The Bite

He was walking with his dog Mac amongst the other dog walkers, long before I came into the suburb. This tousle-haired blonde boy with his wide dark brown eyes. Often he caught us up, half running, half walking in his slightly gangly saunter. Mac, his schnoodle dog was always there, running almost in the same gait at his side. Nicholas was around twelve, maybe thirteen years old. He was certainly not old enough for chin hair or for his voice to have lost occasional flights into contralto. Especially when Mac was shoulder charging someone’s flimsy Papillion or flattening a white bichon into a mud puddle.

I was led to the park, once I had settled into the area, by my own Jack Russell terrier, Angel. She wasn’t a true breed. Some cross breeding had happened blending a terrier with a miniature pug, which could be seen in the bandy legs and pot belly, more than the terrier like-face. I hoped that old the axiom of dog owners looking like their dogs might not be quite true and after all, I was trying to work on my fitness.

Most of the dog walkers arrived in some unspoken agreement, around the same time after dinner and after a working day. They were in the main, like me, single middle-aged women. Some were a little younger but we had in common our trusted furry companions who scampered and snouted with their noses to the ground, in and out of the bush, each side of the dirt path.

Edna was a good example, a short, comfortable woman in sensible walking sneakers and her dog, a frenetic shiatsu. Rona was slimmer and taller with sad eyes and a sun-creased face and an almost permanent cigarette, nervously being pressed in and out of her thin lips. Her whippet strode, high headed and regal at her side and rarely did anything worthy of reprimand.

The exceptions were one couple and occasionally, Nigel, who came with his spaniel and Nicholas. The couple worked in a little local bookshop. Trudi, the wife was far shorter than her husband Len, but somehow he had trained his long and straight legs to walk in small time-keeping steps. They had a dog each, both were ‘bitsa’s. One was small and brown with sharp beady intelligent eyes. The other was black and wiry and was the smallest dog in the park but it made up for size by having the greatest confidence of any of the dogs. It saw no reason to fear a Labrador and would have raised a loud and menacing voice to a great dane if it ever met one.