RASTA, BEN and PEARLIE

June 1997 - November 2012

Rasta was born in 1997, one of eleven puppies brought into the world by Tila, a beautiful Groenendahl Belgian Shepherd, who belonged to one of my neighbours.

I had cared for Tila for 3 months, while her owner was in hospital having a kidney transplant. When my neighbour, asked me how much he owed me I said, “Nothing! It was a pleasure! But, if she ever has pups, I would love to have one!” and that was agreed.

Billy advertised and scoured the country for a suitable match, but Tila was fussy. She beat all suitors to a yelping, shivering wreck, one after another! Finally, when she had just turned 8 years of age, Billy found a stunning Groenendahl stud dog called Shadow, who was brought all the way from Birmingham to try his luck with Tila.
I watched Shadow jump out of the car when he arrived and I crossed my fingers for him. He looked tall, strong and very fit. He gleamed blue/black in the sunshine. His tail was over his back in Alpha posture.

I went into my garden and listened intently across the fences. I heard Tila growling and then there was a very strange silence. Apparently, Shadow had not been at all intimidated! He had grabbed Tila by the scruff of the neck and pinned her down in one deft, but devastating move! He had then conducted his courtship ritual with Tila putty in his paws. She had succumbed in absolute knee-trembling submission!

Billy was ecstatic! So was I….

The puppies were all absolutely identical at birth and I selected mine by picking them all up one by one, on that first day of their lives. They all wriggled about in my hand - all except one, who relaxed and settled down to sleep. I chose that one and we marked the tip of one ear with a little dot of pink nail varnish.
When he finally came home with me, at 8 weeks of age, I named him Rasta.

We lived in a busy seaside town in Essex, so I took my puppy everywhere with me in a basket at first. We went for his first training walks during the night when there were few distractions, people and cars. I did not need a collar or a lead because he walked to heel by choice from his first days at home.
Every day Tila would wait at her front door until Billy would allow her to come to knock at my house. She would bash my door repeatedly until I let her in! Then she would play with Rasta for an hour or so, teasing him with toys and bones; cleaning his ears; gazing and smiling at him with pride. She was a wonderful mother and he loved her very much.

When Rasta was just a few months short of 2 years of age, his mother’s hips and back legs gave way. Billy created a wheelchair for her. The visits became less frequent and a few months later, Billy announced that Tila had passed away. It was a huge loss to us all.

Rasta was very loving towards everybody but, like all dogs, he was quick to spot a wrongun! If he did not trust someone, he would position himself between me and that person and silently snarl, baring his huge canines. On more than one occasion I was told that he was snarling, but as soon as I tried to look he would straighten his face! He would flick his eyes to the side so that I received his warnings very clearly. The only time I personally saw Rasta snarl was as a reflection in a shop window and it shocked me that he could look so wolf-like and fierce! He looked completely different. Otherwise he was a totally magnanimous character. He was invincible at hide and seek.... there was no getting away from him! It was impossible to sneak into our house, his ears were huge and every time my son or our friends tried to surprise him, Rasta would be aware and waiting, wagging his tail.

On Rasta's 2nd birthday I took him to a local pet store to find a present. He was attracted to a tortoiseshell kitten for sale. This feisty ball of fluff was trying to attack him through the mesh cage and he was crouching before her, enchanted. He then did a very odd thing. He came over to me and touched my purse with his nose. The shopkeeper laughed and said "I think he wants you to buy that kitten this time, not a bone!"
So I bought the kitten for his birthday, took her home with Rasta’s nose pressed against the box. I named her Pearlie because she had pearly patterns under her ears, like earrings. She was HIS cat, not mine. He absolutely worshipped this little demon troublemaker and she totally adored him.

When he was 3 years old, I applied for the job of local Dog Warden. It was very poorly paid, but it came with a good van, fuel credit, plenty of time off and I didn’t have to leave Rasta at home alone. He immediately understood the work and was very proud about it. He would come out on patrol with me with his tail curled up high on his back. He behaved as though he was Alpha of Dog World! Not for the first time did he remind me of his father, Shadow. He was a dead ringer.

He would help me to find lost pooches very quickly, simply by sniffing the owner, their vehicle or home. I had to be very quick on my feet to keep up with him as he would be hot on the trail, especially if the dog was frightened or injured.

Rasta made my job really easy. If we were tracking down a reported stray or abandoned dog, I would park up near to the sighting area and wait, letting Rasta go to find and befriend the dog on his own. I would simply sit in the van and wait. He would then bring the dog to the van where I would provide treats and pop it into one of the built in cages in the back. We would deliver the dog to the local kennels and set about trying to contact the owners.

Rasta was indispensable for that job. I was once offered to name my price by Essex police after they saw him in action. Needless to say I just laughed and said, "You don’t have enough money to buy him, but on ya go....try to take him.... this should be fun!" 🤣😂

One of the strays we picked up became his best mate. As Dog Warden, I was required to take all strays to the kennels and, if they were there too long, condemn them to be euthanised. This was something that I was not prepared to do, so I would advertise them in the local paper, vets and pet shops until I found them new homes.

Ben was a dangerous German Shepherd, Staffordshire Bull Terrier crossbreed who did not trust humans at all. He was the only dog I could not place in a home, so I would take him out of the kennel to play with Rasta for a short while whenever we were there. The kennel staff would not go near him because he was so unpredictable.

Rasta and Ben would play fight until they were exhausted. Then they would lie together, panting for a while but leap up for round two or even three, given the chance! Sometimes it would look and sound really fierce, but I realised that they were only sparring and improving their skills. They never hurt each other.
Eventually I had no choice.
I signed Ben out of the kennel, paid his costs and he came home with us. He had never seen a toilet flush, never lived in a house and had a lot to learn. Rasta showed him all his manners very quickly. He introduced Ben to Pearlie, who accepted him immediately. They became a superb team.

Rasta could always guide us to our vehicle, but not necessarily via the route we had taken when we left it. I only had to say "Let's go home!" or "Where's the van?" and off he would go, with me and Ben following along. This was especially useful when we went to festivals in our spare time. I would always forget exactly where I had parked in the massive car parks or adjoining streets, where we had left the van maybe days before!

This photo was taken when Rasta was 6 years old, just before we embarked on our journey around France and Spain in 2004. I would never have travelled so confidently without him, Ben and Pearlie. They attracted a lot of attention everywhere we went. Pearlie was an essential member of our team and, though everyone said that cats do not travel, she adapted to living in our Leyland Daf hi-top van effortlessly. She hunted on every mountain range in Spain before we settled down and she particularly liked to eat lizards. She would occasionally drop dismembered lizard torsos in the dog’s bowls as a gift. They enjoyed these snacks.

After more than a year of searching and living in our van, we fell in love with an abandoned off-grid fruit farm close to a medieval village, Madrigal de la Vera in the Sierra de Gredos, Extremadura. It was well fenced, very overgrown and alongside a river called Garganta Alardos. There was a 3-bedroomed bungalow with a wide carport and verandah between two very old cherry trees. There were dozens of younger trees; oranges, pears, apples, peaches, figs and olives. Numerous tall poplars and brambles added to the security and seclusion.

Extremadura is a large "communidad" (like county) in central Spain. It means extremely hard and it is, in many ways. The terrain is very mountainous, full of pure white granite, old volcanic rock and fertile black soil, but the temperatures soar to over 50 degrees centigrade in August and plummet to minus 10 at night in winter. It is famous for producing tough people who were recruited to join Columbus on his sea voyages and also for being the place where old Roman generals liked to retire for recuperation.

The plains below the mountain range are dry and hot with treacherous winds. We also had some spectacular thunder storms which would spate the 42 mountain rivers so much so that the granite boulders could be heard rumbling and crashing along in the water.
Rasta once ran at least a mile down the raging Alardos river bank, yelping loudly, when Pearlie fell in and was swept away. He must have found her because, by the time I caught up with them, they were strolling back, soaked but safe.
It truly is "extrema dura" on the Sierra de Gredos and on Almanzor in particular. Almanzor is over 3,500 ft high and the name means "big soul". Before the Romans invaded, the south face of the mountain was entirely covered in a huge Celtic city and everywhere, including the small fruit farm, was littered with the remains of Celtic homes, terraces and vineyards. Further up the mountains, ancient hand-built rock fish-keeps are still functioning, providing safe havens from the torrents for tiny baby fish.

I bought the fruit farm and, of course, we had to have a flock of chickens to control the insect population. Then we acquired Soldato, a retired goat-herding horse, who kept the grass down and led the whole family on regular lengthy explorations of the mountainside which he knew so well.

Over the first particularly cold winter, I got a job providing night watch at a huge gravel pit down on the plains, 60 kilometres from our farm. I would park the van on the edge of the biggest pit, where all the expensive machinery and tools were lined up overnight. Rasta and Ben would begin patrolling the acres of land around the pits and mountains of sorted sand and shingles, as soon as I locked the gates behind the workers. I would turn on the gas oven, sit in bed drinking cocoa and reading Spanish literature to improve my language skills. At about midnight the dogs would come in and settle in their soft foam beds under mine. We would all sleep. At dawn I would get up, turn on the oven again and mop the defrosting ice off the ceiling before it soaked my bed. Then I would dress warmly to walk up to the gates with the dogs and at 7am, I would unlock the gates to let the workers into the premises. I spent the days either parked at a friend’s home nearby or exploring. That job was very well paid and nothing was stolen in the time we spent there.

The following spring I was offered a job teaching English at a private school on the outskirts of Madrid. This was only part-time, but came with shared accommodation in a luxury flat with access to a swimming pool. Rasta, Ben and Pearlie adjusted to living on the fifth floor of a tower block accessed by a lift. We travelled home to the fruit farm for weekends and copious school holidays.

One very hot night in May 2007, I was asleep in my room around 5am, when I heard Ben barking madly. I jumped out of bed and found him standing by the main door of the flat, very agitated and inconsolable. I presumed that he wanted to go out to relieve himself urgently, so I quickly dressed. Rasta, Ben and I went down in the lift. As soon as the lift door slid back, Ben shot out and raced to the gate, he was almost hysterical. ‘Maybe he has diarrhoea!’ I thought.

However, Ben did not head to the grassy park in front of our building. He ran along the parked cars searching underneath them! Then he lay down and whined. Rasta and I ran over to him and there, between his paws, was Pearlie. She was barely conscious, mewing faintly. A piece of twig was stuck through her leg and she couldn’t seem to move. She had fallen off our 5th floor balcony, through the tree below and crashed onto the pavement. She was lying in the gutter beside a parked car. Carefully I carried her back up to the flat and waited for the Veterinary Surgery to open at 8am.
Rasta and Ben were bereft and whining, sleepless with worry.

The Vet was brilliant. He said she had broken her pelvis in several places; there were broken ribs and he had removed the twig. He wanted to keep her under observation because he wasn’t sure that she would recover, but I persuaded him to let her come home because, if she were separated from Rasta and Ben, I was certain that she would give up and die.

I bought some incontinence pads to lay her on and he gave me pain medication for her. Rasta and Ben kept a constant vigil, cleaning and kissing her, for weeks. They would only go out for long enough to do their necessities and then they would run back to the gate to return to the flat and be with Pearlie. She began to drag herself around by her front legs and, for a time, it looked as if she would not regain control over her back legs at all.

But she did.

The Vet was amazed when I took her to him for a check up x-ray. Pearlie eventually returned to her full jumping, hunting and feisty self. I don’t know how many of her nine lives she traded in over that fall, but there was no sign of it by the end of July.

Because of this awful accident, at the end of the second school year, I decided that I had learned enough about teaching and returned to my farm to open a private evening school in the village. The village gave me a room over the police station free of charge and they supplied the desks and chairs and blackboard. I only had to buy a box of chalk and we were up and running. I taught from 5pm until 10pm every weekday evening and my students changed each hour. The youngest were 6 years old (really sweet) and the oldest were adults up to age 65.

The dogs would howl down the mountain if I was more than an hour late returning from teaching in the village. It was hilarious. Villagers would see me at the local bar sharing a nightcap with some students and say, “The wolves are howling for Francheska!” The sound was so mournful, that other dogs would join the chorus and it echoed throughout the village. I would have to run before they woke up the entire valley!

Rasta and Ben were truly special and highly adaptable. They wore their claws down to the quick by helping me to dig miles of irrigation trenches between the trees and they patiently guarded our precious chickens and fruit. Ben was especially adept at finding eggs hidden in our haystacks and he would chase the chickens out of the kitchen, growling and pretending to bite them all the way! It wasn’t long before the chickens knew that the interior of the house was not their territory.

This wonderful flood of memories took only milliseconds to flash before my consciousness, the colourful prisms gleaming from shiny black fur in glaring sunshine, the flash of pure white teeth in a broad loving smile, the lean muscles inherited from powerful ancestor wolves and the thrash of enthusiastic tails.
It all comes flooding back.

A decade has passed since I buried them all within months of one another at the end of their allotted time, but it can sometimes feel like yesterday that we were sharing the best adventures of our lives.

Dogs and cats don’t live long enough, do they? ❤🧡💛💚💙💜

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For a fascinating explanation of the incredible sense of smell that dogs (and cats) possess, watch this wonderful video. It explains so much about the skills our furry friends possess that we can only marvel at and benefit from: