Forget those monster mouthful words, such as anthropomorphism, where did they ever get you? Keep your four feet on the ground and your talk short. That´s our secret to life. My vocabulary — see how you 2legs get sucked in by syllables, why not just say words? – I keep ‘em on a tight lead: bark, walk, run, jump, eat, sleep, tree, lift leg, growl, bite, hump, lick, please, bone, pant, ball, brush, dish, day, night… Little else, but what more could a bloke or a bitch ask for? Most of the time 2legs forget the lesson of small, take something plain and before you can say Sit! they’ve gone and bent it like a hind leg. I guess this is why some 2legs have to go and lie on another 2leg’s couch and do all that whining and tail-chasing? Talk about dog in the manger!
This said, I sometimes feel sorry for he who reckons he´s my master, the one I call Big M., him being off-white and squarish. First and pawmost, he´s incredibly slow. Sure, he´s, what´s your word? Handicapped? Okay, I´ve got twice as many legs, but you ought to see the two of us going about St. Kilda, him planting one foot before the other in a more or less straight line as though the path is the way. He never leaps, rightangles down to the beach, slashes the air with his tail full of saltwater and sand. When did you last see him with a tennis ball in his mouth or a stick or chasing a smartarse seagull? Dog knows, I´ve shown him how to often enough. Is it so hard to get a little fun out of life?
He´s taking his head for a walk, I´ve heard him say to other 2legs. A brisk (!) walk gives the blank page of his mind words to digest then sick up again when we get home. Sure, going back to vomit is a natural thing to do but from my after-breakfast basket I often watch him sit there in front of the shiny flat patch of sunlight and he doesn´t look any happier tap-tapping away like a Heeler with the hydatids. He´ll scratch his head or his nose or one of his pits, now that I understand, a flea is a flea and there are plenty on St. Kilda beach, but he hardly ever lets his tongue loll out of his mouth, rarely cocks his head to one side in joy or lies down on the warm bricks of the patio on a fine Melbourne morning. I ask you, does he looks satisfied?
I´m not talking sex here. But as you mention it, in this sense mine´s a dog´s life alright. Thanks be to whoever made our kinds, the great Doggerel in the sky, I happen to have have x–times his sense of hearing, quadruple-x times his sense of smell, meaning that I know he does now and then hide the bone, as we say. But me? The one he goes around telling everyone is his best friend? Look, I´ve been under his kennel roof now for 16 months, and when has he ever helped me find a bit of heat? Never, that´s how often. On the beach I run up to some woman with pretty poochette on a lead and what does Big M say? `Down Rocky!´ `Take it easy, Rock.´ `Sorry, he´s only young´. For Canine´s sake! The other day near the pier I was about to put my front feet up, a cute bitch of a Beagle, and what do I hear at the critical moment from Big M. up there interrupting his deep thinking on the boardwalk? He´s bellowing: `Rocky! Come! Come! I said Now!´ That´s exactly what I was planning to do! Doggone, Miss Beagle´s boss starts shouting similar stuff and there I find myself left standing solo on the shore, Stallone turned lipstick salesman!
I will say Big M. tries his best. He pats me a lot, tells me I´m a good boy. Certainly he´s a generous host; I never go hungry, which is more than you can say for billions of my kin around the world. I´ve seen them on the picture screen; the hungriest ones in refugee camps are always the dogs. To treat someone like a dog is a 2leg insult. In return, despite Big M´s inability to run fast or catch sticks in his weirdly-shaped mouth, I lick his hand to answer his pats and sometimes when I see his work, whatever that is, isn´t going well and he starts getting rabid as a Rottweiler I rest my snout on his shoe and give him the calm-down look. Usually it works.
Really the best thing about man being dog´s best friend is that we can´t communicate directly. We have to learn about each other through looks and body talk (it´d help if Big M. had a tail transplant!). Hope we don´t put our various feet in it. I know, for example, that being a journalist he´s a sniffer. But, and I don´t mean to be hurtful here, sometimes he deludes himself. The other day he was reading aloud what he writes here and he said, I quote: `I walked with Rocky through the streets of St Kilda where by now every crack in every footpath is familiar to both of us.´ How can he compare my knowledge of St Kilda streets with his? What Big M. sees with his eyes as a mere crack in concrete I read with my nose, absorbing and analysing from it about as much information as there is in The Age each morning.
If I were able to tell him this fact, he´d be upset, no? I admit there are things he knows that I don´t have a clue about. This is why we get along so well. Our friendship is very physical and when it is expressed in sounds we keep them, as my friend the Pointer would say, to the point. The rest is what the 2leg poet called inarticulate speech of the heart. Above all, we are loyal. Something you wouldn´t swap for all the bones in China.
Rod Usher is a former journalist with The Age and Time Magazine. He is a novelist and a poet. He lives in Spain. He has a dog called Hilda. Rocky and Hilda communicate through us. We have been friends for a long time. Rod and I. Rocky has vetted this post. He found it mildly amusing.
