Chapter Thirty-Six: Human Laws of Nature

That's not a contradiction in terms as you will learn from these animal adventures of a less cute kind.

Hugo the scofflaw.

Hello, friends. Thank you for forgiving these occasional absences. One or two of you have let me know that chapters are stacking up in your inboxes and you can’t keep up. I don’t need more than 0.1% of an excuse to take a weekend off while I am burning both ends on an unrelated book project. This is a leisurely narrative, perhaps it’s fine if it’s dispensed at a leisurely pace? If anyone is feeling shafted by this slower rhythm, let me know.

Timeline-wise, we’re jumping back just a tiny bit from our last installment, so rewinding from December, 2021 to early November. We’re still in the same end-of-year seasonal gloom, where it gets dark at 4:59 pm, though this time, rather than romantic torpor, there is country drama. In the high school English class constellation of conflicts—man vs. man, man vs. self, man vs. nature, and man vs. society—today’s narrative squats three out of four quadrants. (There will not be a quiz at the end.)

It was early November at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning when I got a panicked call from Marina to please check in on Sasha. “The dogs are missing, she thinks they’re dead,” she said, breathlessly, in her Romanian accent. Holy fuck. Both dogs? Sasha had a big property about forty-five minutes from my house, and she hadn’t fenced it off, but her free-range dogs knew where their food and mother were, and even after small, nocturnal rodent killing sprees, they always ended up coming home.

The dogs were two German Shorthair Pointers, the loves of Sasha’s life, and part of the reason she had decided to set up in Le Perche in the first place was to give them space to roam. (Consistent with our name-changing policy, we will refer to our four-legged friends as Hugo and Diana.) Hugo was the first to appear, maybe nine years ago from today, and when it was just him and Sasha, they power bonded. I point no fingers. It’s been a while since I gave you all a kitten update, but I think you are aware where I come down on human-animal fusion. If not, the TL;DR version is: Two thumbs up.

It’s just that if everyone wants to thrive, dogs need limits and training and bossiness, much more so than cats, which is why I have always stuck to the latter. Sasha’s parenting style for Hugo, who was something like seventy pounds of taut, permanently coiled muscle with razor-sharp teeth and jaws that could snap a wooden spoon in half, was that of a Waldorf mom. You’d show up at her very cute apartment in Vincennes, just over the ring road from my old house in Paris, and Hugo would jump all over you and threaten to knock you down and start to eat your cashmere scarf and it would always take a long time to get him to chill and Sasha would be laughing because he loved you so much.

He really did, though. Once Hugo calmed down from love-bombing, you could never know a better dog. He was one of the sweetest, most patient, most affectionate souls. He was also a stone killer and if there was anything that resembled prey around, he was a beast possessed, all springy adrenaline, hurtling towards his target. I witnessed one baby duck among a mini flock sacrificed on a sailing trip that Sasha and I took to the northern part of the Netherlands, right after I discovered my ex’s dipshit dalliances. There was no blood. Hugo snapped its neck in under three seconds, as the rest of the family looked on, and Sasha started wailing.

Good luck to your shoulder joint if Hugo was on leash and he smelled anything prey-like because Sasha never leash trained him. She believed he should be able to live his dog nature at its wildest, never mind that he was literally genetically engineered by humans to be a worker who followed human orders. Her version of containment was tying a sailing rope around her waist and lashing him to the other end to save on osteopath bills when he absolutely had to be tethered, and he had to be tethered more than she’d usually allow.

Baby ducks, no. Baby humans, absolutely.

Sasha was so hopelessly in love with Hugo, for good reason, that a few years ago, she went back to her breeder and picked up a female from his line, Diana, for the purpose of one day creating a baby Hugo when the original’s timecard eventually got punched.

For a day or two three Novembers ago, we thought that moment had arrived, far too early, for both dog man and his faithful wife.

I called Sasha right after Marina and I hung up, and she confirmed that the dogs hadn’t been seen since very early that morning. In the meantime, she had heard gunshots from her neighbor’s place. I threw half a blister pack of Xanax into my purse, and drove straight over.

Sasha’s neighbor was a local grandee in the mold of an enervated Roald Dahl villain. He had a big property that abutted hers, owned a lot of local businesses, and of course he was a hunter. He had already threatened Sasha earlier that hunting season when Hugo and Diana had run all over the countryside, upsetting the birds and boars or whatever, getting in the way of his divine right to shoot with his own dogs trailing behind to retrieve whatever fell down. “I’m sure he killed them,” Sasha sobbed over the phone as I was on the way.

We need to back up again to talk about hunting in France. There are many versions of the pursuit, from costumed, pretentious fake-aristocratic, with foxes, to eco-conscious species-balancers, to local working class survivalists. The lattermost is mostly what rules the forests of Le Perche six months out of the year, but every social class gets a taste. The French state coddles them all. France has the most liberal hunting laws in Europe. If someone is tracking prey, they have the right to cross your property, with guns, while they are on the move. As an American who has breathed castle doctrine-scented air most of my life, I will always find this outrageous. Get the fuck off my lawn, especially with your guns, especially since too many of you are red-faced drunks. Hikers and peaceful Sunday nature walkers are killed by the stray bullets of hunters every year in France, and every year the powers that be do nothing because they need the votes of the traditionalist lobby.

Thankfully morbid catastrophizing was not all that Sasha did. She also called every vet in the county, and made the physical rounds of the outlying forest, and stalked local animal-related chatboards. (There are many.) When I showed up at her place, a few of her neighbors were already there, in a sort of herb tea-soaked vigil. There was a discussion going on that gently veered towards Sasha’s responsibility to contain her dogs, but mostly, they were all just worried. As there was nothing to do for the time being, I took Sasha to a local medical center, where the doctor prescribed her some tranquilizers of her own. And then the vigil continued. I left her place after another hour or so.

A day and a half later, after many more tears and phone calls, photos of the dogs miraculously turned up on one of the local chatboards. They had been separated, their collars removed, and transported to two different spots in forest locations far from their home. This was clearly an intentional act, and a cruel one. We knew whom we suspected of perpetrating it, though when Sasha filed a police report, she didn’t name her asshole neighbor, since he had too many friends in high places, including those very same police. She wouldn’t have dared. She had some self-preservation instinct.

When you are faced with a four year old who shrieks in the restaurant, and the adult next to him is admiring his self-expression, who are you going to be mad at? When you give a kid no limits and they do something antisocial, whose fault is it? The kid’s or the adult’s? I have always reserved my ire for the grownups, and this was no exception, even if I had compassion. Hugo and Diana were chaos agents, but very loving ones, as a reflection of their mother. She ran from crisis to crisis, sometimes of her own making. Often she did so nobly: she was a public defender of refugees, earning far less than she could as a lawyer of her pedigree and level of success. And she was a refugee herself. She was an adventurer, with the same fight or flight reflexes and monkey mind as her firstborn dog-child. Perhaps her wheels spun because that was all she ever knew in her most impressionable years, and so she reproduced the same tornadoes in her adult life, if under sweeter conditions. (Unless you were a stray cat, in which case, not so sweet.)

Whatever the underlying logic, this scary interlude was a lesson in the rules of the country. You do not get to show up in a place where there is a very established order of animal behavior and make new rules. After that brush with bad neighborly fate, Sasha ordered zappy laser collars and dog-cams, and the dogs lost them as fast as the next one could arrive.

I wish them all the best of luck.