THE GREYHOUND IS sometimes called “the dog of kings,” and its connection to royalty (see EOS) goes back to ancient times. In his Illustrated Book of the Dog (1890), the authority Vero Shaw describes the greyhound as one of the “most delicate breeds of dog” owing to its fragile body, fine skin, and sensitivity to damp and drafts. The mummified remains of these graceful dogs have been found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, preserved beside their masters even in the afterlife. Greyhounds were also fixtures at European courts in the Middle Ages. Dressed in gold collars set with pearls and rubies, they’d accompany royal ladies on their walks; armored in shining breastplates, they’d go out hunting with the lords. In France, greyhounds of a certain breed had the privilege of accompanying their masters whenever they appeared before the emperor Charlemagne. As a sign of their entitlement, these special dogs had their right paws shaved.
The name of the greyhound belonging to England’s Richard II is spelled differently in different sources. Sometimes he’s called Math, sometimes Matt, and sometimes Match, but most historical authorities give his name as Mathe, which is a diminutive of Mathuin, the Gaelic word for “bear.” It was an unusual name for a unique creature: a dog famous for his disloyalty. For many years, Richard apparently doted on this fond and loving hound. Mathe would follow his master everywhere, and when the pair were reunited after an absence, the creature would stand up and press his paws on the king’s shoulders. Mathe’s affection would have been especially welcome in 1399, when Richard began to lose the support of his people, and faced the threat of deposition from his rival Bolingbroke (Henry of Lancaster).
In August of that year, Bolingbroke’s army gained control of the court, and Richard, who’d fled to Ireland, was summoned to meet his usurper at Flint Castle in Wales. During this famous encounter, Mathe apparently left the side of his master, walked over to Bolingbroke, and settled at his feet. The French historian Jean Froissart described the moment in volume four of his Chronicles, written in 1400. When the king and Bolingbroke entered the room, writes Froissart, “the greyhound, which was usually accustomed to leap upon the King, left his majesty, and went to the Earl of Derby [Bolingbroke] . . . and behaved towards him with the same familiarity and attachment as he was usually in the habit of shewing towards the King.” Surprised, Bolingbroke asked the king what his dog’s behavior meant. “The greyhound maketh you cheer this day as King of England,” replied Richard, “to which dignity you will be raised; and I shall be deposed.”
Betrayal is uncommon in canine lore; Mathe’s disloyal behavior is an inversion of the more familiar folklore motif Disguised Man Recognized by Dog, whose best-known manifestation is perhaps the story of Argos and Odysseus. According to Homer, Odysseus’s faithful dog Argos, too old to do more than thump his tail, recognizes his disguised master after an absence of twenty years. The dog lives long enough only to share a glance with Odysseus on his return (see ULISSES). The motif also appears in the Celtic legend of Tristan and Iseult. In most versions of this ancient story, the lovers are forced to separate, and Tristan leaves his pointer Hodain with his lady, Iseult. When the hero eventually returns, disguised as a beggar, Hodain recognizes Tristan long before Iseult does. Indeed, so faithful is Hodain that he licks out the cup from which Tristan drinks his fatal poison, preferring death to life without his master.
Richard II recognized Mathe’s desertion as an omen of ill fortune; he may have been aware that, at least according to folklore, the behavior of dogs can be a sign of things to come. Black dogs in particular, sometimes with large, glowing eyes, were believed to foretell misfortune. They would appear at night beside burial chambers, gibbets, and other places where death occurs. A black dog was rumored to haunt London’s Newgate Prison for more than four hundred years, always appearing before an execution.
When Sherlock Holmes encountered the Hound of the Baskervilles in the late nineteenth century, it wasn’t unusual for English locals to believe in a family curse involving a demonic hound. Such beasts have been part of British folk belief for centuries, and each district had its own version of this spectral doom dog. In the north, travelers told of a monstrous black dog with huge teeth and claws known as the Barghest. A similar creature called the Black Shuck haunted the Norfolk, Essex, and Suffolk coastlines. In other parts of the British Isles, this dusky hellhound is known as Hairy Jack, Padfoot, the Churchyard Beast, the Shug Monkey, Skriker, Galleytrot, Capelthwaite, the Hateful Thing, the Swooning Shadow, the Bogey Beast, Old Shook, Moddey Dhoo, or the Mauthe Dhoog. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, the beast was called the Gytrash, and, as Jane Eyre knew, it was said to haunt lonely roads, where it waited to prey on nighttime travelers (see BULL’S-EYE).
An anonymous fifteenth-century German manuscript predicts that “the Devil will come in the form of a black dog,” and there are many accounts of demons appearing in precisely this form. Legend tells us that Pope Julius III’s legate, the obstinate Cardinal Crescenzio, was literally hounded to death by an avenging spirit in the shape of an enormous black dog, invisible to all but himself. In a verse by French poet and soldier Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, a dark dog appears before the cardinal at the Council of Trent, announcing his impending death and damnation. The same tale is told in “The Cardinal and the Dog,” a folk poem by Robert Browning. In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles first appears to Faust in the form of a large black dog that follows him home. In his depiction of this devil dog, Goethe may have relied on an early chapbook in which Faust is said to own a black dog with demonic powers. (Incidentally, Goethe abhorred dogs; their barking, he said, drove him to distraction.)
Winston Churchill, a poodle lover and the master of Rufus and Rufus II, famously referred to the depression that followed him throughout his life as “the black dog.” The phrase was in common currency at the time. Sir Walter Scott, who also suffered from depression, noted in a diary entry for May 12, 1826, “I passed a pleasant day . . . which was a great relief from the black dog, which would have worried me at home.” Samuel Johnson, another depressive, observed in a letter to his friend Mrs. Thrale, written in June 1783, that “when I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking.”
Hellish dogs are usually black, but they don’t have to be. Scottish locals feared the Cù Sìth, a huge, dark-green dog with shaggy fur and a long braided or curled tail. In Devon, a headless yellow dog called the Yeth Hound or Yell Hound was believed to ramble through the woods at night, wailing. Some of these beasts are distinguished not by the color of their fur but by their distinctive eyes (folklore motifs include Dog with Fire in Eyes and Dog with Eyes like Plates, Tea-cups, etc.). Welsh countrymen share tales of the Gwyllgi (“Dog of Darkness”), a frightful-looking mastiff with baleful breath and blazing red eyes. The Beast of Flanders is also known as Old Red Eyes, and the Canary Islands host the Tibicenas, red-eyed demons in the form of wild dogs covered in long black wool. On mainland Normandy, similar creatures lived in deep caves inside mountains, and were referred to as rongeurs d’os (bone gnawers). Dip, an evil black dog in Catalan myth, was an emissary of the devil who sucked people’s blood.
Betrayal may be uncommon in canine lore, but it’s not unique. In Greek mythology, Actaeon was turned into a stag as punishment for catching a glimpse of the bathing Artemis; he then suffered the indignity of being killed and eaten by his own hunting dogs (the names of all thirty-six hounds are included in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). To dog lovers, this fate seems particularly harsh; according to folk wisdom, a dog would sooner starve than eat his owner. The truth, however, is clear and stark: dogs are perfectly willing to eat human bodies, and there’s no evidence they treat their masters or mistresses differently from any other corpse. Every year, there are numerous incidents of deceased dog owners being partially eaten by their pets. If this fate sounds gruesome, it could be worse; when deprived of food for long enough, dogs have been known to eat their owners alive. Loyalty goes only so far, and karma can truly be a bitch.
Once, I leaned over Grisby when he was dozing, planning to wake him with a kiss. I must have startled him, because to my shock, his head shot up and he went for my neck with a snarl. Luckily, he came to his senses immediately; a moment later, he was wide-awake and ready to play. Still, I’ll never forget it. My best friend took me for a predator and lashed out. I know I shouldn’t have taken it personally, but I couldn’t help feeling the sting of rejection. That’ll teach me to let sleeping dogs lie.
Under the right circumstances, he’s probably capable of biting me, but would he feed on my dead body? If I were lying on the floor in a coma, would he eat me alive? It’s impossible to imagine, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. At some point, even the most devoted love gives way to hunger, and starvation can drive you out of your mind. If it were a matter of survival, I might even find myself eating Grisby—but not without first being transformed by hunger into someone unrecognizable, the human equivalent of the unfamiliar dog that almost went for my throat. I’m reminded of a scene in Charles Maturin’s gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, in which a pair of lovers are locked together in a jail cell and left without food or water. On the fourth night (far too soon, surely), the man leans over his beloved and, in the agony of hunger, sinks his teeth into her shoulder: “That bosom on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now.”
I sometimes wonder whether food isn’t really at the heart of my bond with Grisby. These days, since his weight has become an issue, I try not to give him so many treats, though I can’t prevent others from doing so. Still, there are some things he loves so much I just have to indulge him now and then. His favorite treats are Frosty Paws, ice cream cups for dogs. Hand Grisby one of these frozen snacks and he’ll be preoccupied for half an hour, licking the creamy surface persistently until it starts to melt, at which point his snout gradually disappears into the cup. Frosty Paws are around a dollar apiece, but since a single Frosty Paws keeps Grisby so busy and so happy, to me it seems like a good deal. Of course, they’re full of artificial additives—but SweetSpots, the “natural and wholesome” equivalent of Frosty Paws, cost even more.
To those who can barely feed their own children, the idea of ice cream for dogs must seem like a disgusting luxury. Not so very long ago, after all, domestic dogs were fed with table scraps, vegetable rinds, and whatever they could scavenge for themselves. Of course, in those days, dogs weren’t kept leashed or penned up and could wander the streets freely, scavenging from Dumpsters and garbage cans or hanging around the back doors of various establishments where food was served.
Grisby gets plenty to eat, but he still forages for scraps on the street, wolfing them down before I can stop him, often before I can see what they are. While it wouldn’t be quite true to say he’s hungry all the time, he’s certainly willing to eat at any time (in fact, he’s doing so as I write)—but it has to be something more exciting than his usual kibble, which will sit untouched in his bowl as long as he suspects there might be a possibility, however remote, of finding something more exciting. This means he seldom resigns himself to his “official” dinner until both David and I have given every sign of having finished everything we’re planning to eat that day.
If people are eating in his presence, Grisby will sit and gaze at them, mesmerized. With me, he’ll take liberties, occasionally standing up on his back legs and putting his front paws on my lap, staring at my dinner, sometimes letting out a small whimper. If I’m eating something hot that smells good, he’ll lose all self-respect and start drooling; when I’m barefoot or wearing sandals, I’ll feel the drops of saliva on my feet. As I get to the end of my meal, Grisby will usually end up with a few scraps, or at least a plate to lick. David doesn’t approve of such behavior, and if Grisby comes sniffing around his plate, he’s sent packing—though he usually continues his vigil from a distance.
At the end of the day, when there are obviously no more plates to lick, crumbs to catch, or crusts to polish off, Grisby will turn his attention to his kibble. I love watching him eat his dinner—it’s a spectacle for the ears as much as the eyes. He snorts, munches, chews, smacks his lips, and munches some more, finishing up with a big drink of water, slurped with noisy gusto. He always gets thirsty in the night, so I leave out a bowl of water at the foot of the bed, and often hear him jump down for a noisy drink, the metal tag on his collar ringing against the edge of the water dish. When he’s had enough, he licks his lips, sometimes burps or hiccups, then jumps back up on the bed and immediately falls back asleep with a contented snort.
A fun fact: Grisby’s preferred food, above everything else—above pulled pork, Vienna sausage, and barbecue ribs—is white bread. That’s right, white bread. He adores it; he can’t get enough. Once, at a buffet I made him his own plate of cold cuts, which he never gets at home (David and I are both vegetarian), but, too excited by the smell of the bread, he wouldn’t even go near it. His second favorite food is coffee cake, and occasionally, when he’s been particularly sweet, I’ll buy him his own slice. However, although Grisby surely has his preferences, he’ll eat almost anything he’s offered. When the pie I was attempting to bake turned into a distasteful, lardy mess, Grisby chomped it up happily, eating my new silicon pie dish into the bargain. As a matter of fact, the joy he takes in his dinner leads me to the conclusion that being eaten by Grisby would be an unusual privilege. For now, however, I’m delighted to be the waiter and not the meal.