Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Dog Days

I just watched a neighbour walking a boxer dog down the road and it reminded me of the one Mrs. Bison had when I started seeing her years ago. Actually it didn't remind a whole lot of her dog - this one was normal size and well-behaved; hers was steroidally huge and exuberant, undisciplined and inclined to cause terminal embarrassment in public.

We used to drive to her parents' place in the piece of shit car that I owned, and our arrival was clearly a great source of excitement for Ozzy. When pleased to see you he would jump up and slobber on you, raking your exposed flesh with his huge claws. He was a wondefully friendly dog, very strong but not especially bright. We used to take him out in the field after dinner and run him until he was tired enough for us to catch him. Often we'd have a stick for him to fetch; unfortunately he didn't know when the game ended, so if you threw the stick away he'd go after it, no matter where it landed. One time we threw it in the middle of a dense, prickly gorse bush so we could end the game and go home; he burrowed in and, a few minutes later, emerged with the stick (plus many bits of gorse). Another time it went over a barbed wire fence and he jumped that too, leaving brown fur from his testicles on the wire but mercifully escaping injury. Unfortunately the ground on the other side was two feet lower and he couldn't jump back, so we had to carry him over a gate.

He reserved his special talents for other people, however. We stopped once to pass cheery greetings with a fellow dog walker, only to notice out of the corner of our eyes that Ozzy had lifted his leg and was urinating copiously on this man's small dog. He did this once on a pushchair, which was slightly worse...

Ozzy was a virgin, inexperienced with lady dogs, but that didn't prevent him from putting his big red dog's cock to use on an unexpecting visitor. Christian was the teenage son of a family friend who was in town for the day. He loved wrestling with the dog, but was naive as to what Ozzy was getting out of the encounter. I still remember three of us watching in stunned silence as Ozzy mounted him while he was on hands and knees and humped him vigorously in the dining room while he laughed in unawareness. Mother-in-law eventually noticed and rushed in to shoo him off with a tea-towel. (Shoo him off means get him to dismount - it's not a perverse English means of bringing a dog to climax.)

The worst crime of which Ozzy was accused was one of which he was entirely innocent. One Christmas night we lay in bed listening to him snore loudly in his box in the kitchen. Eventually I had to go downstairs and wake him up to stop him snoring. By the time I got back into bed he'd started again. Deep, long, drawn-out grunts, impossible to ignore. The second time I went down I shook him, and he looked up at me with innocent eyes. Nevertheless he was snoring again within a couple of minutes. Mrs. Bison looked at me and pointed out that I was a useless bastard who couldn't even stop a dog snoring, and she would have to do it herself. She went downstairs and roughed up the dog, only to realize on coming back up that it was, in fact, her father who was snoring.

We apologized to the dog but he never held a grudge. The next day he ate paper hats from Christmas crackers. We took him to the beach and he ran around drinking salt water from rock pools, precipitating cascading diarrhea. Until you've seen a large boxer dog excreting colored paper hats you haven't lived. It was like one of those magicians pulling hankies from his sleeve, only better. I'll bet the neighbour's boxer never did that.



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

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