2013/02/11 12:44
The pursuit of Happiness and Rabbit
1
During the years in Ireland, Brenin was in his prime. He had grown truly massive, standing thirty-five inches at the shoulder and weighing close on 150 pounds. He was as tall as the Great Deans with which I’d grown up, but he was much more powerfully built. His legs were long, like his mother’s, and on the end of them were feet the size of my fists; but he had thickened out and taken the bulk of his father. His head was a broad wedge and found itself perched on massive shoulders. His chest was deep and his hips were slim. He remind me more than anything, of a bull. In fact when I thought how he was changed from his youthful Alabama days to now, it always brought to mind Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Lament’ and its account of the transformation of the man from spring-tailed tom to hillocky bull. The youthful strip of black that ran down his snout had faded, but was still discernible, and framing it were the same strange, almond eyes. I don’t have many photograph of Brenin－I didn’t do photos in those days―but when I think back and try to fix his image firmly in mind, but when I think back and try to fix his image firmly in my mind, what I get are triangles. Bobbing around at the forefront of my consciousness are triangles: the triangle of his lateral torso, sloping down from his head and snout; the triangles of his lateral torso, sloping down from his shoulders to his tail; the triangles of his frontal torso, sloping down to his legs and huge feet.
And the black lines of his snout and his yellow almond eyes were the focal point around which were all these triangles were organized.
After we had been in Cork for about a year, I decided Brenin needed a friend; one with more legs and colder nose than I. Shifting through the Cork Examiner―just as five years before I had shifted through the Tuscaloosa news―I saw an advert for “Malamute”. This was both surprising and disturbing. A malamute is an arctic dog, a sled dog similar to a husky, but much taller and more massive. More importantly,
’malamute’ was still Brenin’s official cover story―that’s what I told anyone who asked what he was. The Irish, for some reason, are terrified of large dogs. If anyone had found out Brenin was a wolf, we probably have been run out of the country, or worse. There was a corner shop I used to pop into with Brenin on my daily walk into work. One day the board outside was emblazoned with the headline ‘Wolf’. This was a ultimately very sad story of a (rather small) wolf hybrid that had escaped from its home and gone walkabout around the countryside of Northern Ireland. Though this was in the North, the republic’s media was in a frenzy, and so too was the woman who served me my daily can of Coke and a cheese sandwich. It was the usual uninformed claptrap, uttered without blinking at Brenin, to whom she had become quite accustomed. What about the children? They should be banned. They’re killers. In the end, the wolf was shot by some idiot farmer to whom it had strolled up, perhaps to ask if he had any food. And the shopkeepers and children of Erin could sleep soundly in their beds once more. So, much like Clark Kent, Brenin had very good reason to want his identity kept secret. ‘Malamute’ was my way of doing that. Malamutes were virtually unknown in Ireland, and I was counting on things staying that way.
The next day saw us driving up to a small village just outside Ennis in County Clare―about three hours away. The father of the litter did indeed turn out to be a malamute: a big brown one, almost as big as Brenin, in fact. Inevitably, Brenin hated him. The mother, on the other hand, was no malamute at all, but a small German shepherd; perhaps the ugliest shepherd I’ve ever seen.
In my experience, when you have two mismatched parents, the pups always grow up looking like the worst one. So I wasn’t going touch them. However, when I saw the puppies, I changed my mind. They were housed in a garage and covered in filth and fleas. I decided I had to rescue one and picked the biggest female from the litter. I’m a sucker for puppies. Nevertheless, I drove home with a distinctly sinking feeling in my stomach. Great, I thought, I’m stuck with an ugly German shepherd for the next decade or so. But, in fact, my luck was in that week. She grew up to be the nicest, bravest, most intelligent dog you ever meet－and, for that matter, not at all ugly. I named her Nina, short for Karenina, after Karenin, the dog in The unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my favorite books, who was in turn named after Anna Karenina.
I had wanted to acquire another dog primarily so Brenin would have some canine company. But, initially, he was less than appreciative. When she was a puppy, Nina tormented him constantly, never giving him a moment’s of peace. In no time at all, she had learned to use his wild heritage against him, discovering how to him regurgitate his food. A few second of frantic licking of his muzzle―Brenin would try to avert his head, but Nina was relentless―and up would come his dinner, which Nina then gobbled up with delight: a scene that managed to be simultaneously poignant and revolting. Nina quickly became a very fat puppy and Brenin a very thin wolf. Eventually Brenin found a part of the garden that Nina couldn’t access, since it required him to leap up a four-foot nearby vertical bank. He used to retreat there for hours on end―especially after dinner―with Nina jumping and yipping in a futile manner at the bottom. This respite lasted only a few weeks‐Nina eventually growing big enough to claw her way up to join him. But it did allow Brenin time to put back on the weight he had lost.
