2013/02/11 12:46
Despite the unremitting torment, however, Brenin was very protective toward Nina. Allowing neither dogs nor any people to come anywhere near her. And this brings me to my second slice of luck that week. One night, around midnight, a few days after the arrival of Nina, there was a noise in our back garden. The garden was surrounded on all sides by a large hedge eight feet or more tall and it was impossible to enter it by accident. I didn’t hear the noise, but Brenin did, shooting to his feet and jumping up at the window, front feet perched on the sill. When I let him out, he ran over to the bank at end of the garden, the place where he used to lie to escape Nina, disappeared behind tree and reappeared dragging a man, whom he then pinned to the ground. I hesitate to relate the next part, since I really don’t come out of it very well. In my defence, I’d lived in the US so long that I was still in an American mindset. My first thought was, ‘oh, my God, what if he has a gun? He’s going to shoot my boy!’ So I ran into the garden and started kicking him, screaming Americanism like, ‘Don’t move, motherfucker!’ But, of course, he did move: it would be difficult not to when you have a wolf at your throat and a madman kicking you while screaming obscenities. Eventually. The whole thing calmed down. I got the guy a big man, around my age, who might conceivably have given me some trouble if I had been on my own in a full nelson; one arm behind his back, the other bent over his shoulder. “What are you doing in my garden?” I asked. “Nut-in,” he said. So I marched him out of the house and threw him into the street.
I had no telephone at the time, so couldn’t have called the police. But as soon as the adrenalin rush had died down, I started realize why that would have been a bad idea anyway. The enormity of what I had just done started to sink in. if we had still in America and we had tackled an intruder in this way, we would almost certainly have been congratulated by neighbors’ and police alike. But I didn’t think it was going to wash in Ireland, where they tend to take a much dimmer view of using a wolf to savage interlopers, luckily, this was a cold night in late October and the guy was wearing a big coat. I don’t think Brenin had been able to do much damage through it at least, I didn’t see any obvious blood when I threw him out. Still, I thought, all things considered, this might not be a bad time to get Brenin the hell out of Dodge. Possibly, this was an overreaction, but the incident with the wolf hybrid in the North had left me more than a little paranoid. So I planned to leave him with my parents for a few weeks, until things had died down a little. I hurriedly packed a bag and prepared for an overnight drive to the ferry at Rosslare, with Brenin and Nina, where I thought we would catch the 9 a.m. sailing and be safely out of the country before the Guards the Garda Siochana, the Irish police? knew where we were.
