Death of Pia

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Death of Pia

So, Lilla having lost her fight against the snake, we were without dog.

Usually in Africa being with or without a dog is very similar as the length of the life of a normal African dog is not to exceed 4 years.

A normal African dog is something a bit yellowish and small that by some trick of nature has not died within the first week and it now living under the house or inside anything, eating whatever it can get its teeth on. Why it does not die is a bit of a mystery as it is usually covered by ticks which are supposed to carry a blood killing sickness.

If it survives the age of one week it gets very skilled at avoiding thrown stones, cars that will swirl to try and kill it, other dogs that will try to eat it, other village inhabitants that will try to eat it and it has to try and find a way of getting at drinking water during the 6 months dry season.

For reasons that are beyond our understanding these stray dogs decide that one of the villagers is his master and will follow him everywhere for miles and miles on the roads, bad luck for the dog if the owner finds a car/taxi that will take him back to the village.

Zambia was farmed by so called white commercial farmers. When they came to the country one or two generations ago, they brought with them their English dogs. These dogs developed on the farms and had all the best of what is best on this earth. They were taken care of, they were fed, they went on hunting, they bred and as there was no real competition, most of the normal size dogs ended up being in some way descendants of these first English dogs.

Most of the worthwhile agricultural production of Zambia came from Commercial farmers. They had huge farms of more than 4000 ha (one hectare being the size of a normal football field) and they were very very good farmers, basically they knew a lot more than us foreign agricultural advisers, but this is quite normal, our task was to try and bring the local farmers up to survival level, not to make the commercial farmers even more productive.

Anyway there was really no problem, like most of the population of English origin, they would not speak to us unless forced to, they were still behaving according to the Empire law of “Master and Servants” and even my position of International Agronomist did not bring me out of my position of “damn foreigner”.

If I have given you the possible feeling that the white commercial farmers were behaving in a snobbish way, consider that the white commercial farmers from Zimbabwe would not want to be seen side by side with a white commercial farmer from Zambia. The Uppers should stay with the Uppers, and the less Uppers with the less Uppers. As for the downers, who cared about what they were doing? As for the mad foreigner working with the Africans, well, all worlds have there fools and idiots, so long as they are not harmful, better let them live.

We had our commercial farmer, half way to Lusaka. A beautiful farm. And beautiful dogs.

Our neighbour got his dog from that farm. Sheba, as you have already guessed was a super black dog of huge strength, some kind of Labrador. Apparently nobody had told her that she was huge and strong, her greatest pleasure in life was lick you to death until you understood that you were to take her out for a walk. Well, walk is not the appropriate term, we were walking, I have never seen her walking.

Sheeba was the size of a small bear, yet she was convinced that the only place where she could sleep at night was under the bed, were you would not have enough place to put 10 one dollar bills on top of one another, should you ever acquire such a fortune.

Our neighbors were immensely kind people even if they were Americans. Possibly they were so good because they had had most of their life in India. Well, I have had to accept that we cannot all be Swedes in this life, the lesson being taught to us from the beginning of our life by our Nordic neighbors.

The lady next door was a beauty but I never knew whether she was aware of it. There was no limit to her kindness.

One day it was decided that Sheba would know (as the Bible says) the He dog of the Little family.

As they were quite willing to cooperate, Sheba was soon producing a litter of beautiful puppies.

All these puppies were black, totally black, except one that had a white tail tip.

Annie selected her.

So Pia became our dog. She lived the first 4 weeks of her life with Sheba, when she was handled, the lady would use gloves so as not to transmit any infection to her. Living on Sheba milk could only have one result, and we got a very handsome and powerful lady.

These pages are not to tell nice stories about lovely dogs doing this and that.

This is to tell about dark days.

Well any dog owner knows that his dog will give him much love but will also make him cry.

In Africa, well, in any location, dogs are a much welcome home for all kind of parasites. In Europe you will find the appropriate treatment, in Africa you use whatever is available hoping that this drug is suitable.

Well it was not in this case for Pia.

She was treated against fleas and other nuisances with a power containing some kind of phosphorus. Which is a very efficient bug killer, regretfully the bug category appears to include dogs as well. So she licked the powder and developed phosphorus poisoning.

I am under the belief that phosphorus poisoning will attack the liver function. Pia ceased to eat and to drink.

Of course this happened the day before we were to travel to the Western National Park. The tickets were paid, the lodge booked at an exorbitant price.

As the only way to get water into Pia was to use a syringe and get a few cc into her throat and wait until she vomited half of it and wait a quarter of an hour and start the process again, we were quite busy.

During one week she would not eat nor drink and was given liquid by syringe and little by little was able to keep more and more of the liquid.

After one week, as we were having lunch, a chicken lunch, she appeared to express some interest in the feeding procedure and was therefore given a few tiny pieces of chicken. She ate it and kept it without vomiting. She was saved.

We would never see the Western National Park. Well, all things considered, it was not such a big loss, the Western Park being known for its Tsetse flies and its poachers and its sometimes creative police and army road controls. I am not really afraid of lions and buffalos but I am terrified by tsetse flies. As to road controls by Army and Police, who would not be afraid?

The main rule of Africa is that if something happens once, then there is no reason why it should not happen twice.

The dogs were running around in the garden. They were quite safe from the bad world, the fence being built to keep intruders outside. Occasionally they would be pelted by stones thrown by the kids.

The garden was quite safe, all gates locked, except the loo for the workers which was 10 yards outside, which means opening the gate, going out, doing what has to be done, coming back, in all let us say 5 minutes which was time enough for a gentleman dog of unknown origin and breed to convince Pia that he wanted to share with her moments of the uttermost happiness. Which they did, the result being 3 months later 6 dogs, one of which totally white. They were all totally devoted and stupid except the white puppy which appeared to be able to solve any problem related to how to get more food.

My house garden was also the only safe place to keep the official vehicles, as I had two watchmen. One watchman would be a useless investment as he would devote his night to find ways of sleeping in some remote part of the garden, two watchmen was rather clever way of handling securities, not that the watchmen were much concerned about bandits, but they kept watching one another all the night in fear that the other one would find a profit occasion that he would miss.

At the height of our power there would be up to 3 official vehicles in the garden plus my own private car parked inside a garage with burglar bars.

Annie was away in Europe and I was away on a field trip, I cannot remember where.

During that time my Zambian counterpart came to collect his vehicle and when driving out, drove into Pia. I do admit that Pia was a stupid dog, that she was used to my way of driving out of the garden, and that the Zambian way of taking care is to drive and chat with everybody within talking distance, the custom being that anything in the way of the vehicle was to give way. Apparently Pia was not fully aware of this custom and she was severely hit.

My neighbors were called in for assistance by my house staff.

It is very difficult to assess what exactly is wrong with a dog that has been hit by a car. She was taken to the vet who could not see from the outside if any major injury had incurred.

When I came home I found my dog in very poor shape.

During the night she got worse.

We were living 15km from the town and without any telephone, but the FAO in its wisdom had provided us with an emergency radio telephone. The only disadvantage of this radio telephone being that it had only one frequency which meant that any call would be heard by all the families of Lusaka. Which the children soon discovered and it took quite some time to discourage them from using the radio telephone as some kind of children's corner.

Around midnight I called the FAO administrator on the radio phone. I called the FAO administrator because there was nothing he could not solve. There sere times when I suspected him of knowing even more than the Indian community about the complexities of the numerous exchange rates available, especially those not available.

As this radio phone was an emergency radio, any call at midnight could only mean one thing, that a family had been attacked, meaning that every in Lusaka body would wake up and increase the volume of the radio to check whether assistance was needed.

So the whole of Lusaka could follow the development of the night thriller, the salvage of an overrun dog. Which was rather a new experience for Lusaka inhabitants as the usual cure for overrun dogs was death.

The FAO administrator had a phone and the best address book of the whole city, he was able to wake the vet and convince him that his intervention in the middle of the night was not a joke. The administrator would have the vet on the phone and me on the emergency radio and the whole of Lusaka on the network.

So in the middle of the night I drove to the vet who was waiting for me, even the FAO administrator was there.

Pia was diagnosed as suffering from internal bleeding, she was put on drip and the vet's wife rescued me while I was trying to do my best to faint in the old fashioned and custom accepted way of strong and powerful men of no fear.

I left my dog at the vet, linked to a drip and went for a few hours of sleep before going to the airport to welcome my wife coming back from Europe.

She had the pleasure of disembarking from the plane to be welcomed by a husband carrying the largest and darkest sun glasses he had been able to find and the news that Pia was not doing well. We were trained to always fear these disembarkation moments when news would be poured on us about all the things that had gone wrong in our absence, but also trained in the knowledge that most of these tales were not more than traditional tales. Regretfully this time it was true. I did not know whether Annie had come back to find a dead or a life Pia.

So from the airport we drove to the vet at the Polo ground, were we found Pia wandering around in the garden of the vet with her drip bottle. Obviously she was still alive and not used to the appropriate way to share her life with a drip bottle.

That took care of that night and that day.

During the day I had to face the questioning and slightly displeased looks of my colleagues whose night had been spoiled by my misuse of the emergency system. To be woken up in the middle of the night for a dog!

That was one night and one day.

Then we had to do something to stop the internal bleeding. Which meant surgery. Which gave me another occasion to try and demonstrate my talents for fainting when the injuries were described: the chock had pushed the liver up into the lungs.

The only good new was that there was no choice, surgery it had to be. Surgery was done.

Pia's belly was opened from one end to another, the vet tried to find which part had to be fitted into what part, a bit like I use to do when I repair a car. A Pia dog still under partial narcosis was given back to us in our arms as she could not stand up on her legs and she could not lie down on her belly.

So there we were with a dog in our arms and little by little the pain killer ceased to have any effect and Pia started to try and fight for breathing without dying of pain. In our arms. We called the vet (on the emergency radio?) and were told that with lung injuries it was unadvisable to use any kind of opium derived pain killer.

For twenty four hours we would keep Pia, a 30 kg (60 pounds) dog, in our arms in 2 hours shifts, listening to her fighting for her life and fighting against pain. Annie would keep her for two hours, I would keep her for two hours. This lasted for 24 hours then Pia decided that after all life was worth living and she expressed her willingness to stand on her own legs.

But for a dog, to stand on her own legs when her belly had been spit from one end to another like an overcooked sausage, this was quite a problem in spite of the bandages that made her look like some Egyptian mummy. As soon as the guts would press on the scar, the suture points would be strained and strained to the point of breaking, the only solution being to tie the bandages to the point where she could barely breathe.

The end of the story being that after having lived happily in Zambia, and lived happily in Burundi, and come back to France to our slightly luxurious fallen down farm building, she died of a sudden hemorrhage one evening.

The floor was covered with blood, my mother who was in early Alzheimer was looking, slightly confused.

The vet came, there was nothing to do but a lethal injection straight into the heart.

And then the awful thing I had been afraid of happened, as the needle entered into her heart, she lifted her head and looked at me ; sorry, I am crying as I write this.

She died.

It was 11 o' clock in the evening.

I drank a lot of whisky, I put a blanket around Pia, and I carried her out in the garden. I still feel the heaviness and the limpness of her body in my arms

Swearing and cursing this life, more than drunk, I dug the grave, heard the thump of the blanket dog falling into the cold earth, filled the hole, went home.

Since that day, I cried as I cry now.

The worst was still to come.

Night was falling, it was a cold night.

And suddenly I saw myself at the doorstep, carrying a blanket to put on the grave of my dog so that she would not get cold.