Leslie

This is a short story about a man and a dog. Would you prefer to have it fed into your earholes? Me too. Here it is, in the shape of Episode 5 of the Simple Joys Podcast.

Leslie

The biggest, most ferocious dogs in Armenia have no ears. For a fighting dog, large ears are a target. Other dogs or bears may scratch or bite the ear, which weakens the dog with needless injury. If you have a dog whose stated raison d’être is combat, it only makes sense to crop its ears.

Few things in the Armenian landscape look more sinister than these beasts, with muscles that glide over a swelling, pulsating frame, and on top of it an earless head. In the hills, man is at its mercy.

The days grew long and wearisome as Johnson Farside neared Dilijan.

His bag weighed heavy and deep on his shoulders. The sky made shapes of grey and blue in turns. Hills rose and fell under his feet and he whistled and sang to no one. No one but a dog who had become his companion.

The dog was small and ratty, useless to a shepherd for anything but a one-sided conversation. Its face was long and conical, its eyes bulging and quizzical, and its fur was stracciatella in splotches across a paltry torso. Like the masterpiece of an angry oil painter in a hurry. The dog, whom Johnson had begun to address ‘Leslie’, had joined him two nights previously beside the village of Karmirgyugh. Leslie was assisting a man in bringing home his herd of cows as Johnson set up camp in the early evening. Leslie didn’t shout when he saw Farside, and in turn, Farside did not threaten to throw a rock at Leslie. Quite irregular, all things considered. Leslie simply waited while Johnson conversed with the man on the horse.

“Can I put my tent here?”

Nods.

Johnson saw the man’s lips quiver as if his mouth were full of questions. Nothing escaped. Johnson offered an answer anyway, miming walking with an index-and-middle-wiggle and uttering the name of his destination. “Dilijan.” The man did not move, as if this were not one of the questions in his mouth. Awkward and confused, man, dog and horse stared Johnson in the face. The horse looked a shade bored, as horses often do. At last the man pricked the tension balloon with a wave of his hand and the last of the evening sunshine illuminated the trio as they poked their way up the hill with thirty cows in tow.

Half an hour later, Leslie returned. Johnson had cooked his Bulgur Dinner and was onto dessert, the Ubiquitous Sugared Dough Balls (available from Every Shop In The Country). Leslie approached gingerly, his expression one of gentle dim-wittedness. The dog would like a Ubiquitous Sugared Dough Ball, Johnson presumed? No, apparently not. He’s just curious.

As it transpired, Leslie did in fact enjoy a Ubiquitous Sugared Dough Ball when it was offered to him, and it remains a subject of debate whether the Machiavellian hound took Farside for a ride that evening. A strong argument in favour of the dog’s fealty was found the following morning outside Johnson’s tent, where Leslie lay in wait for his owner-for-a-day.

This type of dog was anathema to a city-dweller like Farside, but the Caucasian countryside was quite familiar. Dog ownership is fast and loose, so it seems, and a dog has a master inasmuch as the master can persuade the dog to stay. Many dogs prefer an itinerant life, finding short-term lieges with similar interests which tend to include walking, running and sitting in puddles.

For the subsequent 48 hours, Leslie and Johnson Farside were man and dog, and as expected, the dog could offer nothing but companionship. He watched Johnson pick incorrect paths through dense foliage in the untouched northernmost part of Dilijan National Park. He listened as Johnson swore at bushes. He watched Johnson snap a hiking pole clean in half as he tottered across a boulder field. He sniffed the floor while Johnson tugged at the rusted spout of a dried-up water source in the vain hope that “all it needed was a good rub”. Leslie only waited and spectated, as devoted as he was useless.

But it was simply by being quiet that Leslie earned Johnson’s fondness. Johnson had spent many nights under the ‘protection’ of dogs who barked at twenty-minute intervals for nine hours. Johnson liked dogs. But these experiences led him to question their intelligence. A bird landing on a leaf could induce total meltdown from a mutt, who would seem entirely unable to tell the difference between true danger and just a sound. It may have reduced the risk of attack by a bear or wolf, but compared to the certainty of a night lying awake, enraged,  Johnson would have taken his chances. At least they were devoted. But in a stroke of cynicism, this too reduced his respect for the dogs. There was a desperation there.

But Leslie was cool, and their relationship was relaxed. Less master and charge, they were acquaintances, heading the same way and preferring to travel together than alone. Leslie could have covered the distance in a fraction of the time it took Johnson, but he waited while Johnson fumbled his way through, disappearing for periods but always trotting back before long. Johnson feigned indifference, but during these absences he always kept a keen eye out, wondering what it was that had piqued the dog’s curiosity and whether he had found something more interesting to do than to hang out with a bloke. The longer the absence, the more firmly Johnson accepted that their dalliance was over and that he was alone once more, and the dog’s reappearance stirred greater affection with each reconvention.

In the evenings, Leslie never hassled Johnson. They sat together at sunset while man ate, dog making easy society. Leslie’s facile devotion confused Johnson. Humans try to understand animals in terms of their needs, and an interaction with a beast must be explicable within the bounds of eating and reproduction. It didn’t seem like Leslie was there for either. Or Johnson hoped not, anyway.

Johnson had little noticed, but he was moving faster now. A gentle, tranquil love had entered his day-to-day, and to be loved lent him energy. Some combination of Leslie’s undeniable athleticism and carefree fidelity struck a chord with Johnson, who discovered the admiration he had lacked for other dogs. Beside Leslie he felt long and gangly, awkward and poorly adapted, outshone in every department by a homeless dog. But he didn’t mind; it was somehow an honour that this dog, the true master of the Armenian hills, so readily waited for Johnson while he stumbled and staggered at a snail’s pace.

If Johnson believed the trail would improve as it dropped into Dilijan National Park, he was soon proven mistaken. Now outside the jurisdiction of farmers keeping the land to earn their keep, wildness reigned. The very land seemed knotted, tangled, constructed by the Great Green Lady for the destruction of a hiker’s will. It was possible to walk three feet parallel to passable trail without knowing it, so dense was the foliage. While Johnson engaged in a forty-five-minute scuffle with two hundred metres of dried-up riverbed, Leslie carved countless paths through the scrub. Each time he returned to a war-weary Johnson Farside, unable to understand how different they were. Farside cursed the futility of a companion so skilled at the very activity with which he was so bitterly struggling, and one so powerless to help.

At last the terrain tidied itself up, and a scuff-kneed Johnson smiled again as Dilijan crept into view. In three hours he’d be home and hosed, him and Leslie. He wondered what he might do with Leslie once they reached the city. Leslie was clearly not a city dog. If the hound refused to stay with him while he rested, would he forfeit a day’s repose in favour of a companion for the next stage? They had known each other a mere eight-and-forty hours but Johnson could little imagine continuing alone.

On the descent, Leslie and Johnson passed a group of hikers on their way up. Some fifty tourists guided front and back by Armenian adventurers who seemed a different breed.

Suddenly, Johnson started. They had not seen another human being since the cowherd with whom Leslie arrived. These hikers were many to his few, and they were heading back into the hills from which the dog had come. Johnson’s mind raced: was Leslie truly homeless? Was this just a mini-break, a micro-adventure, his association with Johnson just a fling?

Johnson realised with a shudder that he had made of Leslie that which he wanted him to be. He had pushed and pulled the dog to fit him into his own narrative. True, they had shared their tender moments. But who’s to say the dog felt the same? Johnson may have been his third hiking partner that week. He probably was, Johnson decided. Man accepted dejectedly that dog had lived a life before him and would go on living after, and what seemed like a thing of clarity, of significance and profundity would be but an unrecognisable speck when all was said and done. Hell, his name wasn’t even Leslie.

The fifty-strong hoard of hikers huffed and puffed their way past Johnson, and each one he stared at with a wash of inferiority. As for himself and Leslie, maybe their time had come.

At that moment, he looked dead ahead, to the bottom of the hill a few hundred metres on at the convergence of two paths. Sitting at the junction, panting and waiting, was a familiar face. He cares! My God, he cares. This may have started out as a marriage of convenience, but convenience has come and gone and the dog remains! Leslie!

Johnson, teary-eyed, thought they might embrace, but when he reached the junction Leslie trotted on with his own inimitable air of insouciance. Farside was a bit confused by it all, and wondered whether three weeks away from civilisation was taking its toll on his sanity.

It was impossible to know how the dog felt. It was binary whether he stayed or left, but anything happening inside his little head that was mere conjecture. Of course, Johnson would have him for as long or as short as Leslie purposed.

Hardly 50 metres on from the junction was a small house enshrouded in scrub. A fast walker could have missed it entirely, so squat and hidden was it. Dark bricks of various sizes were piled haphazardly, joined by cement slathered between. The trail traced a path around the house to its right, passing through a narrow avenue bordered on the other side by a line of bushes.

Leslie led the way.

As the pair rounded the corner into the narrow pass beside the house, an eerie silence fell. Like in a film, just before something dramatic happens. The music that’s been playing almost unnoticed throughout the film, telling us how to feel, it stops, and the emptiness that it leaves is all that suspense is.

The wind dropped and not a leaf rustled. A keen ear might’ve heard the pitter-patter of Leslie’s carefree footfall, maybe a pant from an open mouth. That same ear would have been the first to hear the faint jangle of a chain, a sleepy growl that quickly graduated to a furious bark. A rigorous eye would have caught the flash of muddy brown fur atop thick, bulging muscle. 

Leslie led the way. Why didn’t he know what was about to happen? Shouldn’t the eyes and ears of a wild dog be good at this? This is part of the job. An occupational hazard. But Leslie missed all of the warning signs, and by the time he and Farside understood the gravity of the situation, they were already surrounded.

Three hounds leapt from the bush, howling. The sheer power of the bark betrayed the beasts’ strength – it bespoke a life led for the sole purpose of violence. One dragged from its neck a chain snapped off its fastening, and the faint metallic clink somehow penetrated. And on top of their huge skeletal heads lay the stumps where ears once were.

For a moment, the hounds formed up. Two blocked the passage, one impeded any retreat. Their bodies swelled and pulsated. Johnson clutched his hiking poles and barked back, but he could hardly hear his own yelp. He was fooling no one. These dogs could smell fear, and the pair reeked of it.

He stole a glance down at Leslie, who didn’t even quiver. He was frozen. His terror rooted him to the spot, but there was a flicker of conviction in his eyes. In that moment, Johnson wanted to take Leslie in his arms. 

The chained hound pounced, and Leslie took the only recourse left to him. He picked a spot just to the far side of the hound at the rear and sprinted back the way they’d come, towards the hills. As he passed, the beast lunged at him with an open mouth and Leslie stumbled. A huge incisor caught his flank and drove him into the bush to the left. He skidded on the leafy floor, found his footing and flew.

The hounds blocking the path surged past Johnson in pursuit, almost knocking him off his feet. Their huge shoulders exploded into motion, giant leaps to Leslie’s scurry. All three gave chase.

They flooded around the house and out of sight. Johnson stood in the passage, alone.

Johnson Farside fell twice before he reached Dilijan. His knees were quivering and his mind was elsewhere. He looked over his shoulder almost every minute, praying that Leslie would appear. He did not.

The day grew long and wearisome as Johnson Farside neared Dilijan. The grey sky darkened without fanfare. His bag weighed heavy and deep on his shoulders. But nothing could weigh as heavy as the pit he carried in his stomach.

The day grew long and wearisome, and then it ended.

Listen to Episode 5 of the Simple Joys Podcast here!