Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men by Donald Mccaig

Author:Donald Mccaig
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497630253
Publisher: Open Road Media

6

The Bonny Wee Bitch

On Eye Exam Tuesday, I wore gray work pants and a flannel shirt. I had a collar for the wee bitch and a lead. I’d bought a dog bowl and some dog food. I dearly hoped Gael wasn’t cow hocked or parrot mouthed or cross-eyed useless. I prayed I’d seen what I thought I’d seen. Tuesday was bright, quite nice. I had difficulty finding Tom Reid’s turnoff, though I’d found it before, at night, half drunk, without the slightest difficulty. I was delaying, afraid of what I might find there.

A chipper Tom Reid meets me at the door and says, “I would offer ye a wee dram, but I canna. Some of the lads came by last night.”

Reid is dressed in fresh suit, cap, and tie. He has his ISDS badge in the lapel, and his handkerchief is folded neatly in his breast pocket. He has, he says, phoned David McTeir, and Mister McTeir understood. Perhaps McTeir’ll come over and see the other three-year-old bitch. “I’ll have to have twelve hundred for her.” Perhaps the American would like to see her go?

“Sure.”

We drive back to the same field I’d seen only once before, at dusk. The same tups huddle against the same far fence. A pretty place to train a dog. Reid steps over the wire fence and sets his three-year-old bitch loose. She is a hearty thing, heavy, squat, and very excitable. “I’ve only had her mesel a fortnight.”

The bitch cuts in too close to the sheep and gets a mouthful of wool. When she finally does lie down, she sticks and doesn’t want to get up again. After her slight exertion, she pants like a blown horse. I say (politely) that she’s going well for only a fortnight’s training and Reid will soon put her right. I note she’d have difficulties in the States where it’s so much hotter.

“Aye,” Reid sighs, “Weel. …”

I am sorry Reid doesn’t have a second good bitch but, at the same time, feel relief. If I can spot the flaws in this bitch, maybe I wasn’t foolish about the wee one. “We should be going,” I say. “It’s a fair bit to Glasgow.”

In the full light of day, Gael’s neither parrot mouthed nor cow hocked and has limpid lemur eyes. She’s built like a whippet, muscle stretched taut over bone. One ear points forward, the other’s half-cocked to the rear. She’s black and tan except for her white breast, a neck ring silly as a cheap boa, and white forelegs like long kidskin gloves drawn to her elbow. She reminds me of Rona, a Jewish girlfriend of my New York days; Gael has the same deep Mediterranean eyes.

Reid jumps both bitches into the boot of my car.

The old herd directs me to all the slow roads, winding through villages, pointing out farms and people he’s known all his life. Once a month he’d drive his wife north, to Glasgow, for the cancer treatments. “She was niver sick,” he says, “Niver had a sick day in her life.

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