My lurcher, Stig, now in his 14th year, looks intently at me from the beat-up leather armchair by the window in my study. I got that chair thinking that visitors would sit in it while I sat at my desk. The dogs thought differently. Dogs, in my experience, are selectively obedient. The first dog to sit in that chair was my bull-cross lurcher, Felix, brindle and white and curvaceous. When he got down, Gigi the ginger saluki cross would take his place, and Pansy, the scruffy Jack Russell, would hop up beside her. They were a team. Later, after Felix died and Gigi pined, Hansel, named after the character in Zoolander, not the boy in the fairy tale, arrived and made that chair his favourite.
That was 14 years ago, the year I came to this parish, and the year Stig joined us. Stig has a noble lineage: lurcher to lurcher for eight generations. His mother was trainer Jim Greenwood’s great bitch Tig; his grandmother was Buffy, who was probably the best little black-and-white lurcher ever pupped. Buffy and Tig did displays at country shows where they would be sent to find an egg in Jim’s bag on one side of the ring and carry it in their mouths over jumps, delivering it to Jim unbroken. Then they’d go back to fetch the frying pan. Here at the rectory, Gigi performed similar feats in secret. She’d get the egg box from the back of the kitchen counter, eat one, and then cache the rest unbroken behind the sofa cushions. We learned to check before we sat down.
Dogs have jobs. They herd sheep, guard flocks, search for the lost, the injured and the dead. They comfort the old, the sick and those who have no words. They guide those who cannot see and alert those who cannot hear. They sniff out contraband and disease, as well as the wounded deer my wire-haired dachshund’s littermates track through the heather. They serve in the armed forces and the police. They have hunted with humans for tens of thousands of years, and they still do. Some hunt lions; some, like one of mine, hunt mice.
When I go upstairs, Ezio, the ninja cat, is behind the curtain on the landing. He sticks out a paw to pat my face, and we play a brief game of “now you see me, now you don’t”. I love the cats and the cats love me but, upon reflection, they don’t understand me as well as the dogs do. Cats understand their people just as much as they need to, and they’re happy for us to remain, to some degree, mysterious, just as they remain, to some degree, mysterious to us. With dogs, it’s different. Understanding people is their vocation. It’s the bedrock beneath all the hunting, herding, guarding, guiding, alerting and rescuing. There’s no “now you see me, now you don’t”. With my dogs, I know myself to be seen. They read my expressions and every gesture and mannerism, from the moment I turn over to get up in the morning. They rejoice with me when I’m happy, commiserate with me when I’m sad and press close to me when I’m ill or in pain. Nobody but God knows me and sees me as my dogs do. They know me better than I know myself.
I used to think that what I loved about dogs, as a species, was their quality of unconditional love and emotional intelligence. But cats have that too. When my husband woke with a shout from a nightmare, there would always be one cat who stayed beside him, purring, to bring him into the waking world. And when Geoffrey died, that cat would not leave him until the undertaker’s men came to carry his body away. No, cats love their people deeply and intelligently. They just don’t make a study of them in the way that dogs do.
With that kind of attention and understanding, I’m quite content to live with dogs who are imperfectly obedient, who dig holes in the garden and bark at squirrels, and run off-lead as Minnie, my first lurcher, did. Minnie wore a bell on her collar, stamped with a phrase from Compline, “the apple of an eye”. When she returned across the fields at 30 miles an hour, it produced a Doppler effect. She stole bait and sandwiches from fishermen, happily joined other people’s picnics by the river and pounced on lovers in the long grass. The lovers would sit up and see me in my collar trying to look like an unconcerned passerby. As much as Stig taught every hound who followed him to behave, Minnie taught them mischief.
Here in the parishes, we welcome well-behaved dogs into church. Not mine though. They won’t settle. I think perhaps, they’re members of the Society of Friends and have no truck with steeplehouses.
