Recently I celebrated my sixth anniversary of what is undoubtedly the healthiest relationship of my life. In short, he’s a sexy beast: powerful, muscular, masculine, and has just the right amount of fur. But he’s much more than that. Reliable, trustworthy, devoted to me. He has wanted nothing more since the day we met than to sleep beside me every night.
I first laid eyes on him at the Orange County Humane Society. I’ll admit it was a rebound situation. I had just broken up with my boyfriend that weekend and decided it was time to divert attention to someone new.
I had always wanted a Rottweiler and had seen one had just come in the OC pound, but when I passed the crate containing who would become Boris, I saw this ordinary looking, mid-sized, black dog. The label on the pen said “Rottweiler” but I didn’t see any in the cage. Still he was cute and looked at me with longing, while his cell mates barely observed me.
When the attendant took the six-month-old Rottweiler from the pen, I then did see blocks of tan on his otherwise black coat, although his facial markings were more subtle than his breed would indicate. He was tall and thin, and his head and face didn’t mirror the square-headedness of a Rottweiler. At 55 pounds, I figured he was probably 15-20 lbs away from full grown; I was really hoping for a larger dog. Cute, but I wanted to see what else the place had to offer.
But then the attendant let him off the leash. Without equivocation, not in a run but in the brisk and uninterrupted canter of an animal that knew exactly where he was going, he strode directly to me, looked at me as he arrived in front of me, then buried his head in my crotch and pressed his whole body weight press into me. I knew from the tag on the cage that he had only been there one day on the day we met, and he had the look of an animal who knew what his human counterparts at the jail just up the street felt.
When I rubbed the back of his neck again, he pushed all his weight into me. Then, he picked up his head, put both paws on my hips and pulled himself into my lap. “Yeah. This is the one.” I said to the girl who had brought him out to me.
“Where do I sign?”
Fast forward 18 months of inconsistent potty training, chewed remotes, floorboards, electrical cables, and my 55 pound half-rottie had blossomed into a 110 pound poster-perfect iteration of the classic American Rottweiler.
I have to be honest. As a single man living in da’ big city, I feel a little safer walking the streets with Boris. That’s mostly because he looks exceedingly intimidating, even though he’s never had an aggressive moment in his whole life. That said, you read stories about Rotties who, when their master is attacked, instinctively protect.
I see glimpses of it. Boris sleeps at the foot of my bed, and positions himself between me and the door to my room. If you burst into my room unannounced, as my sister did one morning, you would get an unpleasant, window-shaking welcome. Boris is sweet, and of his own volition wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Boris is his own dog and recent events, so often apparent when we lived near nature, brought his instincts to surface once again.
In metro New York, the pests that plagued us in Orlando have been non-existent. While presiding over his patch of land back in O-town, Boris had killed rats, birds, squirrels, rabbits, and had terrorized a cat or two.
But since moving up here, his hunting instincts had been left to dwindle—until Saturday morning. Prepping to go to the beach, I was doing dishes and filling various things into a cooler when I saw a small black mouse run across my stove top and disappear into the less-than-one-inch crack between the stove and countertop.
So, drama fleeting, I withdrew to the comfort of my office to check e-mail and watch TV before heading to the beach. Boris uncharacteristically hung out on the kitchen floor.
From there, I heard a brief, one could say efficient, scuttle of activity. When I dashed back into the kitchen, there was my boy, one giant paw holding down the mouse, his prodigious mouth was wrapped around the poor rodent’s head.
Frozen by the presence of his master, he looked at me longingly.
“Drop!” I screamed. And in that moment, he crunched down on to the mouse’s neck, and then dropped him, limp and dying, at my feet. He nearly pranced off to recline feet away.
I scooped up the remains of the mouse, put it into a bag, and dropped it down the trash chute.
It was hard not to feel a proud of my boy as I watched the pest fall into oblivion. Such a vision of savagery should have shocked my urban sensibilities, but for my boy? Hell, I couldn’t help but feel a little happy for him.
Good night, Mickey. You just picked the wrong apartment.
