Buster's Diaries: The True Story of a Dog and His Man (2 page)

The dogs” home sent the Man my blue plastic bed—which was wrong, since it gave a false impression. I am absolutely house-trained.
The Man had a new bed ready for me. It is woolly with fake sheepskin on the bottom and there is a tartan rug spread over it.
I got in straight away. The only thing wrong with the bed is that it has no smell. I shall put that right in the next day
or two.

The Man is very inconsistent—the very worst thing possible if he wants a proper relationship with me. As soon as I curled
up in a ball, he forgot all about me looking tough and self-confident and said, “He really looks a friendly little chap. I
can’t believe that anyone was frightened of adopting him. He doesn’t look a bit fierce.” I almost bit him there and then.
I look very
fierce indeed standing up—especially when my mouth is open. He will find out in the morning.

He is the talkative type, which is exactly what I wanted. Before I went to sleep he told me that he’s signed a form promising
not to tie me up, lock me out or give me away If I behave badly and he doesn’t want me any more, I have to go back to the
dogs” home. Assuming the food is OK, I shall make myself irresistible. It will not be difficult.

The Man has decided that I shall be called Buster. That was not my name before I came to live with him. But since I cannot
remember what my old name was, the change does not matter. The Man says my old name made me sound like a hairdresser who is
engaged to a second-division soccer player.

I think he is a bit of a snob. So am I. At least we have something in common. I think he must have been sorry he was rude
about second-division soccer players’ wives. For he began to invent other reasons for calling me Buster. The Man says that
I have an optimistic walk, cheerful
ears and that my bottom sways with self-confidence. I have no idea what he is talking about. I doubt if even humans understand
that sort of nonsense. Still, if he sticks to the one name, I shall soon begin to come when he calls.

The food is the same as I got at the dogs” home. It looks like little balls of sawdust. The Man is not allowed to give me
my food. When She measures it out, She uses a little glass with lines round the side to make sure I don’t get too much. She
does not measure out his food. He keeps saying how good it is for me to eat healthy food—usually whilst he is eating chocolate
cookies.

I do get “treats.” They are dog biscuits, desiccated pigs” ears, rolled, knotted and braided pieces of hide.

There are special rituals associated with treats. Before I get a pig’s ear, I have to bark very loudly and he has to say,
“For God’s sake quieten down.” I get a biscuit after he tells me, “Sit!… Down!” or “Stay!” or “Wait!” My part in the strange
ceremony—which
takes place about once every ten minutes—is just doing what he suggests. The ceremony is called “training.” He read about
it in a book he got from the pet shop.

The book explained that dogs are pack animals and that he must not let me be leader. He must never allow me to go first through
a door, always move me out of the way rather than step over me, and stop me from jumping on his knee unless he invites me
up. The book says it is easy for the Man to stop me being leader of the pack if only he makes clear who is boss.

I don’t want him to make clear who is boss. It is bad enough when he just tries. For example, he totally misunderstands chewing.
It is a sign of affection from one pack member to another. But as soon as my molars touch his hand he shouts, “Stop! Stop!
Stop! Nobody likes teeth except Buster.” I like them a lot. If we had the relationship of equals, he would chew me back.

There were so many people in the house that nobody took any interest in me. They all said, “Hello, Buster,”
and one or two patted me on the head. But for most of the time, I was completely ignored—except when I tried to share the
potato crisps and little cookies that everybody else was eating. The Man said that if I howled I would go outside into the
hall.

I did not mean to spill the whole plate of little sausages all over the floor. All I wanted to do was have a close smell of
them and, perhaps, steal one when nobody was looking. The Man said he was less worried about the marks on the carpet than
the risk of me choking on one of the little sticks that were stuck into the sausages. But he still put me outside in the hall.
I howled.

After I had howled for about an hour, they all moved into the dining room. Hundreds of dishes of food had to be carried from
the kitchen along the hall so, naturally enough, I was able to barge my way in when the door was left open. The Man said I
would lie quietly on his feet and promised not to feed me bits of turkey. Because he kept his promise, I did not lie quietly
at his feet. When I stood on my hind legs and put my feet on the table, I was put out into the hall again. I howled.

When the people went home, they all said how
much they had enjoyed themselves. I did not enjoy myself. Before they left, I was shut in the kitchen, with all the food
locked away in cupboards. When he took me for my late-night walk, the Man said, “Buster, you’re stupid. If you’d been well
behaved, you could have stayed with me and picked up the food I dropped.” I don’t know if he meant dropped by mistake or dropped
specially for me.

I shall think about what he said. Being well behaved when there are strange people about is more difficult than he thinks—especially
if some of them smell of fear. But I would have liked the dropped food. Today was a Christmas. If there is another one next
week, I shall try to make the best of it.

I think the Man must be a slow learner. She picked up the idea in a couple of weeks. Calm voice. Authoritative tone. Firm
information. Whenever he rebukes me, he either shouts or giggles, which is very bad. Sometimes he does both at the same time,
which is even worse. Then, even if I haven’t quite done what
he tells me, he gives me a hug. If we go on in this way I shall never learn how to behave.

I am beginning to learn about the Man. I don’t think he is leader of our pack. I am not even sure he wants to be. He certainly
does not control the food and seems very happy to move out of the way when somebody wants to walk past. He also lets other
people go out the door first—all signs that he has given up the battle for supremacy. I think he wants to be a friend rather
than leader. That is good. It means he talks to me a lot. But it will cause trouble if, one day, he changes his mind and wants
to be leader after all.

I ran away last night, or perhaps it was early this morning. I cannot be sure because it was dark and I was half asleep when
I did it.

We were in a hotel—which is a big house with dozens of rooms. But we only had one. So I was supposed to sleep on the floor
next to the bed with only a blanket out of the Man’s car to lie on. I didn’t mind sleeping on the floor, but the Man said,
“We must do
better next time. It will be our fault if he jumps on the bed during the night.” I would have jumped on the bed whatever
they had brought for me to sleep on.

After my early-evening walk, I was left on my own for hours. I slept in the middle of the bed until they came back, but when
I woke up I could not remember where I was. I could, however, hear two distant voices calling me. So I sidestepped the Man,
who stood in the open door, and ran out onto the landing. By then I was properly awake and I picked up the scent of the dogs
whose call I had heard in the bedroom. It led me down the stairs, along the hall into the dining room (past people in paper
hats) and out into the kitchen. I barely needed to look up. The sound and the smell planned my exact route.

There were torches burning in the drive outside the kitchen and I ran on between them, out into the road, past the church
and round the back of a pub called the Eyre Arms. It was too dark to see the two Pyrenean mountain dogs that lived behind
the fence in the garden. But I listened to them howling and howled back.

I had been there for about ten minutes when the Man arrived. “God, Buster,” he said, “you might have
been run over in the road.” He had forgotten to bring my lead so he had to tie his handkerchief in my collar. His handkerchief
is shorter than my lead, so he had to walk home bending down. “I knew you’d be with those dogs,” he told me. Perhaps he is
beginning to learn.

I have begun to settle down. I always expected to like it here, but at first, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I
wondered if natural optimism had warped my judgment. But that was when I still thought the Man ought to let me sleep with
him. Now I’ve stopped thinking about that and I only wake up in the night if somebody noisy goes past the front door and growling
is necessary to drive them away.

Perhaps he has not learnt as much about dogs as I thought when he picked up the scent of the Pyrenean mountain dogs. He still
does not realize that I don’t go
out just for exercise. I go out to sniff about and put my head in holes. Sometimes he is so anxious to get me into running-about
territory that he hurries me past every garbage can and crumbling wall. “What’s in a life so full of care there is no time
to stand and sniff?” I ask myself.

Trouble on the way home from the park. All the big houses in Buckingham Gate have holes in their walls with scrapers inside
them on which people used to clean their muddy boots. The holes are now used for hiding old candy papers, cookie wrappers,
milk cartons and, best of all, leftover chicken. He got impatient when I wanted to make a detailed examination of a potato
chrisp packet, and jerked very hard on my lead. This is not how the people at the dogs” rescue expected him to behave.

I had a nasty turn this morning when, for a moment, I thought that things were turning ugly No sooner had we got back from
our walk than the Man went to my cupboard—which I had been led to believe contained nothing but biscuits and sawdust balls—and
got out a piece of wood with wires sticking out at one end. Grabbing me by the collar he began to menace me with this strange
object which he described as a brush.

‘You will like it, Buster,” he said, as he always does in preparation for doing something that I do not like at all. He then
began to run the wire bits along my back. Naturally I struggled. But he held on and struck ineffectual blows in the direction
of my tail. As always when in difficulty, She was called, and She operated the instrument whilst he held me down. To my surprise,
the result was quite pleasant, not to say mildly erotic.

“Turn it over,” the Man said—referring to the brush not to me. I am always called “him.” A softer part then rubbed along my
back whilst he talked the usual guff about my coat shining. He also did it on my stomach and managed to hit my sensitive bits
only once.

He is no longer rational about the food I find on the pavement. As soon as we got out on the street tonight, he began to go
on about chicken, which he says contain bones that will get stuck in my throat and choke me to death. The fast-food restaurants
were in full swing. So the Man walked about staring at the pavement a yard in front of him. He has set himself up as a dropped-chicken
patrol. I still found the chicken first. I’m lower down and he has no sense of smell. Of course, he told me to “Drop it” and
began to force my mouth open. He does not realize that trying to take food from between my teeth puts me in more danger than
letting me chew it slowly. I naturally react by trying to swallow it down whole. This morning he got to me before I had time
to gulp, forced my jaws open and pushed his fingers down my throat as though he were trying to make me sick. When he scraped
out the half-masticated meat and the fragments of shattered bone, he made a noise as if he was going to be ill, and said,
“Disgusting!” You would have thought I had asked him to do it.

Then, of course, we went through the usual “Bad
dog” ritual. I remained remarkably forbearing. I am instinctively opposed to having food taken out of my mouth. But all I
did was hang on to what I had found and therefore was rightfully mine. He got his knuckles bruised and his thumb squashed.
If I had wanted to, I could have bitten his fingers off one by one. But I didn’t. I think I am beginning to feel affectionate
towards him. I must not let it come between me and garbage.

Where I live now, there are great smells. There were smells at the dogs” home, but I knew where they came from, and the dogs
who made them thought it was their territory as well as mine. In the streets round here, the smells are all mysterious and
each one has to be investigated to see if it was made by a potential intruder.

I take each one very seriously, sniffing from its origin on wall, mail slot or lamppost all the way to where it ends at the
pavement’s edge. Throughout the examination, my nose is as close to the flagstones as it
is possible to be without wearing the end away. Once I have completed my investigation, I have a clear mental picture of
the culprit and possible interloper. “Middle-aged bitch. Less than one foot from ground. Long-haired. Possibly dachshund.
No threat.” When a threat is located, I eliminate it by urinating on the spot that the intruder has defiled. As is well known,
the last dog to urinate on a spot has staked his claim to domination of the territory I am a miracle of nature, a walking
DNA machine.

I fear I have discovered something distasteful about the Man. He collects excrement. Usually—my toilette completed—I am too
busy expressing the joy of defecation to notice what’s going on. But this morning, I kicked so hard with my back feet that
I swung completely round. The Man had a plastic bag on his hand like a glove and was furtively bending down over the place
where I had squatted. He was picking up what I had dropped.