¡Mira la perritita tan angelita! or: Why Tula is not allowed to sleep in my bed

Yes, more about the dog.*

When people say to me “Oh, your puppy is so cute! She must just cuddle up with you at night and sleep like a little angel.”, I have to tell them, “Well, no not exactly…”

Aside from the fact that her favorite game is attack-the-feet, she has also been known to play attack-the-face at 5 in the morning.

And aside from that, she occasionally shows up with fleas, from who-knows-where, and then I end up with fleas, too, until I can spray her with the flea repellant and wash (by hand) everything that she has lounged around on (which is pretty much everything BUT the bed). For those who have not had the pleasure of a flea infestation before, let me tell you, it is not fun. They are fast. And tiny. And hard to kill. And can jump feet at a time. Oh, and they make you (me) really, really itchy for days on end.

ANYway, my charming little sweet-faced angel Tula also loves (and I mean, loves) to torment the chickens at the house. Somehow, she gets them out of their pen, and then chases them up and down the stairs and through the garden and around the patios for hours on end. This can also sometimes be problematic for our egg consumption around here, since scared, frantic hens aren’t really that into laying eggs. Also, I should add that these are no normal chickens. They are campo chickens, and thus, enormous. The roosters are probably about 2 1/2 feet tall, and they are her favorites to pester, as they are also a bit more surly than the hens, and will puff their chests out and peck back at her. She jumps up in the air, landing in the “play” position, with her butt up in the air, and lunges back at them. This goes on until somebody sees her, and puts the game to an end. The other day, I caught her pulling one around (kind of gently) by the wing, and was really glad that it was me that found her, and not somebody else. It's all fun and games, until somebody gets their eye pecked out, I keep telling her.

When she gets INTO the chicken pen (which is huge, by the way), her activities include the above chicken antics, in addition to her other preferred pastime: generally basking in chicken feces. She rolls around in it; she throws it around and then pounces on it; and then, for her grand finale, in a circus side-show fashion, she eats it. (This is still (if maybe only slightly) better than the gigantic hunk of semi-dried horse excrement that I had to wrestle away from her on our last walk in the hills, however.) The scent of chicken poop on her fur and breath is just lovely, really.

Needless to say, there are also frequent (bimonthly, lately) visits to the vet, for the magical anti-parasites. One time of cleaning up live, adult worm-crawling dog poop was enough for me, thank-you-very-much.

Anyhow, I am reminded of all of these charming little characteristics of hers, because last night, Tula brought me an extra special gift. Only, since it was dark by the time I got home, I didn’t see it waiting for me on my balcony, next to her little (other, outside) bed. Rather than being able to thank her at the time, I just let her into my apartment, fed her, and made her go to sleep (on her little bed on the floor in my bedroom). This morning, at 7 am, which is when she wakes me up by putting her front paws on the edge of my bed and poking me in the face, I let her out the front door, only to step on something wet and squishy, that looked kind of like a wet, furry towel. I was thinking, “What the….?”. I thought that maybe one of the towels on her bed had gotten dirty somehow. And then I noticed the oh-so-distinctive smell, as whatever-it-was had been out in the hot sun for a good hour, and the fumes were wafting around in the breeze. By the time I noticed the little face and distinctive bucky teeth, I knew that it could only be one thing. A freaking guinea pig. Or rather, the tossed about hide of a guinea pig, still attached to the head. (Oh, did I forget to mention that we have guinea pigs at the house, too, and that they are very much not pets?)



In the 7 seconds it took me to go back in the house and get the broom and a plastic bag, Tula’s “present” had disappeared from my balcony, and I heard a thrashing sound coming from my bedroom. And there she was, with the guinea pig carcass in her mouth, looking as proud as can be, poised to jump up onto my bed, already having sprayed guinea pig juice on the walls and floor. Oh, the smell of it all.

If you have never eaten guinea pig before, you can’t know or fully appreciate its gamey, sort of earthy, salty, vinegar undertones. Even when you eat it cooked, it leaves an oily gamey scent on your hands for days (because you have to eat it with your hands, since there is hardly any meat to speak of). But back to the story at hand, consider this same meat, uncooked. Mix that with a wet, dirty sock smell, a day or three's worth of decomp, and then some hot Andean sun for good measure.

And that, folks, is what I had to wrestle away from Tula at 7:07 am. And then clean off of my walls and floor. She gets her bath later. But not until after I've had some coffee and have stopped gagging.




*It is actually easier and more entertaining -- trust me -- to write about Tula than it is to describe the various other complicated things going on at the moment, like: the fact that there is a movement in Ecuador to abolish all bilingual education, or that our little school could lose the (absurdly small) support that it does get from the government, or that one’s research does not always go as planned, or the 237 steps that one has to go through to create a not-for-profit foundation around here, or any number of other things.