Not Just Another Dog Story

While they say dog is man’s best friend, I then say man is dog’s worst friend.

Take the case of Gundina, our pet dog who mothered a brood of other canines that witnessed tragic events in our poor household in the late 80s. 

One bleak day, when Mother found out that she was bitten by a mad dog in the barrio, she immediately requested our equally mad uncle to shoot the dog using his old shotgun. Mother had simply decided that she wouldn’t be able to recover. 

I remember that day when they cornered her in our backyard one morning after she was out in the streets for days. I heard its final cry and it told me something. Gundina, I learned, never wished to be mad, I thought. She was not just a dog. I mean she was a special one.

She had been Mother’s companion through the years—from the time Mother started to labor single-handedly for her six growing children, after being widowed too early to the time Mother was still laboring much to bring us, her children further, and further forward.

This dog always accompanied Mother when she went to teach grade-six pupils in the barrio school. She would not fail to go with Mother when she went to school, or she would be by her feet beneath the narra desk where she would type away countless souvenir programs for the Cursillo classes held in her father Emiliano’s house, who was himself a great educator.

Gundina witnessed numerous batches of grade-school graduates whom her Master had taught through the years. I always wonder—but she exuded one serenity of such simple creature—and perhaps composure in all instances. I wonder how the animal learned such sense of self-possession after having spent so much time attending to her Master’s teaching work inside a grade-six classroom.

Gundina had grace when she walked, almost like a cat as she sauntered with her Master along the street. The panorama was just impressive—Master and Friend coming together from the day’s laborious schoolwork, strolling towards the sunset, walking almost in cadence—the dog becoming the grace that her Master had, and the Master affecting her pet with such a flourish. The tandem was just one of a kind.

Or I do not know of anyone whom she had bitten—strangers, friends, us, or whoever. If all canine victims filed a blotter case before the Office of Human Affairs Against Canines—I am sure—I would not find Gundina in the record. She was a kind dog. I hardly remember when our family acquired her—all I knew was that there was a dog in our household named Gundina, and she was a gentle ordinary-breed dog with some hazy spots on her off-white hair.

But this one fine day nothing about her was unclear anymore—we were left with no option. When we found out she had been stray for long—and then mad, I felt badly sad. After everything that was shared, such togetherness would have to end—from the unholy and empty afternoons in the classroom to the rabuz sessions in the barangay—Mother could only give her the needed coup de grace to end her “insanity”. And maybe to do justice to her loyalty all those years.

Naturally, Mother could not at all afford to bring her good friend to some sort of a veterinarian or something. No one ever knew of one in the barrio I suppose. In those days in that small place, mad dogs just ended up as one thing—either good or bad pulutan.

How could Gundina’s matter of-life-and-death ever enter her Master’s mind when her four sons in the bigger city were finding it difficult to survive their high school? With a miserable income, Gundina’s Master could hardly provide for her children.

She just had other things she needed to do. She must have thought Gundina’s loyalty could extend to her not being made a priority. Well, the canine’s wails while being gunned down by the furious hunter (and his equally war-freak sidekicks) just vanished. Then it was over.

II.

Then there was Gandhi, a towering figure in our grandparents’ libod (backyard), a sprawling estate that we call with fondness for this is where my mother’s clan had shared many of life’s joys and struggles. Since my high school days, Gandhi has bred generations of good dogs—some of them even helped her breed more all for the service of their owners, Lolo Meling and Lola Eta.

All her offspring have gone through life’s harsh realities—they survived extreme hunger during typhoons or due to the neglect or apathy of their owners and their servants, or are given to the visitors of the old couple—to name of few, Gandhi’s puppies were usually given to rectors, benefactors, and supporters of Cursillos de Cristiandad, who frequented the libod—perhaps owing to my Lolo Meling’s unquestionable commitment to the Catholic movement.

Some of them were also handed to Lola’s relatives everywhere around the globe, and others were disposed to Gandhi knows where else. Others were also given to the friends of their children, or acquaintances of the Grand Dame who usually treated all visitors—aside from select relatives—in full regalia, or cousins who came back to see their relatives after a long while in the city or somewhere else.

Despite having had offspring with her own puppies, Gandhi has remained in my grandparents’ household. She must have seen countless batches of her offspring come and go, live and die. But she has remained as Gandhi, the same dog I knew from the time I entered Ateneo de Naga, the Jesuit high school until the time I needed to get out of it to get some fresh air, er, some real life.

One afternoon in October coming home from a week of facilitating pathetic college classes, I visited the libod to help a cousin clean the poultry houses for the new batch of 45-days chickens in my Lola Eta’s dwindling business. My grandmother was so annoyed when she found out that Gandhi and her new set of offspring had been staying in a poultry house. The brooders smelled horrible. Gandhi must have delivered and bred her new offspring inside the only remaining poultry house. In the middle of hard rain, my grandmother cursed the dogs to no end, and told us to shoo the animals away from the fowls’ cages.

Before we could clean the cages, my cousin Cris had to hurl boiling water at them and we almost scalded her new offspring who howled and scampered in the rain to look for shelter.

Gandhi’s instinctual need for reproduction (has she needed to perpetuate something with her seemingly endless generation of canines?] had not at all merited her Master’s compassion, despite her long years of service. Had Gandhi belonged to government service she would have been awarded a loyalty plaque for years of service and of course—provision of dog power—er, dog personnel that in more ways than one—through the years—certainly accommodated her Master’s sensibility.

But that one afternoon in October disproved this much. And it must have told her many things. How about the security Gandhi and Co. provided their Masters? Despite the countless times that Gandhi and her offspring were driven away from our grandmother’s rickety household, the canine together with her offspring, came back to household. Scalded, bruised, and scathed, they came back. This matriarch had displayed much more sensitivity, as it were.

III.

There were also Kagata (“Bite it!”) and Dasmagi (“Run to it!”), puppies of Gandhi’s with an unknown partner, belonged to my youngest uncle’s household. Their names just showed my uncle’s fondness for grim humor. I feared these two creatures when I’d visit Cabanbanan to help my Auntie Delia harvest some corn at the back of their modest house.

These two dogs heavily guarded Auntie Delia’s house at the time when my young cousin Aldrin was just a toddler, who crawled up the kayo tree while his mother was not looking after him.

I never knew what happened to these dogs but I am sure the fierce creatures were not able to do anything when Auntie Delia filed for annulment or called it quits many times with her husband after he went back from overseas work with a new “wife,” and a few children, too. Like dogs, I think reality simply bites and when it does, it does so very badly.