A post should appear every Sunday

Sunday October 8th 2023

Isis has decided that she’ll no longer bother with seasonal fashion changes; instead, she’ll concentrate on building up a squidgy, very dense, inpenetrably fluffy undercoat, layer it with a thick top coat of very long, soft, fine, fly-away, wavy hair, and then moult steadily, twenty four hours a day, throughout the year.

Sigh.

She must be approaching ten now, at least, and, naturally, she’s slowing down. She’s still very excited about scents, and will make a short dash towards any particularly interesting ones; she still appreciates fine drizzle, and announces its imminent arrival well before the first splodges land on us; she acknowledges rain, likes to catch the drops in her mouth, and will usually greet it with an animated skip or brief twirl; she no longer dances in the rain with happy abandon for five, ten, even thirty or forty minutes as she used to though, and that makes me sad.

Some things are exactly as they were: she continues to behave like a mad dog, wagging crazily, weaving and ducking and dodging, growling ‘threatening’ growls, and pretending to nip me when I approach her with her harness before taking her out. Quite often she utters my favourite vocal, her delightful podengo howl, “Yow-wow-w-woo- oo!” as a grand finale.

As always, she scurries to her dog bed at night (or just as nimbly, at 3.00 a.m. if we’re up late) in anticipation of our bedtime treats games. First, I drop half a gravy bone into her bed. This she sniffs out with indecorous haste in her rush to track down the other half – which she knows Human will hurl across the room before she hides more gravy bones halves and two Markies under the cushions on the day bed.

After she’s found the two scattered treats and dug out all of the delicacies buried beneath the cushions, she sits, tense with anticipation, in the centre of the day bed, awaiting the next challenge.

She knows that she’ll triumph over Human and win this one, too.

It’s a bit like the ‘whack the rat’ stall, once so popular at school fêtes, when a toy rat is dropped into a vertical channel and you have to try to hit it with a stick before it plunges  out of the end of the channel and plops onto the grass.

In our bedtime game, the target moves a little more slowly than the toy rats at the fêtes, but there’s not much in it.

I hold a treat clenched in my fist and jerk the fist up and down too fast for Isis to be able to grab it with her teeth. In order to get at it, she has to force my forearm arm down with her paw, and keep it down until she releases the treat. She used to struggle with this, and I had to slow down to give her a chance. Not now though. She sits by my side, waiting for me to begin, alert and ready to pounce.

‘Thwack!”

She’s become so good at this game that however fast I go, it’s rare that I can  bring the fist back up more than twice before her sturdy little paw pins down my wrist, and holds it down. She is a strong little dog, and it’s near impossible to extricate my hand before she releases it. The game wouldn’t be easy for a sighted dog, but she’s always spot on target, never, ever missing my wrist.

This summer our walks have become very challenging, to put it mildly. She frequently refuses to walk, and just wants to return to the car. I urge her forward. She resists. I insist, and often, once we’ve got going, she walks normally. 

But not always.

Irritating animal. But I can’t say rude things to her, in case her reluctance is simply the result of her aging. Bev thinks she’s it’s because she’s anxious because of all the weeks she spent in the kennels while I was in Yorkshire.

Maybe Bev’s right. Who knows?

I take her to Highbury. She trots into the park,  marks her territory several times, produces two poops and then, feeling her duty has been done, stops and sits down decisively. I urge her on, but she resists and refuses point blank to go any further..

Poor Isis, she’s slowing down and I have to accept it, don’t I? I give up and allow her to make her way back to the car.

I can’t help noticing that at this point, she walks quite briskly.

Hmmmmm.

Another day, and another walk. Again she plods around in Highbury with me as enthusiastically as a teenager forced to run a cross country in a snow storm.

Oh dear. Yes, it must be her age. I need to be careful with her.

Two days later, we meet up with Bev and Nancy, again in Highbury. Now, and for over an hour, Isis trots around contentedly behind Nancy, sharing scents and, apparently, very much enjoying the outing.

Oh, Isis, Isis. What’s to be done with you?

Isis came from Aeza cat and dog rescue in Aljezur, Portugal. For information about adopting an animal from the centre, contact kerry@azea.org or go to http://www.dogwatch.co.uk.