Toujours Provence(7)

One of our dogs was a Korthals, but they are not often seen in Provence, and so my wife stopped the car to talk to a fellow owner. What a coincidence it was, she said, that she had one of the same unusual breed.

The man looked down at the dog, who had paused to take a dust bath, and stepped backwards to distance himself from the tangle of legs and ears that was squirming in the ditch.

“Madame,” he said, “he accompanies me, but he is not my dog. We met on the road. I don’t know who he belongs to.”

When my wife returned from the village and told me about the dog, I should have seen trouble coming. Dogs are to her what mink coats are to other women; she would like a house full of them. We already had two, and I thought that was quite enough. She agreed, although without conviction, and during the next few days I noticed that she kept looking hopefully down to the road to see if the apparition was still in the neighborhood.

It would probably have ended there if a friend hadn’t called from the village to tell us that a dog just like one of ours was spending every day outside the épicerie, drawn by the scent of hams and homemade pâtés. Each night he disappeared. Nobody in the village knew his owner. Perhaps he was lost.

My wife had a crise de chien. She had found out that lost or abandoned dogs are kept by the Société Protectrice des Animaux (the French ASPCA) for less than a week. If unclaimed, they are put down. How could we let this happen to any dog, let alone a nobly born creature of undoubted pedigree?

I telephoned the SPA and drew a blank. My wife began to spend several hours a day in the village on the pretext of buying a loaf of bread, but the dog had vanished. When I said that he had obviously gone back home, my wife looked at me as though I had suggested roasting a baby for dinner. I telephoned the SPA again.

Two weeks passed without sight of the dog. My wife moped, and the man at the SPA became bored with our daily calls. And then our contact at the épicerie came up with some hard news: the dog was living in the forest outside the house of one of her customers, who was giving him scraps and letting him sleep on the terrace.

I have rarely seen a woman move so quickly. Within half an hour my wife was coming back up the drive with a smile visible from fifty yards away. Next to her in the car I could see the enormous shaggy head of her passenger. She got out of the car, still beaming.

“He must be starving,” she said. “He’s eaten his seat belt. Isn’t he wonderful?”

The dog was coaxed from his seat and stood there wagging everything. He looked frightful—an unsanitary furball the size of an Alsatian, with a garnish of twigs and leaves entwined in his knotted coat, bones protruding from his body, and an immense brown nose poking through the undergrowth of his moustache. He lifted his leg against the side of the car and kicked up the gravel with his paws before lying down on his stomach, back legs stretched out behind him and six inches of pink tongue, speckled with fragments of seat belt, lolling from his mouth.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” my wife said again.

I held out my hand to him. He got up, took my wrist in his jaws, and started to pull me into the courtyard. He had very impressive teeth.

“There you are. He likes you.”

I asked if we could offer him something else to eat, and retrieved my dented wrist. He emptied a large bowl of dog food in three gulps, drank noisily from a bucket of water, and wiped his whiskers by hurling himself on the grass. Our two bitches didn’t know what to make of him, and neither did I.

“Poor thing,” said my wife. “We’ll have to take him to the vet, and get him clipped.”

There are moments in every marriage when it is futile to argue. I made an appointment with Madame Hélène, toilettage de chiens, for that afternoon, since no respectable vet would touch him in his current state. Madame Hélène, I hoped, would be used to the grooming problems of country dogs.

She was very brave about it after her initial shock. Her other client, a miniature apricot-colored poodle, whimpered and tried to hide in a magazine rack.

“Perhaps it would be best,” she said, “if I attended to him first. He is very highly perfumed, n’est-ce pas? Where has he been?”

“I think in the forest.”

“Mmm.” Madame Hélène wrinkled her nose, and put on a pair of rubber gloves. “Can you come back in an hour?”

I bought a flea collar, and stopped for a beer in the café at Robion while I tried to come to terms with the prospect of being a three-dog family. There was, of course, always the chance that the previous owner could be found, and then I would have only two dogs and a distraught wife. But in any case, it was not a choice I could make. If there was a canine guardian angel, he would decide. I hoped he was paying attention.