The Loyalty of Dogs

Since moving to Belize, I have adopted (or tried to) two starving stray dogs. Only one of them is still with me.

Charlie

On an evening two years ago, as I sat motionless outdoors, I watched something walk onto my unlit porch. It was a skin-sack of bones, brindled black, with dog ears and a dog nose. It walked into the light spilling from my front door, peered in, and seeing no movement, curled up in the triangle of light and fell asleep. I named him Charlie and started feeding him.

He moved in and grew stronger and heavier. He licked my face and laid his head in my lap, worried knitting yarn into tangled heaps, rubbed against me like a cat, and moved my placemats to the floor. He looked at me with liquid brown eyes and gnawed at my arm. He stole my socks and my heart.

He was with me for a few months, but then one morning he was gone. I suspected that the former owner, who had abandoned him to starve, had returned, and that Charlie had gone back to him. I suspected this because Charlie’s predecessor, Budd,y had done something similar.

Several weeks later, he showed up on my doorstep again. He was thinner, with a wound on his left side and another over his right eye, and when I patted his head he winced with pain. But the wounds healed, and Charlie stayed.

Now he chews holes in my cleaning rags and barks to go out at 3am, but I would not have it any other way.

Buddy

Buddy was Charlie’s predecessor. He looked a bit like Charlie – a largish, black, emaciated stray. Unlike Charlie, Buddy was afraid of people. He was clearly starving, but leery when I approached him. So I lured him with food over and over again until he finally understood and settled onto my front porch. I fed him every day, even though he never let me touch him. He stayed with me for about two weeks and then, like Charlie after him, he disappeared.

Weeks later, as I stood in my yard, Buddy walked past me as though he had never met me. “It’s me, Buddy,” I said, but he stared blankly. I scattered kibble on the ground in front of me. “Buddy, look, food!” It was as though we were meeting each other all over again. He looked at me, looked at the kibble, looked back at me. Hesitated. “Food, Buddy”. Eventually, he approached, sniffed the kibble, took one last look at me, and finally crunched on the kibble. Then it was as though a light went on in his head, and he remembered “Oh, that’s right, this person feeds me!” He stayed on my front porch for two more weeks before disappearing again.

This kept happening.

It turned out Buddy had an owner of sorts – a gangster the locals called Nanny Goat. Nanny Goat abused Buddy and starved him. But Buddy kept blindly going back to him, forgetting about the food I offered. I am told that starvation can damage the brain.

After the last time Buddy left me, gangsters came down from Belize City to shoot Nanny Goat. He had been living off in the woods away from town, and a friend told me that for a time after he died, she heard Buddy howling from somewhere deep in the woods. She heard it every night until she didn’t.

I never saw Buddy again.

—–

It is early morning here in Belize. Charlie, who brings me an intimacy Buddy never could, rouses me from my bed by softly touching his cold nose to my bare toes. I stroke his head, get up to feed him, and start my day.

Artist’s statement

This piece is something I just needed to write, to get it off my chest, as it were. At first I wanted it to be a poem, but it wanted to be prose. I would classify this as flash nonfiction.