I was born two years
after WWII (that ancient, huh!). When I was five years old, we came to live in
a small rented house, around which were very few neighbors.
We had a single tap
in front of the house where my Mom did the laundry and we, together with the
community, bathed and fetched water from for home use.
A few yards from our
house was a huge rectangular object made of rubber. I did know what it was then,
until I grew up and became wiser and surmised it to be rubber lining of a water
tank used by the Americans during the war.
Anyway, it served as
a good trampoline during weekends. Near it was a huge bomb crater, half filled
with water, green with algae, where we cast lines to catch fresh water fish.
The town I lived in (I
still do now) was littered with the remnants of war, i.e., rusted 30 and 50 cal machine guns, bomb craters, ruins
of our bomb-out church and tank tracks laid out as walkways to avoid the mud
during rainy days.
Only dogs were
considered pets and to have one was under these conditions:
-
They were not bought. They were given or picked
up from the streets while puppies.
-
A pet license was not required (it is still
not now);
-
Dog food was table scraps;
-
Collars, if ever there was one, were roughly
twined hemp rope with matching lead.
-
Puppies were leashed but when they grew up,
they were set free to roam, even outside of the premises;
-
Vets were unheard of. If there was one, he
was for pigs and cows, not dogs.
-
Trait modification was taboo. They were
created by God as such and should be left as they are.
Against this
backdrop, I, or rather, I and my siblings had our first dog. It was a half
breed German Police Dog.
My father was working
for the USIS (United States Information Service) then and when his boss was
called back to the U.S., he left his dog with my Dad.
My father told us
that his boss called it Negren. So we called him that as well.
Oh, he had a
beautiful collar, courtesy of his former owner.
He was a wonderful
and beautiful dog. His owner trained him to stay indoors except to relieve
himself, which he did outdoors. When done, he would lie down on the bottom
staircase and licked his paws clean before going back inside.
During meals, he would
sit beneath the table and scratched our legs to ask for food. Though it is
highly discouraged now, we thought it cool then, so we gave him some.
Every night, if the
weather was good and my Dad was not so tired from work, he gave Negren, on a
chain leash, a walk. On rainy nights, Negren was left to do his nocturnal
wanderings.
It was on one of
those evenings, it was rather stormy, that Negren walked alone. Little did we
know that it was his last,
The following
morning, we found Negren lying on our porch oozing with blood from a very large
and deep hack wound on his neck.
To better understand
how it could have happened, a little background of our community then is worth
telling.
We were very rural
then, just came out of the ravages of war. Stories were rife of ghosts, witches
and werewolves. A guy walking in the darkness, on a stormy night, could have
easily taken Negren for a werewolf and gave him a good slash with his bolo.
My father, though he studied
medicine for a few years, was unprepared or unsure of what to do or how to
treat Negren. We had ample supplies of tincture of iodine and sulfa diazine – antiseptic
and anti-biotic drugs for war wounds, nothing else. If they were good enough
for people, my Dad thought, they must be as good for animals.
Beside our home was
an abandoned two-storey house. To give him room and space, my Dad thought it
better to put Negren there to convalesce from his nasty wound. One early
morning, a few days later, we found Negren dead, hanging by his chain.
During the night, he
must have felt very lonely, very cold from the heavy rains and suffered much
from his wound. Feeling despair, he must have squeezed himself through the balustrades
and jumped from the second floor where he dangled from his chain until he died.
We grieved so much
over his loss. A pet like Negren was difficult to replace. Knowing my love for
dogs, my Dad always made it sure that we had one in the house. But none
measured up to Negren so they never made an impression on me and just faded
from my memory.
