My Life’s (Dog) Story – Negren

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.