We mocked her mercilessly. Pretending that she was imagining the dogs and imagining being attacked. Then other people started to be chased and growled at aggressively. The mocking lessened. Finally, I was attacked. I was walking along minding my own business when one of the little sandy coloured dogs decided that I'd looked at him funny. He jumped up, growled at me, charged my leg with his mouth open, shutting it at the last second before head butting me instead. I started to walk the long way to Nat's house if I was alone...
The other endearing trait of the dogs is their howling. Normally at night just as you've managed to get to sleep. If it happens in the evening I've discovered that it's quite easy to stop. One night I was so annoyed I threw our door open and shouted out "I've got an idea, why don't you shut up?". There was silence and thereafter opening the door and shining the torch at them has the twin effect of getting them to be quiet and move away, so they are noisy somewhere else later in the night.
We were promised that the strays would be shot by the Police about 2 months ago. Nothing has happened on that front but someone has clearly taken some action because most of the strays are suddenly incredibly afraid of people, which means they haven't attacked anyone in a while, which is nice.
On the night of the chestnut roasting we had a new visitor. Julie, in the partial darkness, identified the dog as Tiger and invited him into the garden. This was Puppy. Puppy is about half the size of Tiger, plain sandy coloured (where Tiger is ginger and white) and has a very curly upright tail. We haven't yet worked out how Julie got them confused. Puppy is also incredibly timid, so shortly he left the garden.
The next time we saw him, Jamie, Julie and I were having sundowners on the field, sat on our blankets. Up came Puppy and decided that he wanted to be my friend especially. He demonstrated this by coming right up to me and sticking his muzzle in my Gin and Tonic. As Geoff's very allergic to dogs and I wanted my G&T without fleas in, he got short shrift. Julie was employed to stroke him and keep him at a distance. After half an hour her hand had turned black with dirt off his fur. We decided that stroking him was probably out of the question in future!
Now, I know that Katie will be reading this and getting cross about the fact I'm talking about domesticated animals. Tough! Subsequent to the sundowner, Puppy has been an occasional visitor at our house. During the day I let him lie in the sunshine on the warm concrete of our doorway. Sometimes, if he whimpers at me enough and sits on my feet, I'll stroke him (and then wash my hands about a hundred times).
Yesterday he was having a nap under our table when Tiger came in. Tiger and I have been having a small dispute, generally about the fact that Tiger pretends to like me when I have food for him but at all other times favours Gemma and then acts as if I haven't noticed. In response to this I've started pulling his ears and folding them one on top of the other, and pulling his tail when he heads under the table at dinner. This has so far only caused him to turn around and look at me severely, which is nice because he can be very vicious with people he doesn't like.
Anyhow, Tiger doesn't think that Puppy should be in our house so he came in to chase him out. After a while Puppy came back and curled up again. Then Tiger returned. This was repeated frequently. On one occasion, Tiger was spotted in our garden. All of a sudden his feet were up on the windowsill and his ears were pricked up as he looked in. The next thing we knew he was coming in through the door to chase Puppy out again.
Puppy is quite plucky, given that he keeps coming back, despite the aggressive jealousy of Tiger. I'm just not sure how long we will tolerate him for. He insists on being right next to any humans. So he followed Geoff to the shower yesterday and back afterwards, sitting on his feet at every opportunity. This might get a little tiresome!
The major new other creatures we have discovered of late are snails. Now the rains are here the snails have come out of hiding. They all have the pointy shells often associated with African snails. I'm a little worried about our veg patch but it seems to be holding up. The other night Will was looking out of our window with his powerful torch. "Errr, you might want to do something about this, I think your cabbages are under threat!" We gathered around him to see what he could see - a massive African land snail about 8 or 9 inches long in the shell right on the edge of the cabbages. Geoff was rapidly despatched with a plastic bag to facilitate the removal of said creature. He [the snail] has not been seen since.
There is also a new pet at the BLs [Nat and Will]. He's called Sprout and he's a baby, that's kept in a tupperware box in their kitchen. He's a chameleon (or if Geoff's telling you, he's a gecko :) ). Will has the care sheet for adults but this is very much a baby. It remains to be seen how well he will do!
No comments:
Post a Comment