Dylan's Dog Blog
Carbon Pawprint:
adventures of a globe-trotting dog
I was born under a house facing the Indian ocean in the year of the millennium, 2000.The house was on a sandy promontory called Libanona on the edge of a sleepy provincial town. I came to understand that my home was on an island and that only the sea separated us from the southernmost tip of the planet. It happens to be the fourth largest island in the world, and it is called Madagascar.
The house was on a steep incline dropping down to a bay of reef, beach and crashing waves. I slept in the cool dark sandy space under the house with my mother, and my two brothers, until I was almost eight weeks old.
I never knew my father. He was a passing stranger and his only legacy – the large round curl in my tail like the question mark he is. My mother was a pedigree golden retriever called Hibiscus, and she was both beautiful and delicate like the tropical flower. Unlike my two brothers who were mean, bossy and loutish. The same colour as her, golden yellow, they pushed me away as though I had no right to her love. My fur was the darkest of browns, my eyes the colour of splintered labradorite. I was the odd one out. That’s why they picked on me, I suppose. It didn’t matter much because I was soon taken from my earliest hiding place and delivered a few hundred yards away to a woman in a wooden house up ‘the hill’ on Libanona.
That first day together we sat on the veranda and I couldn’t stop shivering. She held me in her arms for hours until I stopped feeling scared and then she made me a bed and gave me warm milk. She smelt slightly salty and her hands were soft as she stroked my fur and told me she was my new mum.
Over the next few days she built me a special play pen on the veranda and Hibiscus would come and visit. . I was given a name, Dylan, after the beatnik poet that my mother loved to listen to as she cooked our supper. I grew tall and strong on the creamy milk she placed in a saucer for me each day and soon, to everyone’s astonishment, I was bigger and stronger than my brothers
Libanona was a wonderful place to grow up. It was big enough to have adventures – especially running round the reef that surrounded the promontory. I would chase flocks of seabirds across the rock pools to where the waves of the ocean crashed high above me and the depth of the sea was a mystery stretching hundreds of feet below. I would see how close I could run to the edge before the waves threatened to suck me out to sea and I could hear my heart beating over the crashing water and my mum crying for me to come back.
The houses at Libanona were made of wood. They were old and rickety and their kitchen doors were always open with pots and pans drying or cooking something out in the sun. I could visit any time of the day and find a morsel of food if I was peckish or discover what was cooking for supper. Sometimes I would go and raid Pascal’s cake cupboard. Pascal worked in the same building s my mum and I had to teach him not to be scared of me.
He was not alone. Many of the people grew terrified whenever I came close. I could smell the musky sweat of fear coming off their skin. I was told that dogs were ‘fady’, which means taboo, something you don’t talk about or touch. The fishermen were the most hostile. When I ran along the beach with my mum they would stop and watch us coming towards them. Even when they carried two hammerhead sharks as long as their own bodies, glimmering silver and strung on a pole across their shoulders, they would find the strength to raise a spear against me. My mum always shouted ‘tsy matsiaka’ which means that I am not mean or dangerous, which is true of course.
Those years passed so quickly. Many people came and went at Libanona and most were kind to me, stroked my head and gave me biscuits. The children who lived around us were less gentle. They teased and chased me and pulled my tail. When they rode a bicycle six akimbo I would run after them and warn them not to fall ; but they just kept rolling down the hill, legs dangling each side of the wobbling bike, like some giant skittish spider.
There was a man called Yves living in my mum’s house and the three of us would go on long journeys together. Yves loved to surf on the ocean, so we sometimes drove for seven hours to a place called Lavanono where the waves were supposed to be perfect. The sea seemed just the same to me there as on the beach at home but then I only ever went in up to my tummy. Yves put me on his surf board one time when I was very small. It made me feel sick to feel no ground beneath me and my legs wobbled like chicken guts on the slippery board. I never liked the sea much after that except as a way to cool down from the hot sun, and it was always hot in Madagascar.
For the first few years I was the most important dog on libanona. I was king of the hill. But as I grew up I was challenged and started to get into fights. There was a gang of wild dogs who lived on the beach and they would come up the hill to steal food from the houses. They would pick on me just like my brothers had done and when Belli arrived the fighting got worse.
Belli, short for bellissima, was my first love. She was a wild dog who had come to live at Libanona because she had no where else to go and she could find kindness and food scraps amongst our neighbours’ houses. She smelt of the rock pool crabs that she liked to chase and crunch into hors d’oeuvres. She had a honey coloured coat with short white ears and a great nose for field voles. She showed me how to hunt in the long grass and to jump with all four feet in the air so I could land my nose on the small prey. The other dogs wanted her and when her season came I had to fight them to keep her to myself.
My mum would find me bleeding and bruised, sometimes with holes in my leg where ‘bad boy’ attacked me. He was a brown and white feral with a large scar over his left eye and ragged ears from so many battles. He organised his gang so that one would hold my ear and another my tail. When I could no longer move he would set about my legs and stomach. He was the meanest of the beach gang and our feud was long lived.
Bur somehow, despite their numbers and violence, I always managed to end up with Belli. We must have had fifteen puppies in all. I lost count after the first two sets as I didn’t care for the mewling, sickly smelling creatures who insisted on playing grandfather’s foot steps with my back legs. Their attempts to steal my supper drove me to distraction and the weeks they were with us I slept on the sofa where they couldn’t reach me.
Those first four years went by so fast , walking the sandy beach, hunting with belli and travelling with my mum. I hardly knew where it had gone when suddenly we uprooted and drove two and a half days north. We needed to spend time hundreds of miles away in the capital Tana, mum told me, for her work. She found us a villa with a big garden. But it wasn’t as big as Libanona. There were gates and fences and you couldn’t visit all the neighbours. I had to go on a lead when we walked. I hardly met any other dogs and Belli was far behind me.
I made friends then with our security guard called Fernand. He walked me when mum was too busy. We sat together during the day waiting for the sun to drop and then we would go to the fields. Mum sent us both to a training school so I could learn to run up fences and crawl through tunnels. I thought this was a huge waste of time but she said it was not for me but to help Fernand understand how clever I was, and how he needed to care for an intelligent dog like me.
We spent a year in Tana. Sometimes mum went back to Libanona without me, for work she said. I had Fernand to take care of me and we would keep each other company. Often he would eat the meat mum left for my dinner and just give me the gravy and scraps. When mum came home she saw I was thin and she would give me extra food and special treats and I’d soon be strong again.
After a while the training was not just about jumping or climbing. I had to learn to go into a cage. This was a really new experience and almost as scary as the surfboard. I don’t like enclosed spaces but mum kept telling me it was because of Italy. I didn’t know anything about Italy but it had something to do with travelling as mum put out the suitcases like she did when our life was on the move. She seemed excited about Italy so I played along. After a year mum took me to the airport and told me it was time. So I did what she said and went in the cage. No one could have been more surprised at what happened next
I was put in a large metal car that flew in the sky. Two other dogs were in other cages and we were all placed in a small cabin. There were no windows and we had no idea where we were going. We heard a huge roar and the air filled with the smell of petrol and we felt the ground disappear from under our stomachs. We must have spent fourteen hours in that cage so we talked to each other to try to stop from being nervous and after a while, when I got used to the smells and the noise, I dozed off. When I woke I was in another airport. My mum was crying and cuddling me and two policemen were standing over her. It seems mum has been very angry with the people in the airport because they didn’t let me out of the cage fast enough.
Eventually we got into another car, the kind I was more used to, and then the most extraordinary thing happened. We drove through a night which had white flakes falling from the sky. I’d never seen anything like it. It was cold like an open fridge and we had left Madagascar in hot sunshine. It was almost impossible to see into the speckled darkness and we couldn’t find the road to our new home. This was Italy she kept telling me. A place where the sky falls on you.
Eventually we stopped and slept in a hotel and when I woke the next day mum took me for a walk on the beach. Only this wasn’t anything like the beach at Libanona. It was covered in pebbles and was freezing cold on my paws. The white stuff from the sky had settled in piles on the stones and it was like cold water when you licked it. The air smelt sort of smoky and tasted like the black charcoal sticks left after a beach barbecue.
We spent days in the hotel. Apparently we were ‘snowed in which was a new way of saying we were stuck. It wasn’t until later that week we drove up a mountain where I discovered you could swim in snow drifts. It was the best fun I’d had since chasing the birds on the Libanona reef.
Mum walked me up the mountain each day to the sanctuary at the top. As the spring came the mountain came alive with other animals. I discovered wild hares and boars! Something in me woke up and I realised that chasing voles in the long grass of Libanona was nothing compared to this. I’d found the best hunting in the world.
Italy was amazing in other ways. The local butcher took a fancy to my mum and gave her a bag of bones for me every week. My coat grew shiny like a seal from so many marrowbones. We explored different forests and I didn’t have to worry about mean gangs of dogs, puppies or people threatening me with spears. The only things that attacked me were the biting ticks that burrowed into my skin, but mum found them during our cuddle times and drowned every single one of them.
I was settling into our new life in Italy when suddenly a friend arrived and helped pack all our things on to the top of our red car. We drove for two days, salied across a sea and drove some more until we reached a place called England. Mum said this was home but I had heard this word before and it never seemed to be any one thing or one place.
We stopped eventually in a city called London. It was grey and covered with concrete and smelt even smokier than Tana. I could feel little bits of dust go up my nose when I sniffed the air. There didn’t seem to be any fields and I hadn’t been anywhere like that before. Mum got straight into her work and I found myself looking out on to something called a street. Sometimes I would go walking with other dogs. We were taken to a space where there was grass and trees. I made friends with a half wild dog from Serbia called Max and we shared our travel stories. Some of the other dogs were snobs and wouldn’t speak to us. They said were ‘mixed’ because we didn’t know our dads, but we had more exciting secrets they could never know. If they were too superior we would talk about flying and that would silence them.
Just as I was beginning to settle into this routine, everything changed again. Mum told me she had to go into hospital and I was sent to stay with her friends who I have come to know as Aunty Terri and Uncle peter. They live next to an orchard full of rabbits and at night I sat by the long glass window that reaches the floor of their study and watched white tails bobbing through the long grass outside. It’s like the glass box with moving people that my mum looks at sometimes, only more interesting.
When mum came back she took us away to a house in Cornwall. It was another hilly location on a lonely spot covered in bracken and rabbits to chase. It was so much nicer than London and we spent the summer there with the door wide open and no streets or taxis or smoky smells. There was a deer that came in the paddock and sometimes I was locked in so I wouldn’t frighten the honey buzzard that landed on a post in the back garden.
I think that’s when mum decided we weren’t going to live in London anymore. Before I knew it we were off again and arrived in a place called Bath. We are still living here so I guess this is home now. We walk in the fields every day and there is a big river that is perfect for cooling off in the summer months. It seems we have cold and warm parts of the year and also lots of rain and gooey earth called mud. I have new friends who walk out with me, and three girlfriends who live next door. They chase me every time I go by their house and ask me about all my adventures, the strange places I have lived and where I have travelled. They think I am some sort of explorer.
I’ve not done so much travelling lately. I had other kinds of experiences this year, like ‘cancer’ for one. My mum cried a lot and fussed over me and I was feeling pretty awful because something was growing on my mouth. Eventually I was taken to see a ‘vet dentist’ called Lisa who I was told had put her hands in the mouths of Indian dancing bears. Mum said that if she could handle them she could handle me. Lisa sent me to sleep and then took out some of my mouth, the part that was sore. It felt strange for a while but then it was so much better not to be in pain. Now I feel strong again and no one seems to notice that I lost my big bottom tooth. I hide this disadvantage from new dogs I meet in case they are mean and want to fight me like ‘bad boy’ at Libanona
Every Wednesday my mum takes me to see some friends called the Bath Writers Workshop. They say I am their ‘mascot’ and that sounds as though it could be important, so I feel quite proud. I’ve always loved social events and I’m happy to sit amongst people as they talk and read each other their stories. Mum said I should tell them mine, but I said, it’s not over yet. She said I had done so many miles already that it could take some time to tell it all, so why not start now.
I don’t now about you but I have no idea how many new adventures still lay ahead of me. Thinking it over I thought perhaps people might fall asleep before I get to the end of my story, so I’d share at least some of it with you now...how I came to be here. And the rest... well, as I’m going to keep going to BWW, I suppose I can bring more another time... after all, there’s so many stories still to tell….
Dylan, the Bath Writers' Workshop Mascot
adventures of a globe-trotting dog
I was born under a house facing the Indian ocean in the year of the millennium, 2000.The house was on a sandy promontory called Libanona on the edge of a sleepy provincial town. I came to understand that my home was on an island and that only the sea separated us from the southernmost tip of the planet. It happens to be the fourth largest island in the world, and it is called Madagascar.
The house was on a steep incline dropping down to a bay of reef, beach and crashing waves. I slept in the cool dark sandy space under the house with my mother, and my two brothers, until I was almost eight weeks old.
I never knew my father. He was a passing stranger and his only legacy – the large round curl in my tail like the question mark he is. My mother was a pedigree golden retriever called Hibiscus, and she was both beautiful and delicate like the tropical flower. Unlike my two brothers who were mean, bossy and loutish. The same colour as her, golden yellow, they pushed me away as though I had no right to her love. My fur was the darkest of browns, my eyes the colour of splintered labradorite. I was the odd one out. That’s why they picked on me, I suppose. It didn’t matter much because I was soon taken from my earliest hiding place and delivered a few hundred yards away to a woman in a wooden house up ‘the hill’ on Libanona.
That first day together we sat on the veranda and I couldn’t stop shivering. She held me in her arms for hours until I stopped feeling scared and then she made me a bed and gave me warm milk. She smelt slightly salty and her hands were soft as she stroked my fur and told me she was my new mum.
Over the next few days she built me a special play pen on the veranda and Hibiscus would come and visit. . I was given a name, Dylan, after the beatnik poet that my mother loved to listen to as she cooked our supper. I grew tall and strong on the creamy milk she placed in a saucer for me each day and soon, to everyone’s astonishment, I was bigger and stronger than my brothers
Libanona was a wonderful place to grow up. It was big enough to have adventures – especially running round the reef that surrounded the promontory. I would chase flocks of seabirds across the rock pools to where the waves of the ocean crashed high above me and the depth of the sea was a mystery stretching hundreds of feet below. I would see how close I could run to the edge before the waves threatened to suck me out to sea and I could hear my heart beating over the crashing water and my mum crying for me to come back.
The houses at Libanona were made of wood. They were old and rickety and their kitchen doors were always open with pots and pans drying or cooking something out in the sun. I could visit any time of the day and find a morsel of food if I was peckish or discover what was cooking for supper. Sometimes I would go and raid Pascal’s cake cupboard. Pascal worked in the same building s my mum and I had to teach him not to be scared of me.
He was not alone. Many of the people grew terrified whenever I came close. I could smell the musky sweat of fear coming off their skin. I was told that dogs were ‘fady’, which means taboo, something you don’t talk about or touch. The fishermen were the most hostile. When I ran along the beach with my mum they would stop and watch us coming towards them. Even when they carried two hammerhead sharks as long as their own bodies, glimmering silver and strung on a pole across their shoulders, they would find the strength to raise a spear against me. My mum always shouted ‘tsy matsiaka’ which means that I am not mean or dangerous, which is true of course.
Those years passed so quickly. Many people came and went at Libanona and most were kind to me, stroked my head and gave me biscuits. The children who lived around us were less gentle. They teased and chased me and pulled my tail. When they rode a bicycle six akimbo I would run after them and warn them not to fall ; but they just kept rolling down the hill, legs dangling each side of the wobbling bike, like some giant skittish spider.
There was a man called Yves living in my mum’s house and the three of us would go on long journeys together. Yves loved to surf on the ocean, so we sometimes drove for seven hours to a place called Lavanono where the waves were supposed to be perfect. The sea seemed just the same to me there as on the beach at home but then I only ever went in up to my tummy. Yves put me on his surf board one time when I was very small. It made me feel sick to feel no ground beneath me and my legs wobbled like chicken guts on the slippery board. I never liked the sea much after that except as a way to cool down from the hot sun, and it was always hot in Madagascar.
For the first few years I was the most important dog on libanona. I was king of the hill. But as I grew up I was challenged and started to get into fights. There was a gang of wild dogs who lived on the beach and they would come up the hill to steal food from the houses. They would pick on me just like my brothers had done and when Belli arrived the fighting got worse.
Belli, short for bellissima, was my first love. She was a wild dog who had come to live at Libanona because she had no where else to go and she could find kindness and food scraps amongst our neighbours’ houses. She smelt of the rock pool crabs that she liked to chase and crunch into hors d’oeuvres. She had a honey coloured coat with short white ears and a great nose for field voles. She showed me how to hunt in the long grass and to jump with all four feet in the air so I could land my nose on the small prey. The other dogs wanted her and when her season came I had to fight them to keep her to myself.
My mum would find me bleeding and bruised, sometimes with holes in my leg where ‘bad boy’ attacked me. He was a brown and white feral with a large scar over his left eye and ragged ears from so many battles. He organised his gang so that one would hold my ear and another my tail. When I could no longer move he would set about my legs and stomach. He was the meanest of the beach gang and our feud was long lived.
Bur somehow, despite their numbers and violence, I always managed to end up with Belli. We must have had fifteen puppies in all. I lost count after the first two sets as I didn’t care for the mewling, sickly smelling creatures who insisted on playing grandfather’s foot steps with my back legs. Their attempts to steal my supper drove me to distraction and the weeks they were with us I slept on the sofa where they couldn’t reach me.
Those first four years went by so fast , walking the sandy beach, hunting with belli and travelling with my mum. I hardly knew where it had gone when suddenly we uprooted and drove two and a half days north. We needed to spend time hundreds of miles away in the capital Tana, mum told me, for her work. She found us a villa with a big garden. But it wasn’t as big as Libanona. There were gates and fences and you couldn’t visit all the neighbours. I had to go on a lead when we walked. I hardly met any other dogs and Belli was far behind me.
I made friends then with our security guard called Fernand. He walked me when mum was too busy. We sat together during the day waiting for the sun to drop and then we would go to the fields. Mum sent us both to a training school so I could learn to run up fences and crawl through tunnels. I thought this was a huge waste of time but she said it was not for me but to help Fernand understand how clever I was, and how he needed to care for an intelligent dog like me.
We spent a year in Tana. Sometimes mum went back to Libanona without me, for work she said. I had Fernand to take care of me and we would keep each other company. Often he would eat the meat mum left for my dinner and just give me the gravy and scraps. When mum came home she saw I was thin and she would give me extra food and special treats and I’d soon be strong again.
After a while the training was not just about jumping or climbing. I had to learn to go into a cage. This was a really new experience and almost as scary as the surfboard. I don’t like enclosed spaces but mum kept telling me it was because of Italy. I didn’t know anything about Italy but it had something to do with travelling as mum put out the suitcases like she did when our life was on the move. She seemed excited about Italy so I played along. After a year mum took me to the airport and told me it was time. So I did what she said and went in the cage. No one could have been more surprised at what happened next
I was put in a large metal car that flew in the sky. Two other dogs were in other cages and we were all placed in a small cabin. There were no windows and we had no idea where we were going. We heard a huge roar and the air filled with the smell of petrol and we felt the ground disappear from under our stomachs. We must have spent fourteen hours in that cage so we talked to each other to try to stop from being nervous and after a while, when I got used to the smells and the noise, I dozed off. When I woke I was in another airport. My mum was crying and cuddling me and two policemen were standing over her. It seems mum has been very angry with the people in the airport because they didn’t let me out of the cage fast enough.
Eventually we got into another car, the kind I was more used to, and then the most extraordinary thing happened. We drove through a night which had white flakes falling from the sky. I’d never seen anything like it. It was cold like an open fridge and we had left Madagascar in hot sunshine. It was almost impossible to see into the speckled darkness and we couldn’t find the road to our new home. This was Italy she kept telling me. A place where the sky falls on you.
Eventually we stopped and slept in a hotel and when I woke the next day mum took me for a walk on the beach. Only this wasn’t anything like the beach at Libanona. It was covered in pebbles and was freezing cold on my paws. The white stuff from the sky had settled in piles on the stones and it was like cold water when you licked it. The air smelt sort of smoky and tasted like the black charcoal sticks left after a beach barbecue.
We spent days in the hotel. Apparently we were ‘snowed in which was a new way of saying we were stuck. It wasn’t until later that week we drove up a mountain where I discovered you could swim in snow drifts. It was the best fun I’d had since chasing the birds on the Libanona reef.
Mum walked me up the mountain each day to the sanctuary at the top. As the spring came the mountain came alive with other animals. I discovered wild hares and boars! Something in me woke up and I realised that chasing voles in the long grass of Libanona was nothing compared to this. I’d found the best hunting in the world.
Italy was amazing in other ways. The local butcher took a fancy to my mum and gave her a bag of bones for me every week. My coat grew shiny like a seal from so many marrowbones. We explored different forests and I didn’t have to worry about mean gangs of dogs, puppies or people threatening me with spears. The only things that attacked me were the biting ticks that burrowed into my skin, but mum found them during our cuddle times and drowned every single one of them.
I was settling into our new life in Italy when suddenly a friend arrived and helped pack all our things on to the top of our red car. We drove for two days, salied across a sea and drove some more until we reached a place called England. Mum said this was home but I had heard this word before and it never seemed to be any one thing or one place.
We stopped eventually in a city called London. It was grey and covered with concrete and smelt even smokier than Tana. I could feel little bits of dust go up my nose when I sniffed the air. There didn’t seem to be any fields and I hadn’t been anywhere like that before. Mum got straight into her work and I found myself looking out on to something called a street. Sometimes I would go walking with other dogs. We were taken to a space where there was grass and trees. I made friends with a half wild dog from Serbia called Max and we shared our travel stories. Some of the other dogs were snobs and wouldn’t speak to us. They said were ‘mixed’ because we didn’t know our dads, but we had more exciting secrets they could never know. If they were too superior we would talk about flying and that would silence them.
Just as I was beginning to settle into this routine, everything changed again. Mum told me she had to go into hospital and I was sent to stay with her friends who I have come to know as Aunty Terri and Uncle peter. They live next to an orchard full of rabbits and at night I sat by the long glass window that reaches the floor of their study and watched white tails bobbing through the long grass outside. It’s like the glass box with moving people that my mum looks at sometimes, only more interesting.
When mum came back she took us away to a house in Cornwall. It was another hilly location on a lonely spot covered in bracken and rabbits to chase. It was so much nicer than London and we spent the summer there with the door wide open and no streets or taxis or smoky smells. There was a deer that came in the paddock and sometimes I was locked in so I wouldn’t frighten the honey buzzard that landed on a post in the back garden.
I think that’s when mum decided we weren’t going to live in London anymore. Before I knew it we were off again and arrived in a place called Bath. We are still living here so I guess this is home now. We walk in the fields every day and there is a big river that is perfect for cooling off in the summer months. It seems we have cold and warm parts of the year and also lots of rain and gooey earth called mud. I have new friends who walk out with me, and three girlfriends who live next door. They chase me every time I go by their house and ask me about all my adventures, the strange places I have lived and where I have travelled. They think I am some sort of explorer.
I’ve not done so much travelling lately. I had other kinds of experiences this year, like ‘cancer’ for one. My mum cried a lot and fussed over me and I was feeling pretty awful because something was growing on my mouth. Eventually I was taken to see a ‘vet dentist’ called Lisa who I was told had put her hands in the mouths of Indian dancing bears. Mum said that if she could handle them she could handle me. Lisa sent me to sleep and then took out some of my mouth, the part that was sore. It felt strange for a while but then it was so much better not to be in pain. Now I feel strong again and no one seems to notice that I lost my big bottom tooth. I hide this disadvantage from new dogs I meet in case they are mean and want to fight me like ‘bad boy’ at Libanona
Every Wednesday my mum takes me to see some friends called the Bath Writers Workshop. They say I am their ‘mascot’ and that sounds as though it could be important, so I feel quite proud. I’ve always loved social events and I’m happy to sit amongst people as they talk and read each other their stories. Mum said I should tell them mine, but I said, it’s not over yet. She said I had done so many miles already that it could take some time to tell it all, so why not start now.
I don’t now about you but I have no idea how many new adventures still lay ahead of me. Thinking it over I thought perhaps people might fall asleep before I get to the end of my story, so I’d share at least some of it with you now...how I came to be here. And the rest... well, as I’m going to keep going to BWW, I suppose I can bring more another time... after all, there’s so many stories still to tell….
Dylan, the Bath Writers' Workshop Mascot