Now that I have dogs of my own, it seems disloyal to write about how much I loved Glenn. He wasn’t even my pet, strictly speaking: he lived with my neighbour, a German who had moved to the same corner of eastern France. But we were miles from town and often shared essentials: eggs, coffee, chainsaws, dogs. Peter gave me a lead, for the times Glenn came to visit, and taught me basic commands, such as “Komm!” and “Sitz!”.
It suited all of us. Glenn, named after the American band leader Glenn Miller, was a big border collie – four or five years old when we met, bursting with energy, and usually in need of distraction. We lived down a dirt track in the Vosges mountains, and there was little for Glenn to do except guard Peter’s chickens. He didn’t have much of a work ethic, latching on to passing ramblers and following them for as long as they would let him, or until he scented something more interesting. He once trailed a family of strangers all the way to their holiday home, two or three hours away, at which point the grumbling father loaded him into his car to drive him back. It was the only way to get rid of him.
I loved to walk and loved company, as long as that company didn’t want to chat. One of the reasons I had gone to the Vosges in the 00s was to get away from all that yapping. The two of us would head off for five or six hours, through spruce forests, past waterfalls, uphill, downhill, come sun, rain and snow. We would rarely see another human.
Glenn would usually come when I called, and when he wasn’t scouting for deer or boars, I would throw a stick for him – so many times that my arms tired long before his legs did. I would cover 20-25km on a good day, and he must have done twice that. When he wasn’t running, he was barking. Often it was at water: he adored smashing his front paws up and down in streams and puddles, woofing his empty head off.
He was … fun doesn’t cover it. Sweet? He wasn’t a complicated dog – I have two Romanian rescues now, both of whom had difficult puppyhoods, and I know doggie angst when I see it – but he was a good boy. A good soul.
What happened to Glenn? We can only guess. I took a trip, and when I came back he was missing. I like to think he followed a stranger, they assumed he was a stray and they took him in and gave him a happy life. I worry that maybe a farmer shot him because he was bothering their cows, or that he followed a stream underground and got stuck.
Sometimes, out walking again, I would see a border collie barking behind a fence, or chained up in a yard, and think: ‘Is that …? Could that be …?” But, at a distance, one border collie looks a lot like the next. Eventually, I gave Peter his lead back.
