Dog Hearted

Suka’s strength fluctuates, but the trend is downhill. We slalom with her. Such is the agony of dog ownership: the way our timers draw down in asynchrony. It’s hard to accept her sand might be running out. Despite her self-possession, Suka – born in a kennel to run in a team – doesn’t really like to be alone. I can’t bear to think of her taking that last walk through the dark without me.

When she walks, we move down the street in stately, slow-moving cavalcade, stopping when she wants to stop – to read messages on a nearby lamp post, perhaps, or to greet her loyal subjects – and turning back when she tires of the whole production

I am not unaware of my descent. Occasionally I voice faint misgivings to the vet: might we have passed from the pathological into preciousness? Am I creating a monster? The verdict is always the same: Perhaps, yes. But they point to her free-falling weight, her erratic health. What’s more important? My pride, my dignity? Or keeping her alive?

Panicked, I take up a new role as kitchen maid, cooking scrambled eggs at a few hours’ interval. I shred chicken breasts into bone broth. Grate parmesan over raw beef. I follow her
12
from room to room offering dainty morsels served straight from my fingertips.

By the third or fourth, she sleeps with me on my mat, curled into the recess between my legs and belly, not quite touching me but close. I feel ill with relief. Sickeningly, painfully grateful.

But I begin to see her in new light. There’s the faintest thread of menace running through her, an undercurrent of cool self-interest.

I’d known instinctively that the harshness of an Arctic climate and a challenging manual job would serve as a sort of shock therapy for my brain: that through corporeal trial I might reunite body and mind, force them to work in concert once more. So there I was, in Finland, shovelling shit in the snow, in exchange for food and board. As a career move, I wouldn’t recommend it. But the thing is: it worked.

What had begun as urban ennui had metastasised into a more malignant form of depression, one I had never experienced before. By the time I left London for the Arctic, I’d had the uncanny sensation of watching my life unfold as if through glass for a period of six months or more.

Dogs leap across genre barriers, dragging along with them questions about what it means to own, to care for, to outlive and to love creatures with whom we only ever share a fractured language.

Dogs leap across genre barriers, dragging along with them questions about what it means to own, to care for, to outlive and to love creatures with whom we only ever share a fractured language.