatched up the cubes that had inevitably fallen out of and around their dishes due to their frenzied eating, their noses would eventually meet along the trail, and, getting the fright of their lives at such a close encounter, hair would fly as they laid into each other with the most ferocious antagonism.

Sham was half bull terrier and half an Australian cattle dog, a blue heeler. He knew his way around and didn’t miss a trick, often scratching and whining on our bedroom doors first thing in the morning, until one of us opened up a door to let him in. Once inside the bedroom of the weary occupant, he would walk resolutely up to the head of the bed, hop up onto it, with one bound, like a cat, and proceed to burrow his way to the bottom of the bed, under the blankets, whereupon he would curl up and immediately go to sleep.

As Sham got older, he got into a few fights, and Raffy was always there behind him, but she didn’t always help him. One day, he encountered a dalmation in a small park at the bottom of our road. It was being taken for a walk by its owner, a fearsome local vet. Sham and the dog were suddenly going for it, the minute we had turned our heads in another direction, momentarily distracted from our civil task of dog watching. Rafferty, adrenaline triggering her to the very hair ends of her tail, bounded forth, not sure what to do, but keen to join in the excitement. She grabbed the back of Sham’s neck and started biting into it, participating fully in the dog engagment to the extent that her instincts had demanded. Only she was biting the wrong dog.

As I went home and lay in bed that night, I thought about my father – good intentioned, but driven by instincts. In moments of stress and excitement he, too, would bite the “wrong dog”. I didn’t like the way my father attacked me whenever he was feeling uncertain about whether I was able to succeed, or about his place in the world.