Holding a Dog While Its Owner Cries

The dog came in on a Tuesday with an ear infection and an opinion about being touched. He was small, some terrier mix, and he had already warned us twice before I got the muzzle on. When I lifted him onto the table he turned faster than I expected and opened the skin of my forearm. Not deep. Shallow, clean, almost polite.

Holding is most of my job. The vet does the diagnosing and the deciding; I do the part where an animal who does not understand the room has to be kept still without being hurt. There is a way to do it that is not force. You take the weight, you do not take the space. Most days it works. Some days the dog is in too much pain for any of it to work.

A bite is a sentence the dog cannot say any other way.

The owner, apologising

His owner was crying before I finished wrapping my arm, apologising in two languages, holding the leash with both hands like it might get away from her too. I told her what I always tell people: the dog is the patient, not the crime. She had driven forty minutes in from Mogoditshane for that ear, and for two weeks someone had been telling her the shaking was nothing.

We washed the ear, gave him something for the pain first, then drained and cleaned what needed cleaning. By the end he let me hold his head with one hand and did not move. That is the whole reward, honestly. Not gratitude, which dogs do not perform. Just a body that has decided the room is safe enough to stay still in.

Six o'clock, bleach, ledger

We close at six. Then the kennels get hosed, the instruments go into the blue bath, and I write the day into the ledger in my flat handwriting: weight, dose, temperament, who needs to come back. The clinic smells of bleach and wet dog and, underneath it, the sweetish smell of the ear wash. I like this hour. Nobody is frightened anymore and nothing needs deciding.

I drive home on the old road with the windows down, because the car holds the day in it. Gaborone at that hour is all low sun and taxis and people walking home along the verge. I stop at the same small shop for bread and milk, and the woman there asks about the dogs, meaning mine, the two at my house, not the ones I have spent the day holding.

The dogs I keep are the ones nobody else wanted to keep.

They meet me at the gate the way they do, one three-legged, one with a hip that never healed straight, both of them loud about it. I put down the bread. Whatever the day was, this part is not complicated: two animals glad I came back, a bowl, a hose, a small yard going quiet.