The first time I saw him, he was a ball of brown and white fluff. He came into my life when the only dog I had then, Teddie I (at the time two years old) was desperately sick. She had pneumonia and was almost dying, and it was only by multiply antibiotic injections that I (along with my father, who was alive then) managed to pull her through. To this day I can’t quite believe that we did it. Anyway, about when she was at her worst and nobody could seriously believe she would survive, there was a visitor who saw that she was badly ill and we were taking good care of her. He thought she was going to die, and since we obviously loved dogs, he thought he would give us a replacement. An acquaintance of his had a litter of puppies and was trying to give them away.
I remember coming back from work (this was the time I was working at the Ramakrishna Mission polyclinic) and finding him in a cardboard box. I reached down to him and his little pink tongue reached out and licked me. A moment afterwards he tried to nip me with his little milk teeth, which made me laugh – but which was pretty much his character. He was always the wannabe pack leader afterwards.
By that time Teddie was well on the way to recovery, and I had no fears regarding her survival, and both of them were immunised against the usual things. This was the first time we had a good vet in the city (who is still the current lot of dogs’ veterinarian). I called him Arkan after Zeljko “Arkan” Rajnatovic, a Yugoslav militia leader whom the Clinton regime, then bombing Yugoslavian TV stations, called a war criminal, which means he was automatically a good man.
Arkan grew rapidly enough, though never very high. He was sturdy and heavy and extremely strong – and he knew how to make use of his strength. In his early days he also had this habit: when he was tired and he wanted to sit down, he would just stand in one place and let gravity take over and go down like a sack of bricks. Once I recall taking him for a walk and he decided to sit down in the middle of the road. I had the choice of either standing there for half an hour till he decided to get up or to carry him. I carried him. He hated being carried, so he decided to start walking as soon as I put him down.
Despite his fluffy looks, he was one hell of a fighter – the only dog I ever had who used to go out of his way to look for fights. Taking him for a walk meant basically sticking to streets where the number of dogs was minimal, because if he saw any of them he would take them on, no matter that they might be double his size. He would take them on and beat them. One time he got away from me one evening and by the time he was located he had – according to eyewitnesses who had no reason to lie – taken on and single-handedly beaten a pack of six dogs. Earlier on he was also very friendly towards humans, but as he grew older he became increasingly aggressive towards strangers. He bit some people rather badly – and he bit me too, twice, so that when I needed to do something to him he didn’t want done I had to put on a muzzle on him. The odd thing was that he never resented the muzzle.
And when he was frisky he was so frisky. He seemed to have phases of depression and torpor, when he would hardly move, and manic phases when he would never stand still. He was always playing then, with a ball or just running around. Sometimes Teddie and he would chase each other in turn, the one in back holding the other’s tail in his or her mouth. At the end of a leg of the run they would change places and run back.
He loved egg yolk. His food preferences would change and he was quite finicky about his diet at times, but he loved egg yolk. Since I don’t eat the yolk of eggs I hard boil for myself, he would come along every evening and literally begin butting me for his yolk. Nowadays I keep the yolk for the current Teddie. She likes it OK but not with the same overwhelming passion.
When Arkan was affectionate (and this was rare) it made me feel like a king. He was the sort of dog who, when he told you he loved you, you really felt you had earned it. He didn’t slobber over you or fawn; he would lay his head on your lap and rub you gently with his cold wet nose…I miss him so much I can’t believe it.
In the last year of his life he had got terribly overweight, though, and I had to put him on a diet. He also had developed severe rheumatism of the right back leg. It almost crippled him and took months of medication to fix. A side effect of the medication was the loss of most of his hair and the development of an ugly eye condition called follicular conjunctivitis – but after the medicine was at last discontinued he regrew his hair, regained his friskiness and his eyes also became quite all right. In the last months of his life he was in awesome shape to all appearances. How could I know he was incubating liver cancer?
I still miss him so much I can barely bear it. He wasn’t a dog. Most of us who love dogs don’t think of them as dogs. He was as much or more a family member of mine than my real family.
Sleep well, Arkan, dear friend. As long as I live I carry you with me. Don’t worry, nothing more can happen to you. You’re safe. I love you.
