23 June 2012

Interim Guest Blogger: Kevin Mitchell

"Dog Stories"

Every morning at Grey Lynn Park, ​where I was the groundsman, there was a man walked his Irish wolfhound through the park at eight o’clock. This Irish wolfhound was about six and a half feet tall and hated my dog Bula with a hateful hatred from hell. Bula himself came to live with us by way of his chasing and worrying sheep at my parents’ place in the country. It was either shoot him or send him to the city.

Bula in turn was the look-alike replacement for Nick who had died. But Bula’s superficial resemblance to Nick was as far as it got. Bula was a friendly enough specimen in his own way but Nick was a truly amazing dog. One in a million. Even Nick’s birth was pretty much biblical. He was the son of Dick and Fly. Fly was a strong-eye dog and Dick a scraggly brown huntaway. Nick therefore was some kind of mongrel heading dog. And he only survived my Dad’s drowning him in the stream in a sack together with the rest of his siblings owing to the foresight of Fly who had spirited him to safety prior to the fateful event. On Christmas day a month or so later, confident the danger was over, Fly fetched Nick from his hiding place and presented him to our family. We children were ecstatic! We couldn’t believe our luck. A fluffy gift from Fly. For a month she had managed to suckle him without anyone noticing (proof enough, I suppose, that it is possible to do the most outrageous things without anyone noticing).
Apart from her prescience and native cunning, Fly is also famous in my mind for having herself killed an entire litter of pups a year or two later, that of my own dog, Tess. I was thirteen at the time and understandably distraught. Every single pup had either its neck broke, or its jaws, or both. I cradled the only surviving pup in my arms, with its jaw broken up and down, and went to look for the .22 rifle. Luckily for Fly my Dad intervened. She escaped. And the pup died in my arms.
Nick the dog grew up with us kids, played football on the lawn (he was Grant Batty), came camping, and swam with us in the pond on Sundays. But what he did best was round up sheep. He was the kind of dog you could teach anything. You could’ve taught him to walk up walls if you’d supplied him with suction cups. He’d arrive at the back of the farm and, before a word from anybody, decide himself which paddock he was going to muster. And off he’d go. But he didn’t hold it against you if you called him back. He just wanted to get on with it. Anyway, most times, he picked the right paddock.
When Nick died my Dad went into mourning. For three days. That was just before he and Mum left for a holiday in Fiji. When they came back, there was Bula. My sister Mary had found him. Bula was the closest-looking thing to Nick she could get.

My experience of people who own dogs for any other reason than rounding up sheep or cattle, or for hunting, is not good. A lot of these people need to be drowned themselves in a sack in the creek with all their siblings. Having seen dogs like Nick and what they do, how much energy they expend in a day and what love they put into life, it seems cruel to keep a dog on anything less than 1200 acres and gainfully employed.
Bula had a pretty good life in the city. We had Grey Lynn Park to ourselves and the run of another twenty parks, as well as a truck. We had a farm right in the middle of town. One morning, after so many mornings of the Irish wolfhound and his master walking by our smoko shed full of hatred and idiocy, the hound decided he’d had enough of Bula laying about in that pseudo-sheepdog sort of way, and went for him. Lucky for Bula I was there. Within an instant, the hound had him round the throat. Without a thought in my head, apart from the knowledge that Bula was about to die, I dived right in. The wolfhound’s master looked on benevolently. I kicked and punched and grabbed and pulled, all to no avail. Time was running out. I had to think. The tail, I thought. I grabbed the hound’s tail and twisted and wrenched and yanked like Bula’s life depended on it. Miraculously, the hound let go of Bula and instead made to bite my hand off. My hand withdrew in the nick of time. The benevolent hound-master mentally patted me on the back. This was after all a test to see who was the sillier: he for owning an Irish wolfhound, or me for trying to save my dog from a beast who was at least as big as I was, and a thousand times more ferocious. He figured he’d won.

*

Parks, you would say, are made for people to walk through. Another funny thing that happened at Grey Lynn Park was the day I ran into a religious nymphomaniac. Even from sixty metres out I could tell she was different. So I kept one eye out and stayed doing what I was doing at the corner of No. 1 field. I wondered what kind of different she was. Probably just crazy.

No. 1 field wasn’t really the number one field. It was the highest field. The easternmost. It was by the entrance to the park. No. 2 was the number one field, right by the Clubhouse.
Walking up to me she says “God wants me to make love with you.” She was in her early twenties, dressed in a white shirt with flowers on it, and jeans. She was pretty. 
“Come down to the shed and have a cup of tea,” I suggested. “It’s smoko time. Who knows, maybe George will be able to help you out? George is a really nice guy.”
I forget now if she had a name. God and her were on intimate terms. “God wants me to fuck you,” she insisted as we walked back to the shed.
Bula was lounging about in his usual way outside the door. George put the tea on and I sat at the table and rolled a smoke. Our new friend stood by the door. I explained the situation to George. Could he help? George too was sympathetic. But George was in love with Sandra. They’d just had a baby. Had God announced to George in a vision that he was to get Sandra pregnant? George didn’t think so. Did George even believe in God? Not everybody believes in God nowdays.
A truck delivering something to the league club drove past the smoko shed and stopped in the turnaround. George and I went on talking about something else. The water boiled. Unexpectedly, the truck fired up again, turned around in a hurry and headed back out of the park. George and I finally stopped talking and looked up. There was no pretty girl by the door waiting to see if we would fulfill God’s purpose. Instead, there was a glimpse of her in the passenger seat of the truck, roaring out of the park. The truckie himself had a decidedly determined look about him.

*

Way back when I was working on the farm, I got friendly with a couple, Don and Margie, who were Orange People. Being Orange People meant that they followed some Indian guy called Bhagwan, which in turn meant they wore orange clothes, or at one time wore something orange, but who anyway dangled at all times a picture of Bhagwan around their necks. I don’t really remember them actually wearing orange, so maybe that rule got relaxed. Through Margie and Don I got to read a couple of Bhagwan’s books.
At some point we organised a Dynamic Meditation. This was Bhagwan’s most famous meditation. As I remember it, it went in ten minute segments for an hour. The guts of it, the most important segment, was to breathe in and out of your nose as hard as was humanly possible for ten minutes solid, never mind the snot. The following ten minutes was also crucial. At that point, you let everything out. Like swear at someone. Laugh because you could. Anything at all went. But I did get the impression that negative outpourings were especially favoured. So of course I did my best. I hyperventilated. I thought: “Let your hair down. We’re dynamically meditating here! Curse my enemies! Let it out. Scream. Swear. Hate.”
It was just at that point I realised I had been Dynamically Meditating every day. I had Meg. Meg was a brilliant dog, a huntaway. The speciality of the huntaway is to bark in a nice deep tone of voice from behind the flock, and so drive sheep forward to wherever they are meant to be going, as opposed to rounding them up or bringing them towards you, which is the job of a heading dog, or an eye dog. Meg was the only dog I had of my own. My dad had four other dogs. For some reason, I assumed Meg could be a heading dog as well as a huntaway, and so I taught her to round up sheep. Or more realistically, I got Nick to teach her. In this way, it often happened that I’d be expecting Meg to operate on a hill a hundred yards away, rounding up sheep, and me whistling “right” or “left” “sit down” “speak up” “get back” etcetera. For a foreigner, Meg was all ears. But her accent wasn’t perfect. She might be a brilliant huntaway, but she wasn’t in Nick’s category for a heading dog. In short, half my day was taken up with swearing at the top of my voice. As I say, I was dynamically meditating every day.

It’s a little hard to describe how hyperventilating through your nose for ten minutes can put you on a high for three whole days. On fresh air. But I imagine Bhagwan felt like this all the time. My belief is he stole the technique from Nick.