A tale of two good dogs

THE dogs in my life left it richer — don’t they always — writes Margaret Wenham. But my betrayal of one of my old best friends haunts me still.

THIS is a tale of two very different dogs.

Why two dogs, you ask? Because I was reminded about the first, a fox terrier called, a bit embarrassingly, Rinty, when writing a recent column on the changing face of Brisbane’s Royal Show. Then I thought, if the subject is dogs, I can’t possibly leave out Nicky, a kelpie-cross, even if those memories, more than 20 years after her death, still trigger anguish.

But first to Rinty. I was nine when we acquired the quivering, undersized, foxie pup, written off as a runt by his disappointed breeder.

A devotee of the popular American show, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, I’d been aching for a “Rinny” of my own and finally wore Mum and Dad down.

Of course, our “Rinny” was nothing like his famous forerunner. For a start, Pommy-accented Mum ruined things by insisting his contracted name should be properly enunciated “Rinty”, with the “t” clearly audible.

The other inescapable truth was that our Rinty was no towering, dignified and uber disciplined German Shepherd. He was a small, scatterbrained bundle of nervous energy. Nevertheless, his breeder, who’d kept in touch, noticed he was actually maturing into quite a handsome dog … for a foxie. Could she borrow him, she asked, to see how he shaped up?

And so it was that after a few weeks of strict dieting, careful clipping and rigorous schooling in controlling himself for five minutes in a show ring, Rinty amazingly won Best in Show at the 1970 Ekka.

Rinty, the unlikely winner of Best in Show at the 1970 Brisbane Ekka. (Pic: Margaret Wenham)

A benefit from all this for him was his subsequent and enthusiastic stint as a stud dog. But we who hoped a better disciplined dog might be returned to us were left living in Mother Hubbard land.

“There goes Rinty taking Mrs Hetherington for a walk,” Percy Feeney, from across the road, would observe as he watched Mum being towed along by Rinty, bounding, kangaroo-like, on his back legs, straining so hard against the collar his breathing was a series of stentorian gasps.

Then there was the barking. Rinty, who was relegated at night to the garage with its wrought iron gates, through which he could stick his head, would bark hysterically at the slightest rustle of a leaf.

Mr Brannelly, next door, who unkindly referred to Rinty as “shoe head”, because of the shape of his head and also because he was “daft”, would put up with it for a few minutes before gathering himself to deliver from his bed an enormous “Shhhaaaadddddduuuupppppp!!!!” that would echo around the streets and actually silence Rinty … momentarily.

If Rinty was inside and you’d come home from somewhere, you needed to open the door quickly but narrowly, squeezing through in one swift move that involved fighting off an excited dog while banging the door shut behind you. Then he’d demonstrate his delight you were home by having “a mad five minutes”, doing laps of the lounge at high speed — ears swept back against his shoe head, stumpy tail aeronautically horizontal.

If your timing was slightly off opening the door, he’d be a black and white speck on the horizon before you had a chance to shout “Blast! The dog’s out!” This was very annoying as hunting him down and finally cornering him, completely unrepentant, could take hours.

One evening, after ages spent combing the neighbourhood, we gave up. “Bugger him,” declared Dad. “If he comes home, he comes home.”

And he did. At dawn, we found him curled up outside the front door, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Except, we found out later, when my best friend from across the road tearfully recounted the horror scene that greeted her when she’d gone to check on her cherished guinea pigs that morning, he’d obviously spent a far from innocent night indulging his latent, bloodthirsty, rodent-killing instincts.

Rinty survived being hit by a car and poisoned by a tick once and toads twice. He was scatty, unruly, disobedient, noisy and irrepressible. When he died we wept for days.

Fast forward a decade or so and I couldn’t go another day without a dog, so off I went to the pound and was picked out by Nicky, who came out of the pack of wrestling pups when she heard my quiet whistle.

Nicky, Margaret Wenham's kelpie-cross and very good dog. (Pic: Margaret Wenham)

Nicky’s intelligence was remarkable. She seemed to understand conversational English. She didn’t just sit, stay, lie and come, she fetched, carried and opened doors — including the fridge, as I discovered one day when I came upon her enjoying some sausage links on the veranda. Out walking or riding, she didn’t need to be on a lead, she’d stick to your side like glue unless you said “go on, go have a run”.

Of course she had her idiosyncrasies, dislikes and likes. She loved milk and though I’d been puzzling about all the torn open milk cartons scattered across our adjoining horse paddock, I hadn’t put two and two together. Then, one morning, there was an urgent rapping on the back door. A neighbour, red faced and puffing, said: “Right I’ve been wondering what’s been happening to our bloody milk. The milkman’s said he’s been delivering it and this morning I opened the front door just in time to see your dog running up the road with one of our cartons between her teeth.”

Nicky and I were inseparable mates for years, but our relationship changed manifestly when I began having children. Suddenly I didn’t have very much time for her.

She started to do naughty things when she was — increasingly — left at home. Like not just digging holes in the garden but burrowing compulsively to such an extent it destroyed large areas. She also, one day, killed the family cat with whom she’d been on excellent terms. We knew it was her because a neighbour later reported he’d seen her do it but also because, when we’d got home, Nicky was slumped in the garage. She stayed like that for days, miserable with remorse and knowing we were disgusted with her.

But it gets worse. Towards the end of her shortened life, after various upheavals, I was barely making ends meet and a budget cut I ruthlessly made was Nicky’s heartworm tablets. Predictably it proved fatal.

There was and is no escaping that I badly let down my dependent, once best friend by relegating her to almost non-existent status. But then, in a final act of betrayal and awful cowardice, which haunts me still, I didn’t go to the vet to be with her as she slipped away.

I’m not sure how to end this now because thinking about Nicky always makes me cry with shame.

Maybe the point of this tale of two dogs was to remind me — us — for how long the relationships we have with our beloved dogs live on in our hearts.

Margaret Wenham is a Courier-Mail columnist.

Originally published as A tale of two good dogs