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Authors: Robert Crisp
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difference.
He was now, I was glad to say, developing the proper possessive instincts and beginning to bark at strangers. The reason I was glad to say this was that among the unwanted animals in my life were the stray dogs which came to my upstairs house in search of food.
Greek dogs were always hungry. They seemed to be used almost entirely for hunting, and they made very good hunting dogs from an early age because they had inherited knowledge that their only chance of getting anything other than a crust of bread to eat was to put up something that could be shot down. There was no longer very much to put up during most of the year: consequently, there were a large number of hungry dogs in Greece.
I discovered this after my third cake of expensive soap, brought all the way from England to save drachma expenditure, mysteriously disappeared from my bathroom. My bathroom was a concrete step outside the front door on which was placed a polythene basin and a piece of soap. The first piece vanished while I was away from home. The second and third while I was either in the house or ten yards away sawing firewood.
The fourth piece I staked to a nail with severalwrappings of string around it. I came back from the beach house to discover one third of it missing and the canine tooth marks on the remainder clearly visible. On each occasion a piece of Greek-made soap on the same step was left untouched.
One Sunday night, when I was having dinner with Janni and his wife, a young man brought a sack into the dining room. He threw it on the floor where it landed with a thud and started mewing. It was the kitten I had been promised, and I carried it three miles home slung over my shoulder.
In my kitchen I untied the neck of the sack, put in my hand, and pulled out a small bundle of multi-coloured hellfire. It spat viciously and damn near tore my wrist and hand to ribbons.
I finally got it immobilised in the crook of my elbow and set about establishing a more harmonious relationship by feeding it condensed milk on the tip of my little finger. Twice it licked this off happily. The third time it nearly bit off the top quarter inch of flesh. That was how Elsa came into my life. And that was how she went out of it the next morning â through the window with about two inches of my skin trailing from her claws. But she came back at night and licked up the saucer of milk I put on the window-sill for her. I knew it was Elsa because I sat up in the darkness until midnight to make sure nothing else got it.
I did not call her Elsa immediately. That came a week or two later when I was beginning to feel like Joy Adamson. Every nightfall Elsa would come into thekitchen as soundless as a ghost. The first I knew of her presence was the lapping noise at the saucer. Even Dog missed her arrival. By sunrise she had vanished into the bush and rocks which surround me.
Very occasionally she would let me stroke her â an operation which I approached as suspiciously and fearfully as she did. Then, on the cold nights, she would let me wrap her in the apron of my jersey and she would sleep on my lap. I thrilled to the first purr as any mother hearing the first baby-gurgling noise. Then, one night at supper, I felt a sudden, light weight on my knee. I could hardly believe it. But the kitten had jumped on my lap. That was when I called her Elsa.
She was now almost tame, slept on my bed every night and sometimes on my face, had polished off the mouse and begun to pinch the cheese herself, and played happily with the centipedes, beetles, lizards, flies, scorpions and other awakening denizens of my many-holed walls. Soon, I hoped, she would have established better than neutral relationships with Dog, who desperately wanted to be friendly but whose advances were always repelled by three or four incredibly swift left jabs.
Elsa still disappeared in the mornings, but never before breakfast and was always back in the afternoons. She did not go far from the
He was now, I was glad to say, developing the proper possessive instincts and beginning to bark at strangers. The reason I was glad to say this was that among the unwanted animals in my life were the stray dogs which came to my upstairs house in search of food.
Greek dogs were always hungry. They seemed to be used almost entirely for hunting, and they made very good hunting dogs from an early age because they had inherited knowledge that their only chance of getting anything other than a crust of bread to eat was to put up something that could be shot down. There was no longer very much to put up during most of the year: consequently, there were a large number of hungry dogs in Greece.
I discovered this after my third cake of expensive soap, brought all the way from England to save drachma expenditure, mysteriously disappeared from my bathroom. My bathroom was a concrete step outside the front door on which was placed a polythene basin and a piece of soap. The first piece vanished while I was away from home. The second and third while I was either in the house or ten yards away sawing firewood.
The fourth piece I staked to a nail with severalwrappings of string around it. I came back from the beach house to discover one third of it missing and the canine tooth marks on the remainder clearly visible. On each occasion a piece of Greek-made soap on the same step was left untouched.
One Sunday night, when I was having dinner with Janni and his wife, a young man brought a sack into the dining room. He threw it on the floor where it landed with a thud and started mewing. It was the kitten I had been promised, and I carried it three miles home slung over my shoulder.
In my kitchen I untied the neck of the sack, put in my hand, and pulled out a small bundle of multi-coloured hellfire. It spat viciously and damn near tore my wrist and hand to ribbons.
I finally got it immobilised in the crook of my elbow and set about establishing a more harmonious relationship by feeding it condensed milk on the tip of my little finger. Twice it licked this off happily. The third time it nearly bit off the top quarter inch of flesh. That was how Elsa came into my life. And that was how she went out of it the next morning â through the window with about two inches of my skin trailing from her claws. But she came back at night and licked up the saucer of milk I put on the window-sill for her. I knew it was Elsa because I sat up in the darkness until midnight to make sure nothing else got it.
I did not call her Elsa immediately. That came a week or two later when I was beginning to feel like Joy Adamson. Every nightfall Elsa would come into thekitchen as soundless as a ghost. The first I knew of her presence was the lapping noise at the saucer. Even Dog missed her arrival. By sunrise she had vanished into the bush and rocks which surround me.
Very occasionally she would let me stroke her â an operation which I approached as suspiciously and fearfully as she did. Then, on the cold nights, she would let me wrap her in the apron of my jersey and she would sleep on my lap. I thrilled to the first purr as any mother hearing the first baby-gurgling noise. Then, one night at supper, I felt a sudden, light weight on my knee. I could hardly believe it. But the kitten had jumped on my lap. That was when I called her Elsa.
She was now almost tame, slept on my bed every night and sometimes on my face, had polished off the mouse and begun to pinch the cheese herself, and played happily with the centipedes, beetles, lizards, flies, scorpions and other awakening denizens of my many-holed walls. Soon, I hoped, she would have established better than neutral relationships with Dog, who desperately wanted to be friendly but whose advances were always repelled by three or four incredibly swift left jabs.
Elsa still disappeared in the mornings, but never before breakfast and was always back in the afternoons. She did not go far from the
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