I was 14. It was the first or second week of August. Our other dog had been found dead just a week earlier. He sneaked out from the garden in Pamuk and one of those big beasts that were let free for the night in the village killed him. Béla bácsi found him on the street in the morning, his neck bit through, he bled out. I was devastated. That little thing was the only fix point in my life at the time.
I hated the idea of getting a new dog. It felt like as if we didn't appreciate the one that has just died. But my mom was determined: we were going to get a dog. So, Béla bácsi and I went on a hunt for a dog. We checked out several homes for homeless dogs, but haven't found the guy we were looking for. It was obvious from the first moment that we wouldn't buy a dog. There are plenty of dogs in Hungary without a home and if we had the chance to help one of those, we had to.
We arrived to Szentendre in the afternoon. There was a dog there that I liked from the first moment. Probably because he resembled our previous dog. But we learnt that he was the owner's dog. We wanted to leave but the woman insisted we checked out another one. We've travelled long enough to get there, so those five minutes wouldn't make a difference, we thought. The woman led us to the fence and there he was. A ball of fur. Most likely a fox terrier, but someone had the stupid idea that he should get a converse cut: the fur was short on his head and really long on his body. He looked like a miniature lion with the wrong colors. He was excited. He was bouncing like a ball and tried hard to make a good impression. Béla bácsi and I looked at each other and probably thought the same: this?! We weren't at all sure that a bouncing lion would match our expectations. But the woman went on and on about what a good this dog was and how he could be a great companion, which is pretty much what dogs should be. Since none of us was willing to take reponsibility for the decision, we called my mother. She had one question: "Is he cute?" Well, cute, yes, cute was the right word. "Then take him."
While Béla bácsi filled out the papers, I sat in the car with the dog. He was nervous, jumped up to the window, squeezed himself behind the stirring wheel, jumped off the other side, then climbed up to the rear window, jumped off and did rounds of this. I held him down on the way home. He continued his insane running and jumping around in the flat. He jumped on the table, the bed, the hotplates - I still can't conceive how he managed to get up there - and eventually we just put him on the balcony. So, what now? We were missing our dog, our dog, which was decomposing under the huge lime tree in our garden. And there was this dog in our flat that we didn't really know what to do with. We named him Csoki, in memoriam our previous dog that was more fond of chocolate than anything else.
Csoki calmed down within a week although I still saw him once in a while in an unimaginably impossible location in the flat. He opened up and made us laugh with his "radaring" ears and funky sleeping positions. He really had a great personality. We soon came to love him just as much as the other one. He was sweet and grateful for all the attention. You could do anything to him, pick him up, touch his food, turn him on his back - just love him. He was a true hunter: he loved chasing cats and birds, and looked absolutely ridiculous when he tried to chase swans in the Balaton - swimming. My parents would always get him the lower leg of a deer or a hare, when they were hunting, which he would treasure and hide somewhere in the garden, and which he would dig out the next year to proudly carry it around... He had at least a dozen toys at home, so that one could feel as if there was a small child in the flat because there were toys everywhere on the floor. I was literally his playmate and when I arrived, he would always bring one of his toys to me to throw or just play with him. He loved squeaky toys. We have always said that we didn't love him for his brains; he wasn't too smart, but sometimes I suspected that he was smarter than we thought. For example, he was good at stealing food from the pantry.
It's the hardest decision a pet owner has to make to put a dog to sleep if he is suffering and there is no way to help him. But I think my parents made the right decision. My mother finds solace in the thought that he's now in the eternal hunting fields, which is where all dogs should go according to hunters, and I'm just glad he doesn't have to suffer anymore.
I've spent the last week looking for homeless dogs online. There are so many of them... I really don't know what the English for sintértelep or gyepmesteri telep is, but there might actually not be a word for that in English. Apparently, there are no such institutions to the West of us, because the practice of throwing your dog on the street (out of cars, into trashcans, by railways, so they would get hit) doesn't exist there, and they don't exist to the East of us either because people don't mind dogs living on the street there. Just think of Greece. So, homeless dogs are taken to the sintértelep where they are kept for two weeks, during which period the owner can take his/her dog, and after which anyone can take them. The problem is that there are more dogs than places for them and the sintértelep is obliged to take in each dog that they find or that is taken to them. This means that after two weeks, they can put completely healthy, young dogs to sleep because they need space for the next one.
So, I've sent about 25 links to my mother and she actually drove to Esztergom to see a couple of dogs. But there was no connection with any of them (or they were old or too big or had puppies etc.) and now Béla bácsi is doing his "I don't want another dog" thing, so I'm not sure what's going to happen. I know that he would grow to like the new dog the same way I did with Csoki, he just has to open himself to the idea. I know my mother would really like a dog because she is missing Csoki immensely; he has really been her companion for 10 years.
