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| "Mud Flap" when he first arrived! |
Naming the Stray
By
Valerie L. Egar
Timid and scared,
the brown and black dog ran through the village, rooting in garbage and
drinking water from the canal. People assumed an owner too lazy to take him to
a shelter dumped him in the nearby park. He ran too fast and was too wily for anyone
to get a good look, but a quick glance showed he was big, about 50 pounds, a shepherd-collie
mix. The twisty tail suggested a smidgen of husky or elkhound added in.
A
group of young boys decided to catch him. “Here boy, c’mon.” Offered food, the dog, shy as a deer,
hesitated and decided it was too dangerous. Off he ran. For two weeks, the dog
eluded people trying to help him. He grew thinner. He began to limp, most
likely from being nicked by a car when he crossed the highway. The boys were
persistent. One day, circling him with their bicycles, they managed to capture
him. Now what to do?
My son, Leo,
was a veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania at the time. “We’ll give him to Leo,” the boys decided.
“He’ll know what to do.” Meanwhile, because of the dog’s large ears, the tips
of which flopped down, and the dirt he’d collected in his fur after two weeks
of running, the boys named him “Mud Flap.”
Despite his large
size, we soon learned Mud Flap was still a puppy. His large half-floppy ears began to stand straight up,
like a shepherd’s. He wasn’t yet house-broken. He chewed things. Everything.
The handle on the hammer. One shoe from
every pair I owned. The cord off the vacuum— three times. In the day when cell
phones were as large as a telephone receiver and had antennas, he fished the
phone out of my purse, undid the Velcro tab on the case, extended the antenna
with his teeth and chewed it off.
He had a knack for
carrying things, which usually coincided with his desire to chew them. Liter of
water? No problem, he bit onto the cap, carried it to his bed and gnawed on the
bottle, piercing the plastic and spilling the water all over. He delicately removed a frying pan left in
the kitchen sink, lifting it by the handle.
His biggest find was a long steel bar with curved ends and a lock called
“The Club," used to prevent auto theft. I’d grown tired of wrangling it onto
the steering wheel and stashed it on a lower shelf in the
utility room. He spotted it, pulled it out and carried it around, the biggest
bone ever.
Though the first
thought was to place Mud Flap in a good home, he soon endeared himself to the
household. We decided to rename him and
keep him. “Chewy” might have worked, but I hoped he would soon limit his
prodigious chewing to bones and nylon dog toys. Dennis? His good-natured
mischief reminded me of the cartoon character Dennis the Menace, but somehow,
the name didn’t quite fit. He lacked
menace— in his world, there was only curiosity and fun.
One morning, the
lanky adolescent dog came bounding through the kitchen, the fabric remains of a
recently gutted frog squeaky toy hanging from his mouth. He was moving so fast,
he had no traction on the linoleum floor, and for a few brief moments, he galloped,
without moving forward. We started to laugh and realized how much we’d laughed
since he arrived. The word ‘snicker’
came to mind and we tried it out. Snicker. The name was just right.
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