Lycanthropia

In a pinch put your money on the red dog.

The sturdy red dog in question is built like a Labrador retriever, down to his half-long wavy coat. Only, in an accident of genetics, his fur is neither blond nor chocolate, but of a dark auburn color that makes him ineligible for pedigree. Normally, he is all wags-friendly and nearly quivers with excitement when I call him from across the street. He is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a “pack dog”. He doesn’t much care whether the others in his cadre are canine or human, he wants to be included. If he surfed the Web, the list of friends in his social network would be enormous. He’d know everybody and everybody’d know him.

There isn’t a kid on the block who doesn’t recognize him by name and greet him with a hearty hello whenever he’s near. He lopes up to each of them, from the largest to the smallest, with a demeanor so amiable that not even the least child is frightened by him. If a dog can be described as “smiling,” he’s the one. There is no malice whatsoever in him.

So it came as quite a surprise when, on a long walk late this afternoon, the red dog suddenly bowed up, raised his hackles and growled under his breath.

“What’s up, boy?” I asked him.

He stood still, snarling, frozen in the position of a warrior ready at a moment’s notice to spring into action. His eyes locked onto something in the distance. I followed his gaze and finally noticed the skinny German police dog coming up the street.

I’d seen the poor fellow before — his ribs showing like the rack of a xylophone, his disposition sour and surly — scrounging for food in garbage cans in the neighborhood. I thought of taking him in and feeding him, but when I approached he warned me off with a not-very-polite grrn and skulked away.

Most days the German police dog hung out with a gang of evil-temepered mongrels, among them a one-eyed pit bull who was a known biter and who, it was rumored, had fought in an illegal dog ring. Sure enough, standing with the red dog at the top of the hill, I picked the others out of the landscape one-by-one. To get past them would be no mean trick, and there was no way home but past them.

“What do you think, boy? Think we can muddle through?”

I wondered how I’d fight off the big one-eyed bruiser if he turned on me, and in my imagination I kept seeing those grainy black-and-white magazine photographs of people with dog bites. Pit bulls left wicked wounds. They were trained for it.

There was nothing left but do it. I started forward and the red dog reluctantly came alongside, eventually walking a little in front of me, my guardian. Along the way I picked up a couple of good-sized rocks and kept my eyes locked on the pit bull. From a distance he looked 80-pounds big, but he grew in my estimation as we neared him until, within a few hundred feet, I could have sworn he weighed 400 pounds and had a mouth as wide and deep as a commercial dumpster.

The red dog kept getting farther and farther ahead of me, nearing the Cyclops. He got within a few yards of the cur and held his ground, daring the other to come forward. Forward he came, his head lowered in an attack position, the huge jaws arcing from side to side ahead of the movement of his enormous shoulders.

Just when I thought the moment would turn violent, the red dog smiled and sniffed the air. The pit bull, caught off guard by his opponent’s sudden gentleness, hitched a step and sniffed in return. The two approached one another, sniffing and snorting from head to tail. Following their greeting the red dog loped back in my direction, the Cyclops trailing, and — I kid you not — the red dog introduced us. I dropped one of my rocks and offered the pit bull the back of my hand to sniff; a moment later he lowered his massive head for a friendly rub.

We walked through the pack without a scratch. The rest simply followed the behavior of the alpha dog and sniffed around us, then went about the business of foraging food. Cyclops stayed with us halfway home before turning back to the pack.

The moral of the story is this: Put your money on the red dog. He makes friends of his enemies.

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