Pipi - The Alpha Male

Life in the Cortijo was wonderful. The heat had died down (a bit) and I was starting to learn things about this new area I had moved to. I’d visited a town called Nerja for a holiday in 1998 and had loved the place so much that I contemplated buying a plot and building a house. Luckily I didn’t as many houses built on illegal plots (given planning permission by corrupt officials in the town hall) are now being bulldozed by, yes, you’ve guessed it – the same town hall.

La Herradura

The area was called the Costa Tropical, so called because it had a tropical climate and could grow fruits and other crops normally found in very hot regions. However, only a few months after I moved in, a ‘tropical’ storm hit the area and rain poured down for days on end. In the space of a few months, La Herradura, my new home town, had had the hottest summer in 30 years and the wettest in living memory! Bars on the beach were flooded, the beach actually disappeared as flood water poured down from the old town and my terrace was about 4 inches under a torrent of mud which had been washed down from the terraces behind the house.

None of this had any effect on Elsa and Django of course. Rain is something to play in for a dog. Mud is also something to roll in and the fact that the lower terraces were awash just made it all the more interesting.

It was about November that another couple of dogs appeared. I noticed that they tended to appear when the landlord’s father (another Joaquin) was working the land – tending his trees and keeping the grass down around the orchard. I said hello to this grizzled old guy in Spanish and my greeting must have been pretty authentic as he replied with a stream of Spanish. I apologised for not speaking his language and he began again in faltering English but then, strangely asked if I spoke French. ‘Oui’, I replied and ever since we have conversed in French. So here we have, what turned out to be a retired professor of French (from a Spanish High School) standing speaking French with a Scot in the middle of a Spanish avocado farm!

Turns out the big, male, dog was called Pipi which, given he lifted his leg every few seconds, seemed to be an apt name (pipi is the name for a widdle in French). The small dog who followed every step Pipi made was called Margherita and I just assumed she was part of the family.

Pipi - The Alpha Male

Gradually, Pipi and Margherita started to appear regularly on the terrace, not that I was feeding them – I guess it was just the company of the other dogs they sought. Pipi was quite obviously the alpha dog on the farm as he stood no nonsense from either Elsa or Django and I was careful to keep an eye on the dogs when they were playing, quite a wise move I think as one night I heard an awful fight outside and when I investigated, poor Django had been set upon by Pipi. Another expensive trip to the vets!

Gradually, Pipi started to accept that any bad behaviour was ‘rewarded’ with a slap from me but he never took his eyes off poor Django who still thought he was a red-blooded male and could mate with little Margherita, unaware that he’d had his ‘bits chopped off’ when he’d run away as a pup. It was then that I figured out that Pipi and Margherita were an ‘item’.  

Margherita

  

Django

I’d arrived to view my new rented house in Spain. Elsa was with me, probably fed up by now of being secured in the back seat of the car or stuck in the apartment and desperate to get out despite the morning trips to the beach. The house was a two bedroom finca (old Spanish farmhouse), more accurately called a Cortijo (country house) once they'd been modernised, which luckily, mine was.

Virtually, as soon as I got out of the car, a large black Labrador cross came bounding up and jumped up on me with his paws resting on my chest. ‘Django. Get down’, the owner of the house shouted and gave him a good old right hook to the side of his face. I’d heard that Spaniards weren’t too kind, to put it lightly, to their pets and here was proof on the very first day. Anyway, the house was perfect and I took it on the spot.

My Cortijo

It’s always difficult introducing a pet to a new home and for the first few days I was careful to walk Elsa around the property to get her used to her new surroundings. After a few days she was happy to wander around the avocado and mango farm which was to be my home for the next 3 years. 

On our early trips round the farm I discovered not only avocados and mangos but pomegranates, bananas, persimmons, olives, oranges, cherimoyas, guavas and what looked like lychees. A true fruit lovers dream. Unfortunately, being a gin and tonic man myself, the only fruit missing was lemons! 

Elsa loved wandering around her new surroundings but she never strayed so I was happy just to open the door and let her go and do her own thing.

Django

It didn’t take long for Django to appear - a couple of days actually. He’d wander up from the main farm house and sit on the terrace and amazingly, find a ripe avocado, peel it with his teeth and then eat the flesh, leaving a perfectly clean stone and a pile of skin. Elsa watched him, obviously fascinated by his dexterity but she never ate the green, slimy flesh. Maybe like me she had tried it sometime and thought 'there’s no taste!'

For the first few weeks Django only appeared during the day but as time passed, I noticed he was still on the terrace as I closed the front door at night. It was still summer (as far as Spain was concerned) and the daytime temperature was still be in the high 80’s, or about 30 degrees Celsius. Maybe the large covered terrace offered him a respite from the sweltering heat. 

Django and Elsa became great buddies. I can only assume that after Elsa had her breakfast, Django would take her on trips to the furthest corners of the farm and then they would return an hour later desperate for a drink of cold water.

I’d not seen much of my landlord but one night he called round to see if things were ok with the house and there, lying in a corner was his dog, Django. ‘I wondered where he’d got to’, he said. ‘Don’t feed him or you’ll never get rid of him’, words which would resonate with me a few months later.

Around this time, I’d taken Elsa into the local vet’s practice to get her annual jabs. Stefan, the vet and I got talking and as well as the bill being about 50% of what it would have cost in France, he seemed like a really nice guy so one day when Django appeared with several large gashes in his side, ears and head, I took him down to see what Stefan thought of his wounds. Why did I take Django down to the vets? Because I knew that his owner wouldn’t and as it turned out, the owner ‘had previous’.

As I bundled 40+ kilos of black lab into my car, I was amazed at just how calm and well behaved he was. He lay on the back seat and when I stopped in the village and put him on a lead, probably for the first time in his life (I was told that he was about the same age as Elsa – 3), he walked perfectly, not pulling or straining on the leash and ignoring the many other dogs out for their morning stroll with their owners.

In the vets, Stefan said he thought he had seen Django before and when his wife Heini appeared she confirmed that about 2 years previously, the police had picked up a black lab and had taken it to the local dog refuge. They, in turn, had asked Stefan to inoculate and spey this ‘lost’ dog, as they do with all dogs which come into the refuge, and in doing so Stefan was informed by a client who just happened to be in the practice at the same time that Django’s owner was the guy who owned the village computer repair shop – Joaquin, my landlord! Incredibly, despite there being only 50 yards between the shop and Stefan’s practice they had never met. 

Stefan went over and told Joaquin that he had his dog and that there was a bill of 60 euros waiting to be paid. Joaquin denied that Django was his and refused to pay the bill but said he’d give him a home! All that subterfuge for 60 euros!

Anyway, back in the present day, Django’s wounds were deemed to be serious enough to warrant a good ‘stapeling’ (I counted about 20) and along with a box of pills and a bill of about 80 euros, I took Django back home to convalesce. That 80 euros was the first of many hundreds I paid to Stefan for treating dogs who weren’t mine. It was also the time when Django realised that he had found someone who cared for him, he had a doggie friend in Elsa, that there was a nice bed inside the house and best of all, he was presented with two meals a day.

One dog goes to heaven, a new one arrives....

I guess my life with dogs started when I was about 13 years old. We’d just moved to a Glasgow overspill housing scheme and we got a puppy from a neighbour, a small bundle of brown and white fluff. My brother (Robert) and I called her Patche (don’t know where the ‘e’ came from but I suppose it was because our father watched western shows on TV and we mistakenly thought we’d call her after the Apache Indians). Anyway, Patche had a ‘lovely’ life running off to the nearby farm and chasing the farmer’s cows and sheep (a bad move because like today, farmers can shoot dogs who are worrying their animals), catching burglars and generally having a nice life. 

Unfortunately, when Patche was about 5 years old, she followed me one night when I was going off to a football match. I didn’t notice her until I’d walked about a mile from the house and as I was going to meet my prospective new father-in-law, I told her rather sternly to ‘go home’. She never did and I have regretted not having taken her back to this day. Poor Patche – whatever happened to her? My brother has never forgiven me to this day.

Fast forward 30 odd years without dogs in my life and I moved to France to be with an ex-girlfriend who had decided she wanted me back in her life. The family consisted of Julie and her two kids, Guy (5) and Kitty (3) and Shadow – a 1 year old mixed breed mutt, so called because being all black, when he peered through the windows or ran about at night, he looked like a shadow. 

I guess Shadow was in the process of becoming the alpha male of the family but he bore no grudges when I moved in and immediately took to me despite the fact that I was travelling a lot with my job then and only saw him at weekends.

The wonderful Shadow

Shadow and I became inseparable. He followed me everywhere, even accompanying me to the local bars and restaurants where all the locals knew him as a perfectly behaved dog who would patiently sit under the tables waiting for a scrap of hamburger or a bit of ham. And then we’d go home to our house in the foothills of the Alps where he’d chase rabbits and run away from wild boars.

Shadow had a wonderful life but was obviously a breed which suffered from hip problems and sure enough when he was about 14 years old, his back legs deteriorated and we had to ‘let him go’. To me, it was a truly traumatic time which I tried to capture in a blog I wrote at the time. You can read it here.......   

http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com.es/2012/10/shadow-obituary.html        

I told my girlfriend, soon to become my wife, that I needed time to get over Shadow’s death but true to form, she went off to lunch one day and reappeared with the most gorgeous little puppy. Of course, she knew that despite still grieving for Shadow, once I set eyes on this little bundle of fluff I would be smitten and so it turned out, but what to call her? Kitty, my step-daughter wanted to name her Khaleesi after some character in the TV show Game of Thrones but having watched one particularly gruesome episode, I wasn’t convinced and so we named her Elsa after the lioness in the film Born Free.

Like Shadow, Elsa was ‘the perfect dog’, beautifully behaved, a wonderful temperament, faithfully following me around the fields and terraces and just like Shadow, with impeccable manners in the bars and restaurants. By this time, I was on the verge of retirement so Elsa and I spent virtually 24 hours a day in each other’s company. She was a wonderful companion, almost a reincarnation of the dearly loved Shadow.

Little Elsa

When Elsa was about 2 years old, I decided to move to Spain. A lengthy journey ensued with Elsa stretched out on the back seat of the car, patiently looking forward to the nightly stops in ‘dog friendly’ hotels. For a dog who spent all day, every day in the fields and terraces of the foothills of the Alps, it couldn't have been a pleasant journey, particularly as Spain decided to have its hottest summer for 30 years with the temperature reaching 43 degrees! Worse, my new home was not available for a month so we had to ‘exist’ in a small, airless apartment, the saving grace being that the beach, which Elsa loved, was but a minute’s walk away.

We got through that period by going for morning swims and chasing birds but it couldn’t have been pleasant for her cooped up in a tiny flat when she’d been used to roaming at will. I guess she took her revenge by having her first ‘wee’ of the morning, every morning, on the immaculate lawn at the front of the apartment block which rapidly turned a bright yellow and then died!

The month past incredibly slowly in the searing heat of the Spanish summer but eventually it was time to move into our new home – and that’s when we met Django.