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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
