The Stirling family have 3 dogs, an unsocial, pullet-murdering German Shepherd which lays upside down most the day on the porch and seems to be the dog equivalent of a hermit dreaming of chickens; a puny 1 year-old Chihuahua called Teddy, and an absolutely huge, jet black Great Dane called Trooper. Trooper is completely solid, her muscles rippling. She has a shiny, pronged, silver collar which jabs into her flesh to control her when tied up. She is loose most of the day to patrol the garden and is only shackled when there are visitors. As I have become friends with her she isn’t tied up when I’m about.
As Trooper and the chicken-eater are outside dogs and between 30 and 50 times too big for the quasi-dog-flap into the Stirling’s house, they are usually separated from the living quarters of the most popular and friendly Chihuahua. Teddy gets all kind of special, preferential treatment for being small, cute, and house-trained (although because it rained this morning she laid out her daily produce on the living room carpet to keep from getting wet), and whilst the poultry-burglar couldn’t care less about this, Trooper simmers with resentment and the family become frantic when the pollo asesino and the Dane get rough and run around the garden play-fighting because the innocent and quite literally pea-brained Teddy wants to join in the boisterous fun and races out into the melee with her insect-sized, shrill bark. Teddy doesn’t realise that Trooper’s paws are about half the size of her entire body, and just one trample and she will be no more. The screaming of girls and yelling of rescuing boys results as they dive to Teddy’s rescue, and I think Trooper secretly wants to demolish the yapping, house-dwelling, toy-owning Chihuahua.
Today Trooper stole Teddy’s American football toy ball (a soft ball made for a tiny dog, so roughly the size of a reasonably large plum) after seeing the family play with Teddy with it. The thing fitted into Trooper’s huge mouth the way half of the newly-purchased quail couple fitted into the German’s earlier in the day when the speckled fowl made the unfortunate decision to escape the chicken pen (there is hope from the youngsters who bought them 2 days ago that it was the husband who fell victim to the serial-killer and that his wife is pregnant with his posterity).
This night I witnessed more of this anti-Mexican sentiment by the tall, dark European as I sat on the porch trying to research the prophecy or Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38 and 39. To start with it was almost midnight and Trooper was asleep on the grass ahead of me, beside her the German, no doubt racked with guilt at her crime, was having disturbed dreams, her limbs flapping about. Teddy was inside.
Without warning, at 23:57 the city of Villarrica exploded with roars and everybody in the surrounding blocks jumped and hollered and set off rapid explosions of dozens of small, loud fireworks that seem to produce no light, just noise. From what I could gather it was a sporting event that had captured everybody’s attention. This stirred the dogs and Trooper groggily looked at the figure sitting on the porch chair, and despite being petted by me for a week now, was unable to recognise me and started barking at me almost quizzically. This brought the scampering, yapping Teddy out the dog flap and sliding along the tiles.
‘Trooper, shut up,’ I told her. Eventually she figured out I was a friend and not a foe -something I was grateful for, as I reckon she could easily crush me in a fight as she seems to be made of rods of steel similar to the Terminator, and standing up on her hind legs she is 5’6” tall.
Wanting petted she walked up to me, nearly shoved my laptop onto the ground, and dug her head into my ribs, all but pushing me and the chair holus-bolus along into the bushes. Teddy saw this and wanted some of the action and started yapping and jumping up at me with her sharp little claws scratching my legs, her goggle eyes blinking longingly at me. I reached a hand to pet her too, only for Trooper, in her insanely jealous way, to push past, and form a rather large and strong barricade between me and the Mexican. I tried to pick up Teddy only for Trooper to attempt to crush her to death between my arm and her solid head straining on bulging neck. I had to drop her, and a quick, big paw hit the ground with a pneumatic sound almost squashing the totally-oblivious-to-the-extreme-danger Teddy.
I got Teddy on one side of me, Trooper on t’other, and shoved out a leg to block the one with violent intent whilst trying to balance the laptop on the spare leg. Trooper took this forceful shoving as a sign that I wanted to roughhouse with her, and her pricked up ears and lively eyes suggested she was game. Either Trooper was going to kill Teddy with an explosion of ‘fun’, or Teddy would be flattened Tom & Jerry style with a falling computer. I had to make a break for it and I dashed off to the small guest house across the garden. The run was like Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is chasing the car: I could feel Trooper’s feet hit the ground behind me, getting closer as I ran clasping the closed laptop across my chest with a look of inescapable horror etched across my face. Not only was a T-Rex after me, but amidst the pneumatic thumps gaining on me were the pitiful, shrill yaps of Teddy, and her tiny, 1mm thick claws scratching the ground tiles. It was most pathetic: I was going to be hit by a Danish locomotive, and Teddy was going to be peeled off the track at sunrise by a mourning family, or removed from the mouth of a German.
Somehow, despite the tangle of legs, and the danger, Teddy didn’t get hit, and like a true imbecile thought Trooper was running scared from her and tried to bite her as we all reached my door. I got the door open just in time to dive through and close it enough to dissuade Trooper from following. Sliding in also was Teddy, out of harm’s way, under the bed. The door stayed ajar, and I sat on the floor looking out at the huge, hulking figure of Trooper looking in, she working her eyebrows marvellously to ask if she should continue the game. Teddy marched out from the bed and stood in the moonlight inside the door, ears pricked up, looking out fearlessly at the monster at the door.
I’m leaving for Asuncion tomorrow, so my dog adventures in Villarrica will fortuntately/unfortunately be over for the time being.
