Barry Stone - Barking at Winston

I sensed her outside my cage before I actually saw her. I was lying on the concrete with my head on my paws, eyes half closed, facing the grassy square that was framed by the four terraces of kennels.

First, I felt a rise in temperature I put that down to the sun getting higher. Then I was aware of a familiar red mist. Sometimes it means anger but mostly its joy. You can tell the difference right away: anger makes your coat bristle but the other gets your tail wagging like its got a mind of its own and my baldy tail was going like a lizard on scalding concrete. I looked up. My sore blue eyes I had conjunctivitis as well as mange widened. A ginger-haired woman of about fifty-five was smiling at me. Her nose was broken that must have hurt. I wanted to lick her face.

Arent you an artful bugger? she exclaimed.

I was taken aback. I was just being myself, not artful, but the red around her got brighter. Shed been playing with words.

Arent you an artful bugger? she said again, bending so close that I saw my quizzically pricked ears reflected in her big green eyes.

Yes, you are! As artful as they come! she cooed.

Well, artful or not, if that wasnt the moment for me to make a painful sacrifice by rolling on to my sore back, I didnt know what was. Dog-loving humans cant resist a belly thats offered for a tickle.

And since you must be wondering about the impediment of my cage, well, I saw it as an advantage: my admirer would have to crouch to put her fingers through the bars thereby getting nice and close to me.

Instead she straightened up and stepped back. Fear jolted through me like an electric shock. Didnt she want me? My first human had had a cruel streak as wide as a river that was why my mange came. The electric shocks hed given me had only stopped when the human from the RSPCA took me away with him.

I kept very still so Ginger as Id dubbed her wouldnt move further away, and fought the need to blink. I was convinced that my life depended on unbroken eye contact between us. My conjunctivitis was really stinging now.

Artful bugger, she said again but this time in a way that suggested she was considering me as her companion. She was probably alone in the world, I thought. If I could just stop myself blinking until shed got herself fully committed, Id have the life of Reilly whoever he was.

Then, beyond her legs she was wearing trousers in the same pea-green colour as her top I saw two pairs of tatty sandals and two more of unpolished brogues. Shed stepped back because she wanted some kids to get a good look at me. Suddenly I was in a tizz and panting hard. I jumped to my feet and started to pace round and round my cell I went. I was seeing double or even apparitions

No, I wasnt: Gingers kids were two quirky-looking sets of twins. Jack and Vanessa were sixteen, Craig and Rachael, a year younger. They all had a thick mop of black hair that clearly came from their dads side of the family, and equally thick black eyebrows. Otherwise they were Ginger to a T: they had her skinny lips, Roman nose, pointy chin and honest shiny green eyes, all eight of which were glued expectantly on me. Any second now theyd see I was a repulsive freak and move on to a dog with a full fur coat.

Except that those eyes had me hurtling into a tunnel that I knew Id never come out of: even if they didnt take me, Id forgive them. It was love at first sight.

Maybe I had encountered an apparition after all. One that filled me with an iron resolve to elude Psycho Vet. I shoved my right paw through the bars of my cage and did some of what the kids and Ginger would have called whimpering but it was their laughter that brought on my embarrassing seal wiggle (I suspect theres a splash of Labrador in me somewhere).