Rufus, on the other hand, could never be trusted off the lead. Having always lived in the country, Puppy had never learned to walk on a lead and, when one was put on her when she was young, she tended to throw herself to the ground and roll around refusing to walk a step. There were going to be challenges, however. Her black fur was now peppered with grey, but she was as vigorous as ever: small, barrel-chested, wasp-waisted and designed for longevity.“She’ll outlive the lot of us!” we all used to jest, inwardly hoping this wouldn’t be the case.
When we adopted her from the local shelter, allegedly aged three, she caught our eye because of the way she kept lifting her leg, despite being female.
She always seemed somewhat confused about her gender too. Seventeen-year-old Rufus was named after the titular character in one of our children’s favourite books, Tomi Ungerer’s Rufus the Bat, due to her flying fox-like snout and pointy ears, although she was female, which people who asked both her name and gender often found confusing. I met another elderly dog in Crete that had the same anomalous name for the same commonplace reason, which goes to show the better side of human nature in encounters with homeless baby animals. We had found her abandoned at a Madrid mega-mall aged about three months and, without any plan to keep her, took to calling her “the puppy”. Fourteen-year-old Puppy, a Husky mix, hadn’t exactly grown into her name.