A Bone of Contention

Last night I found myself waiting up until nearly two while my dog was out having fun. He might as well have been guzzling vodka from a bottle concealed in the toilets of a teenage disco. I sat watching my grown-up television programme while he was off doing something in the garden. Occasionally I went out and called his name weakly, but all I could hear in the freezing dark was the dog running away from me, hiding from the majesty of my authority and snorfling away as he nibbled on a bone. I couldn't chase him in the dark and he absolutely refused to come when called, so I waited up muttering comforting words to myself until he decided to come in, at around what-kind-of-time-do-you-call-this.

Since the staking of a new fence in the back garden it has been a pleasure to let Freddie have the run of the garden. I believe it is good for his intellectual and moral development to conduct private research into the various smells to be found in the garden, the chewability of various sticks, etc, but he discovered a breach in security yesterday so I was concerned to keep an eye on him.

He was out there for nearly two hours, between Vincent Browne and the end of Mad Men, and no amount of cajoling would induce him to chew whatever he was chewing in the sociable warmth of the family hearth. I understand that a dog needs his private bone time, but it puzzled me that he should be quite so determined to remain outside.

Then I remembered that the bone he was working on - a very large bone for such a small dog, what looks like the swivelling ball of a cow's hip, shiny and perfectly round and covered with delicious gristle - was in the most literal sense possible, a bone of contention between us. I got it for him several weeks ago to reward his stout courage while getting his stitches out, and for a while it seemed that bone might have had him beaten. He had difficulty getting a purchase on the slick sphere of bone with his small jaws, and it seemed too heavy for him to carry comfortably. Frankly I was a little disappointed in the animal, that he should have let himself be bested by a bone, but I didn't think much of it when the thing seemed to disappear from the house, like an unused exercise machine.

Anyway, this was the same bone that turned up again last night and I was reminded that it had been the centre of an ugly scene between us. Some time in January I removed Freddie from the leather sofa in the kitchen, and I instructed him to take the bone with him (I'm not going to get into the appropriateness of otherwise of not wanting the leather sofa polluted by bits of bone right now). This was the first and only time that the dog growled at me in a non-playful way, the growl of a dog being separated from his bone. It has been argued that I should have let him be, but the principles of law and order in this house demanded that I smack him very sharply on the nose and throw him violently into a small dark room. (The fact that I collapsed in remorse and begged forgiveness as I released him a few minutes later does not detract from the forceful and decisive manner with which I responded to this threat to the social order.)

I don't know what to think about all this. Why did the bone resurface after so long? Could Freddie's refusal to work on his project indoors be related to the painful memory of our first fight? It's confusing. In any case I now have to find and act on this security breach, but I am glad that a) there was something on television while I kept my vigil and b) that the dog has finally shown himself the master of the recreant bone. Still it gives me a little pang of loss to think that I can never fully enter into the private thoughts of my poor old pup, although of course that is as it should be.