Mouschka looked more like a ratty urban fox than a stalwart German Shepherd. She was the runt of the litter and though her paws and her ears proved her breeding, her body was woefully undersized. Her parents’ owners said she was purebred, but hey, this was Africa, it’s not like the AKC was making the rounds, right? In fact, for all our trying, I don’t think we ever really owned a purebred Shepherd. But in the beginning or end, that didn’t really matter.


Mouschka was loyal in that unique doggy way and it more than made up for her size. Anything that I played with, anything I touched, even my favourite trees in the yard were guarded with slavering devotion and some pretty fierce growls for a dog so puny. I had one of those rollerscooters that I often left carelessly in the middle of the driveway, but the gardener was hardpressed to put it away when a fifty pound snarling street rat was standing over it. Antoine – that was the gardener – had an otherwise friendly relationship with Mouschka, but anything that was mine was untouchably holy. Even, ironically, his water can that he used for his twice-daily prayers. He let me use it, once, for a pretend game, and he couldn’t get it back for Mouschka’s growls.
Mouschka was already slated for the sweet nightshade of lethal injection, because of her several painful maladies, when she got hit by a car. My mother’s car, to be exact. She – Mouschka, you understand, not my mother – had this irritating habit of racing after people’s heels, not so much that she bit them, but only for fun. On one of the driver’s nights off, my mother came home from a school meeting to pick me up for a dinner with Dad. I was waiting on the steps, watching her pull in.
She usually didn’t have to honk because Seidou, the night guard, would have seen the lights through the metal gate and started to swing it open to the dusty street. But he was in the bathroom so Beatrice came running out of the house to open it. Cue, as usual, the delighted rat-dog chasing at her heels. I can barely remember the sequence of horrific dominos as I watched from the garage door steps but when Seidou also rushed out of the side entrance to hold the swinging gate open, Mouschka naturally crossed the driveway to play, and that’s when my poor mother felt the bump rolling under the front left tire of the Mazda and when I started screaming. They buried her in the fields across from the house and Mom started smoking again, after having quit for six months.
No dog I ever owned had been quite as loyal as Mouschka, but Champion certainly tried. In fact, when I refer to Champion, I usually say, “that dog was dumb as a bag of hair but boy, was he loyal”. What made Champion especially noteworthy in our morbid history of sudden pet death was that he didn’t die. This isn’t to say that I know whether he’s still alive – my parents had to leave him with their French neighbors in the Congo, after being transferred to the urban life of Cairo where the poor beast wouldn’t have fared well.
No, Champion’s uniqueness goes beyond his ability to simply survive our family for more than a few years. He went from Tunisia, where he was the only puppy to survive his young mother’s litter, to Houston, where he routinely threw himself at our wooden fence and got terrified by bluejays on his food bowl. The bane of Champion’s life was the pool at that house in Houston. It was all he could do to not die from terror every time I swam in it. Instead, he would run relentless circles around the perimeter, barking hysterically. If I sank under for more than a few seconds, the moron would throw himself into the water and try to rescue me, all one hundred pounds of smelly wet fur and frantic claws. Sometimes, I think just to keep himself in the game, he’d bark maniacally at the automated pool cleaner that skimmed the bottom all day.
After Houston we dragged him to Kenya, which is really where he earned his reputation for both stupidity and loyalty. My father, mocking my thirteen year old choice of name for the dog, called him Prince Stupid instead of Prince Champion, and after a while, the dog started answering to Stupid, or Stoop. He had a really hard time with our Kenyan houseguards, who were part of a company that provided security. The guards were almost never the same, week after week, which threw the insecure Shepherd into a frenzy of misplaced protectiveness. He was fine with them if they stayed at the gates, but when Mom would open the kitchen window and called “ASKARI!” for them to come get their evening tea, he’d become the snarling picture of terror that belied the cowardly baby he really was. Because Stoop was beyond training, we just had to advise the guys to walk slowly and look forward and promise them that he was really too much of a big whiny baby to hurt them. I don’t think they believed us.
Stupid as he was, though, I loved hanging out with him, putting my bare feet on his back as the black thick fur heated up in the sunshine and the rattle of his breathing tickled my toes. Mock him though I did, he was a good dog. But it wasn’t the askari threat that proved the mettle of that stupid loyal Shepherd, though. It was Kirby. It was the menace of beauty that was our first and only Terrier.
From the minute we brought Kirby home, the little Jack Russell was the only apple of my eye, the wiggling crafty little beauty that I couldn’t stop hugging or praising or playing with. A less loyal or patient First Dog, on seeing their abject demotion to Second Dog, would have retaliated. But it was in this graceful slide from favor that Champion really proved his utter dogginess. Kirby was everything he wasn’t – smart, quick, fearless, impossible to catch, impossible to reprimand, and the barking howling begging darling of my heart. As a young puppy, he thought it the pinnacle of hilarity to climb onto the slumbering Champion’s back, grab his black ears with those sharp Terrier teeth, and growl.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a dog to sigh but Champion actually sighed. He’d lumber to his feet and trot obediently around the yard with the snarling clinging Terrier trying to start a fight on his back, and then with one powerful throw, he’d fling Kirby to the ground and look at him with long-suffering brown eyes, then climb back onto the verranda and fall asleep again in his sunny patch. My father, who hated the impertinence of the Napoleonic little Jack Russell, suddenly developed a wealth of affection for Champion and started referring to himself and the Shepherd as “the Dogs in this family”. It was a joke that gained even more ground when Dad and Champion went to the Congo while Mom, Kirby and I went to Houston for a year. That was the last time I saw Champion.
Kirby, on the other hand, continued to be both a darling and a menace in my life. Our townhouse in Houston, while spacious, wasn’t nearly enough to contain his zest and mania. He broke collars to chase squirrels, peed on furniture as sulky retribution, bent the venetian blinds in the fury of throwing himself at the window to bark at yardmen, and humped the plumber. It was in Houston that we discovered that Kirby was epileptic, but his strong muscles and heart were something our vet expressed amazement at and the reason that Kirby wasn’t put on daily Phenobarbitol.
His trip to Brasil with my mother, after I’d left for college, was to be his last adventure. The fits had gotten worse, and when my mother took him to the state kennel to get stamped to leave Brasil (and come visit me in New York), he had another terrible attack. The vets there, thinking he had rabies regardless of my mother’s furious insistence to the contrary, demanded to keep him overnight for “observation”. Keeping him overnight in an unsupervised and strange kennel, though, prompted another fit that, unsoothed by my mother’s worried hugs, led to the heart attack that killed him.
I like to joke that Kirby’s incessant dashing and yapping is what gave him epilepsy in the first place and this is admittedly a funny thought, but I cannot think of that early morning international phone call without getting a little emotional. Insane or not, Kirby was the first dog I’d picked for myself and loved with unparalleled fierceness, and that love was the crux all the reasons that my parents continued to give me pets, even when those poor maligned creatures could do nothing but love me briefly and die suddenly.
Like Jade. She stands out in the morbid timeline as being the truly sweet one. We named her Aquaba Jade – aquaba means “luck” in an Ivorian dialect. She was the consolation for the loss of Mouschka, and she made the move to Tunisia with us. It was a particularly hard move because Ivory Coast had felt so much like home, and she was the perfect dog for it. We spent hours in the lush wilds of the backyard in Tunis, where I’d play solitary games of being Artemis with Jade as my loyal wolfhound.
But one day when I was at the school I found loathsome and miserable, Jade ate rat poisoning that she’d found buried in the yard. She died a gruesomely sudden death in my father’s arms, on the way to the vet, and to spare me the horrific details, my parents told me she’d gotten pneumonia and passed away quietly during a nap. Somehow this was meant to ease the pain of yet another pet torn from me, and they didn’t tell me about the rat poison until years later. Perhaps because when we’d moved in, I had been helping the gardeners search for all of the deadly stuff in the yard, and we’d all missed just that one packet. Perhaps I would have blamed myself, and losing her was hard enough.
They were all, though, dogs to the truest definition of the word. Jade was the classic Shepherd. Loyal but fun, quiet when you needed to just rest your tear-streaked face in some warm black fur, and a companion in every imaginable game. Champion stayed true to me even when my heart had abandoned him to the fickle genius of Kirby, and he’s pictured most in my memory as napping on the warm brick tiles of that verranda in the afternoons, and the regular rise and fall of his breathing as I rested my feet on his back, under the glass table where I did my homework. Mouschka was mercilessly mocked by careless friends for her runty size and her hair-loss (and the heel-snapping thing was both annoying and her downfall) but she was the perfect size to cuddle with on the deckchairs surrounding the pool and she loved going on long walks. And Kirby – well. Kirby was crazy and fun and smart as a whip and a complete handful, but boy howdy did I love that dog.
Boy howdy did I love those dogs.