MISS JUNE’S HOUSE WAS a quaint one-story, two-room wooden affair with white-painted walls and blue trim, a white-painted corrugated tin roof, and a verandah with a floor of rich, highly polished wood. The house was set back from the road behind a low stone wall, hidden amongst a profusion of flowering bushes and trees.
As Marie-Paule and I walked in through the open gate, we had to duck every now and then to avoid the hanging branches of overgrown bushes. Half a dozen clucking hens, some with yellow, golf-ball-sized chicks following closely behind, scurried amongst the bushes, stopping frequently to peck the ground in search of food. A large white cockerel, obviously alarmed by our intrusion, stood erect, his brilliant red wattles and head comb flapping violently with each threatening flick of his head and coarse “crrr” of his challenging call.
I shouted out a greeting so as not to frighten Miss June by our sudden appearance. We found her sitting outside at a low wooden table on the grass, together with three tiny children and a heavyset black woman, whom she introduced as Miss Maisy. Miss June ran a nursery school in the village, we soon discovered, and she and Miss Maisy were teaching Bible class to the three children.
As we were going through the ritual of greeting Miss June and Miss Maisy, introducing ourselves and then apologizing for being a nuisance, the puppies suddenly scampered out from under the elevated foundation of the house and ran over to sniff and nip my ankles. I crouched down to play with them and they clambered over one another to gnaw on my fingers and wrists. Looking up at Miss June, I asked, “Where is their mother?”
“Oh, Molly’s off visiting Jake’s Restaurant,” she replied. “The owner is very fond of her, and he prepares her a little something special to eat each evening before everyone comes for dinner.” I had noticed earlier in the day the blue-painted wooden sign in the lane outside the gate to Miss June’s. Large white lettering and an arrow pointed out Jake’s Restaurant, about half a mile farther on down the narrow, meandering road. I remembered seeing the sign outside the restaurant, announcing, in all the colors of the rainbow, SWIMMING, BEACH BAR (OPENING SOON), LUNCH-DINNER, and finally, DANCING. Jake’s is described in one of my travel guides as “the spiffiest place” in Treasure Beach. So Molly is a gourmet, I thought to myself, and probably likes a touch of the high life, too.
With that, Molly suddenly appeared, not from the direction of the lane, but from the beach. This route from Jake’s must have saved her a quarter of a mile’s traveling, a very important consideration for a dog in a hurry. She ran to greet me, tail wagging, bottom wiggling, long pink tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, pendulous breasts and elongated nipples swaying from side to side with every movement of her body. Molly was a bush dog if ever I saw one, the same sort of dog I had seen in West Africa roaming the countryside and scavenging around the villages. Slight of build, quick and agile in movement, with an open, friendly expression on her face, Molly was just the way God had intended dogs to be, without any distortion by man’s interference. She was basically white all over, with black ears, a broad black patch that covered the left side of her head, and a splattering of blue-black spots over her muzzle, shoulders, forelegs, and underbelly.
Bush dogs, more properly called pariah dogs—a term that I very much dislike because of its demeaning connotation—are so thoroughly mixed, in a genetic sense, that I think they should be regarded as a species unto themselves, distinct from the domestic dog known scientifically as Canis familiaris. After the wolf, coyote, and dingo, they are probably the closest true representatives of the wild dog family. Unlike their highly inbred relatives, the domestic dogs of pet owners the world over, bush dogs don’t suffer from the myriad hereditary diseases and malformations common to most “pure” breeds. Their eye lenses don’t drop as they do in toy poodles; their hips don’t become dislocated as they do in retrievers; and their kneecaps don’t pop off sideways as they do in Alsatians. Medium in size, bush dogs are usually a pale biscuit brown color all over, although they do come in other shades, including white (like Molly), tan, and even black, with a mixture of other hues thrown in for good measure. Yet they all have certain physical features that distinguish them from their domestic cousins. There is a strong element of greyhound in them: the sleek body, deep chest from spine to sternum, but narrow from side to side, thin, wiry legs, long face, and ears erect or able to be erected at a moment’s notice.
You shouldn’t usually fear being bitten by a Jamaican dog. They are placid and their success in staying alive is undoubtedly due to the fact that they have reached an understanding with their human counterparts, child and adult alike. They are incredibly intelligent, and know not to chase people’s goats or chickens. All of these dogs belong more or less to someone, yet, because they are mostly free to roam, they are, in a sense, truly wild. I have no doubt that Molly and most of the other dogs on the island are descended from the dogs that must have accompanied the African slaves to Jamaica in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, because they have so many similarities with the bush dogs of West Africa.
It so happened that, within three days after the end of Marie-Paule’s and my vacation in Jamaica, that mid-August in 1993, I would set off on a previously planned trip to the Gambia, a tiny sliver of a country on the west coast of Africa. There I would meet a bush dog who reminded me very much of the Jamaican Molly. I was visiting a chimpanzee rehabilitation project located on a group of riverine islands about 175 miles upstream in the River Gambia National Forest. With the punctuality of an alarm clock, Munya, as the bush dog was called, would awaken me at seven o’clock every morning by his noisy entrance into the center of the research camp. The sound of his feet thumping against the hard-packed earth echoed through the still predawn air. He was dropping in for his daily visit from his village, situated about three miles away through the bush. Coming to from deep sleep, in my mosquito-screened cot, I would wonder each morning how such a lightweight dog could make so much noise. He was only an inch or so taller at the shoulder than the Jamaican Molly, and must have weighed no more than thirty-five pounds. His body had the same sleek, almost greyhound-like shape and configuration as Molly’s, but, unlike her, he was a pale biscuit-brown color all over, except for a long splash of white down his chest. He also had the same intelligent, open face. The points of his ears had been cut off when he was a puppy, a common practice in Africa, to avoid dogs’ having their ears torn in the constant territorial battles with one another. I became very attached to Munya, and we spent a great deal of time together every day, until he would return to his village each evening before sunset.
One day, he and I went for a long walk together through the bush and I discovered the reason for Munya’s noisy early-morning behavior. We followed a narrow, ill-defined track through the dense foliage created by the constant travels of people passing back and forth between the research camp and Munya’s village. On the trail, Munya walked close by me, his head pressed tightly against the outside of my knee, his stride in exact keeping with my gait. His unusual behavior made it quite difficult for me to walk and became all the more pronounced as we proceeded. Every time we approached a bend in the track, Munya raced forward, came to a dead standstill, and craned his neck around the corner to peer intently through the overhanging branches at the ground ahead. What on earth is he doing? I wondered. Then it dawned on me. He was making sure there were no snakes or other creepy-crawlies that might be lying in wait for the unsuspecting traveler. Having determined that the coast was clear, Munya would look back at me and wag his tail, as if to say “You can come along, now; everything’s all right.” He would wait for me to catch up to him before continuing on the journey, his head again pressed against my knee. I realized that his clangorous stride into camp each morning served a similar purpose—to frighten off any snakes that might be lying across his path.
EVEN AFTER A LIFETIME of being around dogs and working as a vet, I realized, once I started to write this book, that I knew relatively little about the dog’s history, and certainly nothing about bush dogs. As a child, I imagined early primitive people sitting around their wood fires at night, surrounded by the threatening darkness, and how, as they cooked their bison meat, the appetizing aromas attracted wild dogs from near and far that approached cautiously, bellies dragging the ground, ears drawn back in submission. Perhaps one man, out of fear that the dogs might attack or because he felt a sympathy for their hunger, might have cast one or two scraps out into the darkness. Little by little, over time, this ritual led the man to throw the food less far into the night, and the dogs crept ever closer to the fire, until a relationship of mutual and lasting trust developed. But this was a romantic view, I grew to realize.
If any one could set me straight on the history of dogs, I thought, it would be Roger Caras. He had authored several books on dogs, and his most recent publication, A Perfect Harmony, describes the intertwining lives of animals and human beings throughout history. I had got to know Roger when he made a couple of visits to LEMSIP during the 1980s to film the chimps and monkeys for science programs when he was Special Correspondent for Animals and the Environment on ABC Television. He had also shown me around the new headquarters of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in upper Manhattan when he became president.
I put a call through to Roger at the ASPCA, and he agreed to meet me for dinner at a Manhattan restaurant to discuss dogs. His theory of how dogs became domesticated is quite different from my childhood idea. He maintains that early man, somewhere between ten and fourteen thousand years ago, was forced to come up with a new idea for procuring food, especially during deepest winter when hunting was particularly difficult. He would locate a wolf’s lair, usually a cave, scare off the mother with flaming torches, and steal the cubs as a live, fairly easily managed source of future meat. But, every now and again, there would be one wolf pup that was different from the rest of the litter—a little more affectionate perhaps, with more of a tendency to lick the hand of the feeder, rather than snap at it. No one would have the heart to kill this pup, and it would be treated as a pet. Over time, the process would be repeated, and as such wolf cubs grew up and started to breed amongst themselves, they passed on these gentler traits. It might then have been only a matter of time—a few thousand years, perhaps—before early man began to selectively breed future generations of puppies for attractive or useful physical traits, such as depth of chest, powerful hind legs, and maybe even intelligence. Then, in the mass migrations of peoples over the millennia, each group brought along its own variation of the original wolf. Centuries of breeding have given us the different dogs we have today.
“How then did we arrive at the present state of affairs with bush dogs?” I challenged Roger.
“Well,” he said, as he looked up to contemplate the ceiling of the restaurant, “if you took a male and female of each breed of dog known to man—and there are about eight hundred and fifty of them all told—and turned them loose in Yankee Stadium, and came back maybe twenty years later, you would probably find that all the youngest puppies were bush dogs.”
I saw what Roger was driving at, a sort of reversal of the genetic inbreeding carried out by man, but the genes could never be put back together again in quite the original combination to make a wolf, because many of those genes were lost and gone forever. You would, however, be left with your basic bush dog.
MISS JUNE’S YARD WAS like a small-scale Noah’s ark. The chickens continued their scurrying around; I now saw two cats crossing the grass; and the puppies bubbled over in doggy effervescence. Not one type of animal interfered with another; all lived in perfect harmony, it seemed.
Anyone who has ever tried to photograph a bunch of mischievous puppies knows what a frustrating experience it can be. Molly’s little puppies were all over the place and wouldn’t oblige me by sitting still even for a moment. By the time I had set my camera to the correct f-stop, found the perfect focus, and composed the best artistic balance, my subjects had long since gone off to sniff the nearest bush or squat under it.
As I crouched and gyrated to get the best pictures, I noticed one little puppy standing in the deep drainage groove running alongside the front of the house (a result of the runoff of rains cascading from the corrugated tin roof that overhung the verandah). I hadn’t seen this little one before, I was certain. I made a quick recount . . . five, six, seven, and, yes, there were eight, not seven as I had first thought. It was female, I could see that right away, but she bore hardly any resemblance to the rest of the stocky pups of the litter, who rolled over one another in nonstop play or ran to their mother to nurse, the very image of energy and vigor. This puppy looked like a shrunken, wizened replica of an adult dog on her last legs. She was half the size of her brothers and sisters, hardly bigger than a plump guinea pig, excluding her scraggly little legs, her head slightly downcast and tilted to one side, as if it were too heavy for the muscles of her neck. The very weight of the world seemed to be on her bony little shoulders. She stood with her legs spread wide apart to give herself balance and stability, but her little body tremored continuously, as though she would fall over if she made the slightest wrong movement. She had the bloated belly characteristic of a heavy infestation with parasitic worms, and her pencil-thin tail stood erect, too stiff with soil to go back down. When she would decide to take a step forward, she would actually step backwards a pace, then readjust her angle to point her body in the new direction, before lumbering forward with the cumbersome grace of a World War I military tank. The lids of both her eyes were matted closed with pus, and her left eye bulged beneath its lids, giving her head a distinctly lopsided appearance. Even so, she looked more like her mother than any of the other puppies. She was white, except for black ears and a broad black patch on either side of her head and neck, which left an irregular white line running down the middle of her forehead. She had a tiny almond-shaped brown spot above each eye, the only feature that she seemed not to have inherited from her mother. She also had a small irregular black patch on her bottom, to the left side of her tail, but this looked more like a soil stain than a haircoat marking.
“What about this little one?” I asked Miss June. “I don’t remember seeing her before.”
“Oh, she’s the runt of the litter,” she replied. “She was born long after the rest, and she can’t compete with the others for a nipple.” My heart went out to this pathetic little mite of a puppy, and I bent down to scoop her up to my chest. She felt like a feather in my hand and I realized she didn’t have the dank characteristic sour-milk smell of a normal newborn pup. Her tongue and gums were marble white, not the bright flesh pink of the other puppies, but I wasn’t sure whether this was because of anemia or shock. Her little black nose was clogged and bubbling with cream-colored pus, and the skin of her muzzle and lips was scalded raw pink by the continuous discharge. Her bony little bottom was also raw from the constant flow of diarrhea. I held her up in my hand, pressing her chest close to my ear while I closed off my other ear, the best I could do without a stethoscope. Even above the rustle of the breeze, I could hear the sounds of her breathing, interrupted now and then by faint grumbling cries, and I could hear the bubbling and feel the gurgling of her lungs beneath her ribs. This little thing was in bad, bad shape. She definitely had bronchitis, possibly pneumonia.
Runt puppies are usually the last to be born, sometimes as much as a day after the rest of the litter. Growing from an egg that has had the misfortune to implant itself at the very top end of one or other horn of the uterus, far removed from the best blood supply, the runt is undernourished throughout the pregnancy, and is often so weak that it dies from exhaustion during the course of being born or shortly thereafter. This little one had survived three and a half weeks, but I could hardly fathom how. “She takes a little milk from the saucer,” Miss June assured me, “and we have tried to get Molly to stand for her so that she has a better chance to suckle. But she soon gets pushed out of the way by the other puppies.”
“Let’s have a go now,” I suggested to Miss June. “You get Molly to stand and I’ll hold the puppy up to a nipple.” It worked for a few seconds, the puppy sucking with surprising vigor, but Molly soon became agitated by our interference, and the other puppies began to crowd in to see what was going on, desperate not to miss out on anything. In the process, the little runt was quickly pushed out of the way.
With that, Miss June invited us into the house for tea. “We can give the little puppy some milk in a saucer,” she added.
In every detail, Miss June’s abode resembled a doll’s house. Bookshelves lined two walls of the tiny sitting room. Small potted plants, framed photographs, and quotations from the Bible adorned the other walls. Every space in this minute room was well planned; every crook and cranny contained some treasure. Miss Maisy soon emerged from the minuscule kitchen beyond the living room with a large pot of tea, a plate of Scottish shortbread, and a saucer of milk for the puppy.
We began to talk; Marie-Paule to explain about her teaching, me to say I was a vet. Miss June told us that she had been born in Jamaica, sometime around the beginning of the Second World War. Both her parents were English, and had met, fallen in love, and married in Jamaica, after they had shipped out from England to work as civil servants in the British colonial government. We went on to discover that Miss June was married to Frank Pringle, a former minister of tourism, and now a financial advisor to the government of Jamaica. His parents had been wealthy and influential landowners in colonial times. Well, well, I thought, Molly comes from a very prestigious background.
“And what about Molly’s story?” I asked Miss June.
“Well, let me see,” she said, with a faraway look in her eyes. “Molly is about four years old. She was adopted when she was a puppy by Joan Marshall, the Hollywood film star. Miss Marshall had left America and come to Jamaica when she discovered that she was dying of cancer. She loved Jamaica so, she wanted to spend her last days in peace. She and I became close friends, and after she died I took care of Molly. This is Molly’s second litter of puppies. She had no problem at all with the first,” Miss June continued with pride, “and I found homes for them all. These puppies are all spoken for, too,” she added, and began to describe to what type of home each would go. “The little runt is going to a farmer who has a mentally retarded three-year-old son. He thought it would be good for them to grow up together, seeing as they both have problems. He’s such a kind man, and I know he will give the puppy a good home.”
“And what about the father of the puppies?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s Shaba,” Miss June replied with a laugh. “He’s a real character. All the other dogs in the area are in awe of him. You may have seen him around the villa where you’re staying. He’s got his eye on the female that lives next door.”
Shaba—that’s a regal-sounding African name if ever I heard one, I thought. I did recall seeing him earlier in the afternoon, playing and carousing with the female in the next house. With his cocky, self-assertive manner, he was every bit the bush dog. He had a stockier body than Molly, and was a pale biscuit brown all over, except for a small swatch of white on his chest. So that’s where the nutmeg spots above the little runt’s eyes come from, and the brown markings on some of the other puppies, I realized.
As I sat on my little chair in the corner, with the runt puppy held across my lap, deeply engrossed in Miss June’s stories, I noticed a flea making its rickety, arduous course through the hair on the puppy’s neck. Trying not to let Miss June see what I was doing—for owners are often very embarrassed to be told that their animals have fleas—I tried to snap the flea between my two thumbnails. Then a second appeared, followed immediately by three more, crisscrossing one another’s paths. In no time at all, I realized that the puppy was absolutely infested with fleas. I began to feel itchy all over, wondering whether some of the fleas hadn’t made it into my clothing.
During my years as a vet in private practice, my axiom to dog and cat owners had always been that if you see one flea, there are nine that you haven’t seen. By this calculation, I estimated that there must have been at least two hundred fleas on this little thing’s body. If I spent all day at it, I couldn’t hope to squash more than a few between my thumbnails. I have always been impressed by a flea’s ability to learn very quickly that something, or someone, is after him. While you might be quite deft at catching the first two or three fleas, the rest seem to know you’re after them, and they lie low, as if a warning were being transmitted by jungle drums. Perhaps, I thought, if we took the puppy back to the villa for a few hours, we could get some sustained nourishment into her, and at the same time I could continue the hunt for fleas. I remembered that Marie-Paule kept a fantastic pair of broad-bladed tweezers in her toilet bag that would be ideal for the purpose.
“Miss June,” I said, “would you mind if I take the little puppy back with us to the villa for a couple of hours? I could really concentrate on getting some milk into her. I’ll bring her back later on tonight.” Miss June seemed quite happy at this and gave us a small bag of milk powder that she had been using for supplemental feeding. Bidding our goodbyes, Marie-Paule and I, with the pup wrapped in a small piece of toweling, set off back to our villa, this time by the quicker back way, to scale the coral wall once again.
Miss Polly, the young woman who looked after us in the villa, was in the kitchen when we returned. She was cooking the evening meal and tidying up, all part of the Jamaican holiday package. When she saw the puppy in my arms she immediately took pity on her and set about making a thick chicken soup, “the best nourishment,” she said, “for weak children and animals alike.”
While Miss Polly prepared the broth, I went straight away to get Marie-Paule’s tweezers from her toilet bag and then laid the puppy out on a thick layer of several issues of the Gleaner, the daily Jamaican newspaper. As weak as she was, I had no difficulty getting her to stay on her back while I searched for fleas on her abdomen. I immediately saw three or four fleas zigzagging across the open prairies of her bloated tummy, but I found them even harder to catch in this exposed position than those wandering amongst the dense forest of hair on her back and neck. After half an hour of hunting and squashing, I realized the hopelessness of the task. What I needed was some good flea powder, but where would I find some at this late hour?
Try I would, though, and I left the villa to walk the narrow, winding lane toward the village. I tried to recall what sorts of shops I had seen. There were only two, if I remembered correctly, a tiny supermarket and an engine-parts shop, which never seemed to be open. I couldn’t imagine either selling flea powder.
On the way to the village, I saw an elderly man leaning on his garden gate, gazing at the sunset. He was a fisherman and had returned for the evening after the day’s catch. “Good evening,” I said to him, “do you have any dogs?” “Yes,” he replied. “Do they ever get fleas?” I inquired. “Sometimes,” he answered with a quizzical expression beginning to show on his face. “Do you ever use powder to treat them?” I asked eagerly, quickly explaining the reason for my inquiries. “Oh, yes,” he said with a chuckle. “Wait awhile, I think I may have some in the shed.” With that, he called to his wife, who appeared at the side door of the tiny cottage, and the two of them disappeared into a garden shed at the back. I could hear them rummaging through boxes, and finally they reappeared at the door, beaming with success.
After thanking the fisherman and his wife, back to the villa I went, and with a metal comb in one hand and the canister of flea powder in the other, I set to work, shaking and combing, combing and shaking. This was great stuff, the strongest flea powder I had ever come across, probably too toxic to be sold on the American market. The label on the canister was so worn and tattered that I couldn’t make out any of the ingredients listed. Within minutes, I had a thin carpet of dead and dying fleas on the newspaper. My original estimate was no exaggeration; I had killed at least two hundred of them. I continued to comb out the pup’s hair, not only to remove the fleas, but to rid her of as much of the powder residue as I could. It is really quite dangerous using such toxic compounds on very young animals, all the more so if they are already ill, because the chemicals are absorbed rapidly through the skin into the bloodstream and can then attack the organs and nervous system. I was afraid that if this happened to the puppy, she could go into seizures, and maybe even suffer permanent damage to her brain or liver.
Within twenty minutes, I swear not a single flea remained on that little thing’s body; I felt quite proud of myself. I placed the puppy to one side on a blanket, and with the greatest of care I folded the newspapers so as not to spill any of the contents onto the floor and disposed of the package in the garbage can that stood outside the back door of the villa. I wondered what the reaction of the owner of the villa would be, somewhere off in his home in America, if he knew of the odd practices going on in his absence.
What next, I wondered as I looked down at the pup asleep on the blanket. She needed a bath to get rid of the flea droppings that littered her coat like a dusting of fine black sand and to wash off the mats of dried diarrhea on the hair of her bottom and down the backs of her legs; she would surely feel better being clean. With a bowl of warm water and a gentle shampoo, Marie-Paule and I set about washing and rinsing, a section at a time, so as not to let the puppy get too cold, going over her hair with a blow dryer in rapid strokes. After ten minutes, the pup looked all fluffed up and shiny as a new pin. But I was still concerned about the infection in her eyes. I had no antibiotic ointments to treat her with, and every time I tried to pry her eyelids gently apart, she screamed in pain. The only remedy I could think of was to bathe her eyes in warm milk, a trick my mother had taught me from her days of treating horses in Ireland when she was a girl. The fats in the milk helped to soften and dissolve the hard-crusted pus.
In the meantime, Miss Polly had finished preparing her thick soup, and she poured some into a saucer on the stone floor. The little pup made straight for it, plunging her little muzzle into the viscid brew and lapping as though there were no tomorrow. She could hardly keep her balance on her splayed-out paws, so eager she was to drink, and by the time she had finished, her raw pink muzzle was covered in congealed, cream-colored broth, and spattered droplets stuck all over her face and whiskers.
We were encouraged by the puppy’s progress, and I had killed all the fleas, but now what? If we gave her back to her mother she would end up in the nest, made of whatever, wedged in the crawl space beneath the foundation of Miss June’s house, along with all the other flea-ridden pups. She would be infested again in no time at all, and we would have achieved nothing. I was also very concerned about her lungs, and the possibility that she might have early pneumonia. The very least we had to do was keep her until the next day and assure that she got sustained nourishment at regular intervals throughout the night.